Rhea Perlman Quotes

I was 16 when I entered the foster system, and know firsthand the statistics for 'aging out.'

The most important element of the foster care system is getting kids out of foster care and into a permanent placement so they don't have to spend their entire childhoods in courtrooms, wondering if they will ever have a place to call home.

In one sense, the stories I read betrayed me. Too few gave me back my mirror image. Fewer still spoke to, or acknowledged, the existence of the problems I faced as a black foster child from a dysfunctional and badly broken home.

I'm missing work. We didn't have enough money for preschool. I had a panic attack. I couldn't do it. I became one of those horrible foster parents who give the kids back.

I have a family member who was in the foster system briefly, and so I've kind of grown up knowing about it myself.

I think there's a need for more oversight by social workers, because there are a lot of foster parents who are just collecting checks. They need to look closely into the backgrounds of the people whose hands you're putting the kids into and then continue to monitor them.

Foster care was a big part of my life.

Children are my pet cause. I have a foster child in El Salvador, and whenever I'm home, I work for the Adam Walsh Foundation, which finds missing children. I also do some hospital visits and other things for the Make-a-Wish Foundation.

My mother used to go out on her own, and I used to have to keep a look out for my stepfather coming home.

My father had a very violent temper, and he was never home. So I was kind of a mama's boy.

I grew up in an era of pretty severe poverty. My parents weathered the Great Depression, and money was always a very big concern. I was weaned on a shortage mentality and placed in foster homes largely because there simply wasn't enough money to take care of the most basic of needs.

I don't think I'll do foster care or adopt, to be quite honest.

Despite the best of efforts, many foster children are neither reunited with their families, nor adopted.

So when I was 13, I basically left home and never returned and lived at home again. I would come home for a week at Christmas and two weeks in the summer only.

I moved up over Lower East Side and I was adopted by eight foster parents; I lived all over New York City with these parents, man, till I was about ten years old.

Growing up, we didn't have anything. My mum wasn't well, so I was in three care homes then foster homes before me and my little brother went back to her. I was passed from pillar to post.

I didn't grow up in a regular upbringing. I ended up at my grandmother's house past a certain age, so I took care of things myself. I moved out of home when I was 16.

I wanted to make a film - and I've been wanting to do this for 16 years - about life in care, and bring it to the public's attention, because I had never seen anything, on TV or in the cinema, which said: 'This is how it feels to be a kid in care'.

Many kids in foster homes have a lot of emotions that are hard to get out. It's important to let them know they can make a difference in the community.

I've got my feet on the ground because I've got a lovely family waiting for me when I get home, even though they're not my flesh and blood. I haven't got children. That's my only regret, I suppose.

My foster parents were very religious. They told me that they had not decided to take me in, rather that it was God that had decided it for them.

As an adoptive parent myself of foster children, I have seen firsthand the glaring problems of the system currently facing this Nation.

When I was in the group homes, I saw some of the kids being moved into foster homes with the potential for adoption. I remember well asking a social worker if I could find a home, too. I was told I was 'too old' and 'no one wants to adopt a 16-year-old.' I felt hopeless and alone.

My mom put me away at 7. I enjoyed it... Being in institutions, I got three meals a day, clothes.

I was just a very torn child, very wounded in so many areas, with no family support. I happened to the be the fifth child of my family. So everybody was already grown and had left home already.