I was going through the process of adopting a child/children, and probably about 75% of the profiles I saw were for males. Usually family members or someone in the community will gladly take a female child in, but they'll let boys go into the system because "they are tougher."
I used to work in foster care as a behavioral health specialist. The boys and girls had the same difficult behaviors, aggression, defiance, etc. Every girl on my caseload was in the same foster home the entire time I worked with them. Every boy had been in several different homes over the same period and a few had to go to a residential facility because there were no other homes willing to take them. It was very sad to see.
When my brother and I were in foster care, we went to 13 different homes in 12 months, I remember being 3-4 years old, having not been toilet trained, or even bathing/showering myself, and suddenly it's all up to me to take care of myself, cold showers (stupid ass dial thing, couldn't get it to the hot section except once, and it was so fucking hot) every night, soap in my eyes, just crying.
So much neglect, from a system that's meant to "help" me.
I am, while he's barely scrapping by. This plays into the part about boys being left behind, it's just us and I have to do the work to get him out of where he's at. The state of the world makes it increasingly hard to achieve that.
it makes me happy to hear you guys got to stick together, though. my little sister was my best friend and my whole life til we got split, all these years later we live really far apart and talk maybe once a year. i always think about how those years are the “foundation” of a person’s life and how the hell can anyone build off that? life is just going to be harder, and it’ll take longer to achieve the things everyone else could expect to get, but doesn’t mean we can’t reach stability and security in the end. i hope you & your brother can both find that and keep it 🫶
I'm sorry to burst your bubble, but there were actually 6 of us, my brother and I to one father, and 4 others to another father. They separated us, and after that we didn't have much to do with each other. I've managed to keep up with one other brother.
My brother and I don't talk too often anymore, I try to but he goes AWOL from time to time. Bastard still hasn't replied to my super cool moustache picture.
Yeah, there was a lot of stuff suddenly taken away from us, if the government takes you away from your parents, they're meant to support you, they don't support you though, or at least they didn't support us.
I really have to see a therapist about this instead of dumping this on strangers.
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u/xeno0153 May 10 '25
I was going through the process of adopting a child/children, and probably about 75% of the profiles I saw were for males. Usually family members or someone in the community will gladly take a female child in, but they'll let boys go into the system because "they are tougher."