Ad council releases new PSAs targeting black parents

Almost everyone agrees that good parents are important to a child's development. That's also a big topic of conversation in the black community, as presidential candidate Barack Obama, comedian Bill Cosby and others have discussed in the past year.

Well now the Ad Council has released several new television ads to focus attention on adoption and parenting in the black community. 

"Currently, there are 510,000 children in the U.S. foster care system and 129,000 of these children are waiting for families to adopt them," according to the Ad Council. The majority of those who are waiting are children of color, and older African American boys wait the longest for adoption, the Ad Council reports. Each year 26,000 young adults age out of the foster care system without being adopted.

The new PSAs direct audiences to visit www.adoptuskids.org or to call 1-888-200-4005 for "important, accurate information" about the foster care system and the adoption process.

In the first ad (shown below), a mother is vacuuming under the sofa when her two sons come in holding a hamster cage looking for Ichabod.

In the second ad, a father tries to console his daughter after a bad date, but the advice he gives doesn't seem to resonate with the teen.

A third ad, released two months ago, features a black man cheerleading on the sidewalk, "Oh those boys are much too much! Those boys are much too much!"

The text accompanying the video on YouTube says that nearly 80 percent of Americans feel "the most significant family or social problem facing America is the physical absence of the father from the home." The absence of a father "correlates closely with crime, educational and emotional problems, teenage pregnancy, and drug and alcohol abuse," according to the Ad Council.

The Ad Council partnered with the National Responsible Fatherhood Clearinghouse and volunteer ad agency Campbell-Ewald to create a new PSA campaign to show dads the critical role they play in their children's lives.

The Ad Council is one of the leading producers of public service advertisements (PSAs)addressing "critical social issues" for Americans. The Council is a private, non-profit organization that utilizes volunteer talent from the advertising and communications industries, the facilities of the media, and the resources of the business and non-profit communities to create its messages.