There are no unwanted children, just unfound families.

There are no unwanted children, just unfound families.” is widely associated with U.S. adoption advocacy and is commonly attributed to the National Adoption Center as a slogan used in public-awareness and recruitment messaging. The phrasing reflects a late-20th-century shift in adoption discourse away from labeling children as “unwanted” and toward emphasizing permanency planning and family-finding—especially for children in foster care or those considered “hard to place.” It is typically encountered in promotional materials (posters, brochures, campaign copy) rather than as a line from a single speech or authored literary text, functioning as an institutional maxim meant to reframe public perception and motivate prospective adoptive families.

The line reframes adoption and foster-care language by rejecting the label “unwanted child” and shifting attention to the social task of locating a suitable, committed home. It implies that the problem is not the child’s inherent desirability but the absence (or inaccessibility) of a family able and willing to care for them. As advocacy rhetoric, it aims to reduce stigma, encourage prospective adoptive parents, and emphasize systemic responsibility—recruitment, matching, support services—over moral judgment. The phrase also suggests optimism: for every child, a family can exist, even if not yet identified, and the work is to connect them.