Foster care homes may provide basic necessities for survival, but often fall short of fostering a healthy upbringing. This system frequently separates siblings, compounding their trauma. In May 2019, six siblings who had endured over 1,500 days of distress stood teary-eyed in a Pittsburgh courtroom. A gay couple from Pennsylvania, Steve and Rob Anderson-McLean, had adopted them all, reported Good Morning America. On the day of the courtroom decision, the entire family was dressed in cream-white T-shirts printed with the label "Anderson-McLean family." In their hands, they held a plaque that read, "After 1640 days in foster care, Anderson-McLean family adoption day, 5-23-2019."
"We never imagined we'd be lucky enough or blessed enough to have six," said the couple, overjoyed. Steve and Rob, who have been together for two decades, fell in love with the six siblings - Carlos, 14, Guadalupe, 13, Maria, 12, Selena, 10, Nasa, 9, and Max, 7, in 2018 - when they first learned about them.
“We saw their picture and fell in love,” Rob told TODAY. He shared the wholesome reason why they decided to adopt all the brothers and sisters, “So many sibling groups are broken up because people just want to adopt the younger children. Steve and I knew these guys needed to be together.” In July 2018, the siblings came to live with the dads, along with two other kids, Parker and Noah. Parker and Noah were the couple’s kids from a previous marriage. After spending some time with the caretaking dads, the children asked them innocently if they could stay with them forever. “We took them to the park and to the zoo. We played in the yard. That was all new to them. Having fun was new to them," recalled Steve.
Although the couple was worried about how the teens would adjust to the same-sex parents, their doubts were soon erased when they realized that the kids were very happy in their company. They would go to adventure parks, have night-outs, and make fun-filled trips together. “The kids felt this huge sense of relief,” Steve said, “They had been let down by adults so many times in their life, and were nervous it wasn’t going to happen.”
Once the adoption was finalized, the kids couldn’t contain their excitement, the dads recalled. Their boy Max screamed a cry of joy, “I am adopted. You can’t be unadopted right?” They had to reassure him that he would always be their son. Another of the siblings, Carlos, who graduated from college in June 2024, said to Steve at that time, “I’m not a foster kid anymore. I don’t have to carry that title around. I finally have a real family.”
"I'd say our kids have brought a great kind of crazy to our lives. It's heartwarming and so exciting to see how they connect with us and our extended family and friends," said Rob. The couple regularly posts updates of their children’s lives on their Facebook page, which shows how liberated the kids felt when they were withdrawn from their foster homes and brought into unison in one big family.
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Robin Williams performs for military men and women as part of a United Service Organization (USO) show on board Camp Phoenix in December 2007
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Will your current friends still be with you after seven years?
Professor shares how many years a friendship must last before it'll become lifelong
Think of your best friend. How long have you known them? Growing up, children make friends and say they’ll be best friends forever. That’s where “BFF” came from, for crying out loud. But is the concept of the lifelong friend real? If so, how many years of friendship will have to bloom before a friendship goes the distance? Well, a Dutch study may have the answer to that last question.
Sociologist Gerald Mollenhorst and his team in the Netherlands did extensive research on friendships and made some interesting findings in his surveys and studies. Mollenhorst found that over half of your friendships will “shed” within seven years. However, the relationships that go past the seven-year mark tend to last. This led to the prevailing theory that most friendships lasting more than seven years would endure throughout a person’s lifetime.
In Mollenhorst’s findings, lifelong friendships seem to come down to one thing: reciprocal effort. The primary reason so many friendships form and fade within seven-year cycles has much to do with a person’s ages and life stages. A lot of people lose touch with elementary and high school friends because so many leave home to attend college. Work friends change when someone gets promoted or finds a better job in a different state. Some friends get married and have children, reducing one-on-one time together, and thus a friendship fades. It’s easy to lose friends, but naturally harder to keep them when you’re no longer in proximity.
Some people on Reddit even wonder if lifelong friendships are actually real or just a romanticized thought nowadays. However, older commenters showed that lifelong friendship is still possible:
“I met my friend on the first day of kindergarten. Maybe not the very first day, but within the first week. We were texting each other stupid memes just yesterday. This year we’ll both celebrate our 58th birthdays.”
“My oldest friend and I met when she was just 5 and I was 9. Next-door neighbors. We're now both over 60 and still talk weekly and visit at least twice a year.”
“I’m 55. I’ve just spent a weekend with friends I met 24 and 32 years ago respectively. I’m also still in touch with my penpal in the States. I was 15 when we started writing to each other.”
“My friends (3 of them) go back to my college days in my 20’s that I still talk to a minimum of once a week. I'm in my early 60s now.”
“We ebb and flow. Sometimes many years will pass as we go through different things and phases. Nobody gets buttsore if we aren’t in touch all the time. In our 50s we don’t try and argue or be petty like we did before. But I love them. I don’t need a weekly lunch to know that. I could make a call right now if I needed something. Same with them.”
Maintaining a friendship for life is never guaranteed, but there are ways, psychotherapists say, that can make a friendship last. It’s not easy, but for a friendship to last, both participants need to make room for patience and place greater weight on their similarities than on the differences that may develop over time. Along with that, it’s helpful to be tolerant of large distances and gaps of time between visits, too. It’s not easy, and it requires both people involved to be equally invested to keep the friendship alive and from becoming stagnant.
As tough as it sounds, it is still possible. You may be a fortunate person who can name several friends you’ve kept for over seven years or over seventy years. But if you’re not, every new friendship you make has the same chance and potential of being lifelong.