If you’re looking for a fun activity for your next staycation or during a road trip, consider watching these movies about foster care and adoption.
Whether you’re looking for movies about adoption or foster care to watch on your own, or something family-friendly for young kids, this list should cover it.
Remember: movies about foster care adoption are going to be very much dramatized for the screen, so it likely won’t be a perfect portrayal. Be sure to pre-screen anything that you plan on showing your kids—so you can decide if it’s age-appropriate, or if it might trigger some traumas.
As you watch each movie, think of some discussion starters you can use after sharing it with the kids.
EARTH TO ECHO (2014)
In this coming-of-age movie, three inseparable preteens (one of them a foster kid) stand on the brink of being divided forever. The local government is poised to build a freeway through their neighborhood, so their families are selling their homes and scattering. With only a day left before they will be pulled apart, the boys encounter a small alien who needs their help to return home.
A key takeaway from the movie: foster kids, while having real issues, challenges, losses, and sadness, can be the bravest, most loyal, most forgiving, and most dependable of their peers. And they can turn their experiences outward into kindness to help others in similar situations.
ANNIE (2014)
You know this classic story, but the modern retelling swaps orphanages for a dramatized unhappy foster home.
The young address who plays Annie helps us feel Annie’s deep longing for a loving family and the outsized joy of finally finding one. She wins us over with her smile and hopeful, believable earnestness.
Annie’s positive attitude shines in the midst of unrealistically and unhelpfully negative stereotypes of incompetent social workers and greedy foster parents. Kids who have suffered from disrupted placements, long to be adopted, or miss their absent birth parents might struggle with the story line. But if you feel your child can handle it, this movie could lead to some valuable conversations.
INSTANT FAMILY (2018)
Pete and Ellie have enjoyed their lives as a childless couple. After a conversation with relatives, Ellie starts thinking about having children. Pete makes an offhanded joke; he is too old to have an infant – but if he adopted a five-year-old child, it would seem like he started having children at a reasonable age. Pete gives no further thought to his joke, but Ellie begins researching adoption, and her heart is touched by the profiles of children on a website geared towards recruiting adoptive parents for children waiting in the foster care system.
Pete’s heart is also eventually touched, and Pete and Ellie begin their journey towards certification as foster-adoptive parents. In time, they meet Lizzy, Juan and Lita at a matching event. The film follows them through a very realistic experience of the California foster and adoption system, through their certification, matching process, and placement.
THE TIGGER MOVIE (2000)
Someone realizing that they are different from their chosen family and grieving the loss of a birth family is a familiar experience. Watching a beloved children’s character like Tigger experience those emotions helps make those big feelings seem a little more manageable.
The adoption issues of loss and identity are prevalent in The Tigger Movie. Tigger has often sung that the “most wonderful thing about Tiggers is I’m the only one.” Now he realizes a sadder side of being “the only one.” Owl suggests that Tigger can find his family by first finding his family tree. Tigger shows a range of fantasies, expectations, and fears when he starts pursuing his family.
THE RIDE (2020)
The Ride tells the true and inspiring story of Scottish BMX champion John Buultjens, who overcame an abusive childhood through the love and life lessons of his interracial foster family.
John McCord is sent to juvenile detention as a 9-year-old for a crime he didn’t commit. John hails from an abusive home, where his dad beats his drug-addicted mom, leaving John and his brother Rory to be drawn in by a local white supremacist group. After seven miserable years in detention, John is chosen for potential adoption by a couple, but to his dismay his new parents are a white woman and a Black man. John and his foster dad are slow to find common ground, but eventually they bond over bike riding. John starts training for freestyle biking competitions. When Rory and the group come back into his life, John has to face his past without losing hope about the new future he’s building.
THE BLIND SIDE (2009)
Surrounded by poverty and thuggery through much of his childhood, Michael could’ve been just a statistic—a life wasted on the mean city streets—had it not been for his gentle disposition. When he was a baby, his mother told him to shut his eyes when anything bad was going on. Before he was allowed to open them, she’d tell him, “The past is gone, the world is a good place, it’s all going to be OK.” He’s held firm to this odd little fairy tale, shutting his eyes completely to his painful past and allowing himself to accept both the present and future with a certain level of serenity. Is that kind of attitude more accurately defined as denial? Perhaps. But the result is him escaping the anger and bitterness that could’ve consumed him.
Based on a true story, The Blind Side depicts an older foster youth who needs the love and support of a permanent family.
