Brazil has 5 suitors for each child available for adoption; understand

Celebrated this Monday (25), National Adoption Day sheds light on a paradigm of the topic: Brazil currently has 32,065 active applicants qualified to adopt, while the number of children and adolescents ready for adoption is 6,247.

The numbers, extracted from the SNA (National Adoption and Reception System), reveal a proportion of five candidates for each available minor.

The situation is seen as a "challenging scenario" that demands a "paradigm review" from society, say experts. In practice, the math doesn't close due to a mismatch between the families' profile requirements and the reality of the host institutions.

The bottleneck of the desired profile
The main reason for children remaining in the system, even with a surplus of interested parties, is the preference of adopters for specific profiles, generally babies, children without siblings or without health problems.

Contrary to this desire, the majority of minors eligible for adoption are older children, belonging to groups of siblings or who have some health condition or disability.

Reception and family reintegration
It is important to differentiate the number of children in shelters from those who can be adopted.

Today, there are 36,428 minors hosted in institutions or foster family programs. They were removed from their original families due to protective measures, but most still maintain a legal bond with their biological parents.

The Brazilian system prioritizes maintaining the original link whenever possible. Since 2020, 80,103 children and adolescents have been reintegrated into their families after resolving the problems that caused them to be taken into care.

The number of adoptions completed since 2019 totals 33,559, demonstrating that returning to the home of origin is the most common outcome for institutional care.

Source: CNN