Tiffany Haddish is always full of surprises, from her hilarious roles in blockbuster movies to her job as host of “Kids Say The Darndest Things” on CBS, she keeps us guessing as to what she’ll say or do next. And now she’s sharing something truly wonderful: She’s taking parenting classes to prepare to receive older kids from foster care.

It’s especially impactful that she’s planning to do this because she also grew up in the foster system. She wrote about her experience in her 2017 memoir, “The Last Black Unicorn” where she said she spent ages 13-18 in foster care and had only a first or second-grade reading level until high school.


“I’m taking parenting classes to adopt,” Haddish told E!’s Daily Pop earlier this week. “I’m looking at five and up, really like seven. I want them to be able to know how to use the restroom on their own and talk. I want them to know that I put in the work and wanted them.”

She said it’s important for her to care for foster kids that are older because she’ll be able to relate to them and their experiences. “I just want to bring to them survival skills, share everything that I know with them,” she said last fall on Common’s podcast.

Having biological children isn’t something Haddish wants to do, and the deeply ingrained racism in the U.S plays a large role in that decision.

“I would have to give birth to someone that looks like me … knowing that they’re going to be hunted or killed. Like, why would I put someone through that?” Haddish said on a podcast last year. “And white people don’t have to think about that, that’s something they don’t have to think about. It’s time to talk about that.”

According to current federal data, there are currently more than 400,000 children in foster care in the United States. They range in age from infants to 21 years old, but the average age of a child in foster care is more than 8 years old. Each year, approximately 20,000 of these kids age out of the foster care system. The kids who never become adopted have a statistically higher chance of receiving a poor education, becoming homeless or experiencing joblessness.

It’s nothing short of amazing that a former foster child like Tiffany Haddish, who now has the means to provide a wonderful home for herself and an older child who needs one, is choosing to become a mom this way.