Adopting a child is a pretty big decision and one that can enrich the lives of both adults and children. But not all kids are adopted into two-parent homes — according to recent figures, around 28 percent of those adopted from foster care are adopted in by single parents.
Many of these single parents have famous faces — some embarked on the parenting journey when they weren’t in a romantic relationship, others were initially coupled up, then split but decided they still wanted to pursue parenthood. Celebrities from Sheryl Crow to Sandra Bullock and Sia have created families on their terms by welcoming children from infants to teenagers into their homes.
And the payoff has been real — Sharon Stone has called raising her three adopted sons, “The great privilege of my life.”
According to the Adoption Network Law Center, two percent of American families have adopted a child and about 140,000 children are adopted by U.S. families every year. The reasons people adopt are individual, ranging from experiencing infertility to not finding the right person with which to start a family. Others simply feel a calling to adopt babies — or even tweens like actress Rosario Dawson did.
Check out a few of our favorite celebrities who adopted kids as single parents below.
A version of this article was published in 2021.
Rosario Dawson
Image Credit: Gilbert Flores/Variety Rosario Dawson has an exceptionally special story of adopting her daughter Isabella — who was 11 at the time — as a single mother.
In a 2021 interview with Health, the actress talked about how she learned that her dad wasn’t her biological dad when she was 5 years old.
“I recall thinking, ‘What if my parents hadn’t met, and I was older, and no one wanted to marry my mom because she had an older kid?’ I remember vividly back then saying that when I was older I was going to adopt an older child,” the Ahsoka star said.
“With my daughter, I didn’t go to an adoption center,” she continued. ” … My family knew her biological mom, and when we found out she was in foster care, we looked for her. It wasn’t even a question; it was clearly meant to be — she’s my kid. It’s wild to think I manifested this when I was younger.”
Edie Falco
Image Credit: John Nacion/Variety Edie Falco adopted kids Anderson and Macy in 2005 and 2008. “At that time I was single and the idea to adopt came to me,” the actress told Anderson Cooper in 2012. “I just knew at a certain point it was time to raise kids. The second you are handed a newborn, it is yours. It doesn’t matter what body it came out of. I’ve never felt more strongly about anything in my life.”
Denise Richards
Image Credit: Elyse Jankowski/Variety via Getty Images Denise Richards is the proud mom of three girls. The actress shares biological daughters Sami and Lola with Charlie Sheen. In 2011, after their divorce was finalized, she decided to adopt a third daughter, Eloise. Eloise made headlines in March 2025 after she reacted to accidentally seeing her mom’s OnlyFans photos. (Can you imagine?!)
Of the adoption, Richards told People in 2020, “I felt like I wasn’t done having children, and I’ve always wanted to have a large family. And so after my divorce, I felt like, ‘Oh well, I’m sure I’ll soon enough get remarried and have my family [grow],’ and that wasn’t in the cards at the time, so I decided to expand my family on my own.”
Sheryl Crow
Image Credit: Simon Lindenblatt/Everett Collection Sheryl Crow opened up about her journey to motherhood with Wyatt and Levi in an October 2021 episode of the Making Space with Hoda Kotb podcast. “I had the gift of getting a lot of things out of my system before I had my kids, or before I got my kids,” said Crow. “So there wasn’t anything that I felt like I was missing. If I stayed home and something was going on, I just didn’t feel like I was missing anything, that I wanted to be anywhere else, and that’s a gift.”
Crow added that her mom convinced her that she didn’t have to be married to have a family. “You have a family around you who will stand at the altar with you at baptism and say, ‘We are his community, or her community,’” Crow said of that conversation.
“The story I was telling myself limited what I thought I could have, until somebody stepped in and said, ‘Wait a minute, your story doesn’t have to look like your mom and dad’s story,’” she said. “Families look like all different things.”
Sandra Bullock
Sandra Bullock is raising her adopted kids Louis and Laila on her own. The actress initially adopted Louis with her then-husband Jesse James, and decided to raise him as a single mom when she and James divorced in 2010.
On The Kelly Clarkson Show in December 2021, Bullock said of her film, The Unforgivable, “If it wasn’t for adoption and foster care, I wouldn’t have my family, so this film really struck a chord in that there are millions upon millions of babies and children on this planet that have no one to love — that have no one to let them know they are the most amazing thing when they walk in a room. There are millions upon millions of adults that wish they could be a parent.”
Bullock has also spoken about the adoption label telling InStyle in 2018, “Let’s all just refer to these kids as ‘our kids.’ Don’t say ‘my adopted child.’ No one calls their kid their ‘IVF child’ or their ‘oh, sh*t, I went to a bar and got knocked-up child.’ Let just say, ‘our children.’”
Charlize Theron
Image Credit: Elizabeth Goodenough/Everett Collection In 2020, actress Charlize Theron reflected on the adoption of her two children, Jackson and August, in an interview with designer Diane von Furstenberg on the podcast InCharge with DVF. “I’m an only child, I didn’t have any siblings,” Theron said. “And my mom has a letter that I wrote her when I was 8 years old, and in the letter, I ask her if we could for Christmas go to an orphanage to adopt a brother or sister for me.”
Theron added, “That whole process was incredibly empowering for me as a woman. The fact that I got to choose when I wanted to be a mom…I travel a lot and I see a lot of young girls not have that choice. There is a great power in choosing to be a mother and then doing it when your body, your mind and everything is celebrating all of that.”
Madonna
Image Credit: Derek Storm/Everett Collection As a mom to six kids — two biological and four adopted from Malawi — Madonna has come to motherhood in many different ways, including adoption as a single mom. The singer is the proud mom of Lourdes, Rocco, David, Mercy, Estere, and Stelle.
In a 2017 interview with People, Madonna revealed that she received backlash after adopting David in 2008 (“Every newspaper said I kidnapped him,” she said) with her now ex-husband Guy Ritchie. But she had an even harder time bringing Mercy home the following year because by then, she had divorced Ritchie and was a single mom. According to the singer, Malawian officials told her, “I was not capable of raising a child.”
“The way I was treated — that sexist behavior — was ridiculous,” said Madonna. Later, she added, “I’ve had some pretty dark moments, but I’m a survivor.”
Meg Ryan
Image Credit: Steve Mack/Everett Collection Meg Ryan and Dennis Quaid welcomed their son Jack in 1992. However in 2006, after the couple divorced, Ryan adopted a daughter named Daisy as a single mom.
In a 2007 Redbook interview, Ryan revealed that she adopted Daisy from China where her daughter was assigned to her. “I am convinced, completely convinced, that there was nothing random about it,” she said. “She is the daughter I should have. I never felt like I was on a rescue mission or anything like that. I just really wanted a baby; I was on a mission to connect with somebody, and Daisy and I got to meet each other this way at this time. We are so compatible. And also having the experience of having had Jack and now to have Daisy in a different way — there’s no difference in the love you feel.”
Kristin Davis
Image Credit: Dee Cercone/Everett Collection Kristin Davis is a single mom to Gemma and Wilson, and in 2020, she dished to Anderson Cooper about the difficult process of adoption. “It is terrifying, partly because with adoption you always know there’s the chance that it won’t work. So you’re on pins and needles.”
Later, the And Just Like That star added, “I had always thought in the back of my head that I would adopt — that it was a possibility. So I started the process … but it’s quite confusing. There are all these different rules and if you’re single it’s harder.”
Diane Keaton
Image Credit: Elizabeth Goodenough/Everett Collection Diane Keaton adopted her two kids, Dexter and Duke, as a single woman in her 50s. Keaton said in 2008, “I’ve had such an unusual life. Obviously career-oriented. I was happy to be a daughter well into my 40s. That was something that meant a lot to me. I didn’t think that I was ever going to be prepared to be a mother.”
She added, “Motherhood was not an urge I couldn’t resist, it was more like a thought I’d been thinking for a very long time…I wanted to be in a good relationship. Those good relationships that are strong and substantive never happened for me, and that prolonged my indecisiveness.”
Sharon Stone
Image Credit: Kristin Callahan/Everett Collection Sharon Stone has three adopted sons: Roan, Laird, and Quinn. She adopted her first child with then-husband Phil Bronstein, and the other two as a single mom after her divorce in 2004. Stone told Vogue in 2019, “I’m now a single mother with three adopted sons, and it has been the great privilege of my life to raise them. When you adopt, you realize any child could be your child, any person could be your relative. After that you never see the world in the same way again.”
“I’m connected to everyone on this planet,” she continued. “And that’s a miracle in and of itself.”
Sia
Image Credit: James Atoa/Everett Collection Sia told the Australian TV show The Project that adopting two sons after being inspired by a foster care documentary in 2019 was both “painful and rewarding.” The singer added, “I think it’s just scary to have someone say ‘I’ll love you forever’ when you’ve been in 28 different homes your entire life.”
The singer then shocked fans in 2025 when news broke that she and ex Dan Bernad welcomed baby Somersault Wonder a year earlier.
Connie Britton
Image Credit: Priscilla Grant/Everett Collection In 2011, when Connie Britton adopted her son Yobi from Ethiopia, she was a single mom and filming the television show Nashville in Tennessee. “I feel like becoming a mother changes everything, in terms of how we look at life and how we know ourselves,” she recalled during an interview with Hemispheres Magazine in June 2021. “But so much changed at the same time for me, because when I adopted Yoby, I then also immediately moved to Nashville and started doing that show. And that was a very ambitious, difficult show. It was extremely long hours, and I was a brand new mother, and I had no support system in Nashville. And so, at least initially, I would say being a mother mostly taught me grit, frankly. And to rely on myself and my instincts.”
Angelina Jolie
Image Credit: Gregg DeGuire/WWD Angelina Jolie and her estranged husband Brad Pitt share biological kids Shiloh, Vivienne, and Knox plus adopted kids Maddox, Pax, and Zahara.
In 2002 and 2005, as a single mom, Jolie adopted son Maddox and daughter Zahara from Cambodia and Ethiopia respectively.
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