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Originally Posted by queenjane  [LEFT]Well, i can only tell you my experience
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My experience has been this:
When we began fostering (not fostering to adopt, just fostering), we were called about a placement before we'd even decided to get licensed. They needed homes *badly,* and they especially needed a home for this guy who was otherwise heading back to a large, marginally safe group home! They did not have another placement for this kid.
Of course, that was doing non-adoptive
therapeutic foster care for older kids and teens. But still, the call I got was about a permanent-placement. Though the agency didn't do adoptions, they needed a forever home for my first foster son in any case.
When we switched over to doing non-therapeutic foster care for kids 0-9, we did have to wait a little while before our first call (a couple months, if memory serves), but this does not mean that they didn't generally need homes. I have seen the placement worker just as desperate to find homes. Sometimes kids come into the system in waves, so there are slow times at the department too. Again, that was straight fostering, not adopt.
Our first foster-adoptive placement-- ds-- came to us about four months after our homestudy for foster-adopt was approved. He was a newborn, and there were other families waiting at the time (almost all wanting babies), but we were to my knowledge at that time the only couple willing to take any gender (almost everyone I met in the trainings, the foster-adopt support group, etc. wanted girls). Also, "healthy child" is a variable concept. ds had a potential for special needs due to genetics, but we accepted placement anyway. Some families may not have been open to that, so I have no idea if ds would have had to wait around in regular foster care for a foster-adopt home had we not said "YES! Oh of course, YES!"
His case was very straight-forward. There is no way his parents would have been able to parent. No way. They would have needed an adoptive home one way or another.
I do know they typically had a hard time in our county placing toddlers and preschoolers, especially little boys. I have been at county foster-adopt support group meetings where they have made announcements about waiting children from our county, and other counties near us, for whom they haven't been able to find homes. None have been about babies, but some have been about older toddlers and preschoolers.
After they search between counties, I am assuming the kids go onto some national list.
dfd was an unexpected placement for us. We were called out of the blue when ds was 17 months. dfd was six months. She had some risk of attachment issues (not attachment disorder, necessarily, but attachment issues), and seemed healthy to date but did have some other risk factors including prenatal exposure.
The social worker asked me if we were interested, and I told her I would need to speak with my dw first. I spoke with dw, and we called back and told the social worker that we accepted the placement (usually how it worked in our county...the placement worker knows all the families and then selects a family for each child). Then the social worker told us that, no, we weren't accepting placement because she had nine families who were interested (apparently--and I found out later, much to the placement workers dismay-- she had demanded multiple names and decided to interview families herself rather than just letting the placement worker do her job in getting the right matches). She called us all in for interviews.
Because this was out-of-the-norm, several families got upset and dropped out before the interviews. We considered it, but decided to stay in the mix. After we interviewed, the social worker told us that there were only two families she felt appropriate for this particular child, and we were one of them. Later she decided on us. The placement worker mentioned to me a year or more later that we were the first name she gave to the social worker (and the only name she would have given, had more not been demanded).
I get the impression that our experience with and openess to parenting children with some special needs came into play.
We never intended to "compete," and throughout the process we considered withdrawing. We hadn't been actively seeking placement at that time anyway, as ds was still quite young. But I also know now, given dfd's needs as they developed once she was older, that we most likely were the best equipped to care for her needs. As RedOakMomma said so well:
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| competing against other couples for a child....you can look at that different ways, too. If you're talking about domestic adoption of a healthy child, putting your name out there as a potential choice for an expectant mother could be a good thing. Perhaps that mother is looking for someone like you...your parenting beliefs, your stance on AP/vax/etc., your location, your approach to open adoption...who knows. I know it seems like a competition, and sadly some treat it that way, but I think it's good for expectant moms thinking of adoption to have options. In domestic adoption, I firmly believe that it should be about finding the right family for the wants of the expectant mom...NOT about a bunch of pre-adoptive couples waiting in line, calling "dibs," and waiting their turn for the system to spit out a baby. I know some pre adoptive parents start feeling awfully entitled, but to me that's backwards. |
For us, it wasn't a domestic adoption of a "healthy" child (though despite risk factors, she did seem healthy at placement). But RedOakMomma's point still stands. It is about finding the right place for the child, not about finding a child for the parents.
We've now moved and discovered in our new city that they are really desperate for both foster and foster-adopt parents. There is a lot of active recruitment of foster and adoptive parents happening here. The state is spending money and resources trying to find homes.
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Originally Posted by queenjane That being said....in my state there is great competition for kids under, say, ten yrs old. And this seems to be true of most of the waiting parents i talk to online who are waiting to do a "straight" (non fostering) adoption of a US waiting/state child.
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queenjane makes a good point, and the reason seems to be partly because most kids who are adopted after being in foster care are adopted either by relatives or by foster parents. In many cases, they were in foster-
adopt care because termination or relinquishment of parental rights was already seen as a highly likely scenario. Other times, like with dfd's brother, a foster parent will decide they are willing to adopt a particular foster child in their care after adoption becomes the case plan.
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Originally Posted by kalkiwendy I just wanted to point out that the "you saved that kid" language that exists can be sort of detrimental.
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This is a good and important point. No child wants to be wants to be a charity case. That said, the OP's language, not intention, seem suspect.
And OP, I think what you are getting at are some of the important ethical questions around adoption. And those are worth every ounce of time you can give them before you make a decision. Each route of adoption brings up different ethical nuances that I believe are better faced when you aren't attached to a particular route.
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Originally Posted by 1littlebit what i saw was a lot of kids of who were in the foster system but could not be adopted b/c their parents had legal rights with no intention of relinquishing them. Are these children ever able to be adopted or will the spend the whole time in the system?
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How long ago was this? The reason I ask is because it has only been within the last eight to ten years (if memory serves) that the current laws around permanency planning have been passed. It's not been that long.
It was actually my early experiences doing therapeutic foster care that espeically motivated me toward foster-adopt. That was because a lot of the older kids and teens that we fostered could have been without so much trauma in their lives if adoption had happened when they were much younger.
For my first dfs, for example, he'd been in foster care for ten out of fifteen years and twenty-three homes (that is, he'd had twenty-four sets of "parents..." twenty-four FAMILIES!!!) when he arrived in our care. His parents refused to relinquish their rights but repeatedly failed their seven children...they wouldn't show up for visitations, would show up and leave early, would show up and couldn't maintain appropriate behavior through the visitations, couldn't overcome their addictions or maintain any semblance of safety in their home, etc. etc. dfs was ripped to peices every time his parents wouldn't show to visits, etc.
Finally, a full SIX devestating, highly emotionally damaging years after dfs came into foster care, his parent's parental rights were terminated by the court. By that time, dfs was eleven and a permanent home for him was a near impossibility. Even foster parents who said they'd commit to him over the long-term...well, things would change. Two guardianships were attempted, and terminated.
When he came to us as a permanent foster placement, we kept thinking what it could have been like if the system could have terminated his parental rights even three or four years earlier so that real permanency in one form or another could begin. His life story would have been entirely different, and as far as I can tell, much, *much* better.
Now, things don't happen like that in the majority of cases. The goal of pushing for permanency plans earlier is to keep kids from languishing in foster care the way they did even ten or twelve years ago. Now, the states are forced to plan earlier when things aren't working out with parents but parents aren't willing to relinquish.
That's not to say that some kids still don't languish. Especially kids with special needs. And most, most especially *boys* with special needs. But I think things are much better now.
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Originally Posted by queenjane Yes, a child that is born to you could be born with medical problems or learning issues, however when you adopt a child you need to not only prepare for whatever that child may be genetically (just as your own bios)
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Yes, and as with ds, sometimes the genetic "risk factors" are higher in adoption. For example, my ds' parents can't parent because *they* have special needs that make it impossible for them to do so safely (proven with ds' older half-sibling). These genetics that prevented them from parenting are certainly part of the picture for ds.
And for dfd, her parents have several
very severe and debilitating mental health disorders that are special needs. These both necessitate the adoption (in this particular case, they came into play in terms of the cause of neglect) and also are challenges that may be part of my dfd's genetic legacy.
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| but also the *environmental* impact of their life before they came to you. |
Yes, and as queenjane said earlier, this includes not just things like exposure to drugs or alcohol before birth, but also things like the very experience of losing one's first parents.
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| "Toddler Adoption: The Weaver's Craft" has been recommended as a good book that talks about this. |
I second the recommendation of this book in general, not just for this part of the conversation.
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| Also....if these teens were in a psych placement/hospital, then they likely werent ready for adoption anyway. Usually, they like kids to be able to transfer from residential treatment centers to therapeutic foster homes in preparation for adoption...it would take a highly skilled and prepared parent to adopt a child directly from an in-patient program like that. |
Yes, yes. Those kids in a pysch placement aren't the kids normally seen in this kind of conversation.
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| I inquired on a little boy that was in a RTC in WA, he looked exactly like my son and i felt so drawn to him, but after talking to his worker, i had to stop pursuing it. His mom was an alcoholic who drank throughout pg (so they suspected some level of alcohol-related brain damage, which impacts cause-and-effect thinking), and he was also dealing with a significant attachment disorder. Its very difficult to parent a child like that successfully...its ALOT of work, therapy, structure, etc. Children with similar issues need very special homes (often with two parents and no other kids, in a very structured home)....so even if the teens you worked with WERE available, there may not have been too many homes waiting for them. |
True. And not only that, but most "staff" who worked with my eldest dfs over the years had no *idea* what we went through as his parents. I mean, they thought they did. They thought they had been there for the worst. But none of them had. There is just no way until you are living it.
I am *really* glad we did it. But I'm telling you that I don't think even professionals could have handled it.
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Originally Posted by queenjane Sometimes thats not such an indication of a desire for a permanent home, as it is an indication of an attachment disorder.
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Yes, yes, yes, YES!! This is so, so true. The director of the agency where we did therapeutic care did not understand this (to her credit, she was actually mentally ill herself...something no one realized at the time), and quite literally destroyed dfs' one true shot at family life when she decided to let dfs decide to move from our home when he said he wanted to go live with a new respite placement. "He's a teenager. If we don't start letting him make decisions about his life now, when will we?" the director said (it is notable that dfs would have lived with us into adulthood as a dependent due to his special needs). And there it went.
He was moved to his respite provider, and bounced out of there shortly thereafter. He proceeded to continue bouncing into adulthood. He is now an adult and in very, very,
very bad shape.
Kids with attachment disorder want to go live with everyone but the people who love them
as and provide them with stability
of their parents. dfs didn't say he wanted to move in with his respite providers (he called them his "dream family") until AFTER he had stabilized in our home. It was only once dfs stopped causing the police come over to our house at least once a week, once he started to make progress in school at least enough to sit through most of his classes most of the time, once he started to open up to us in more genuine ways, etc. etc. that he asked to go. And kids with attachment disorder will make it sound like there are no other options even when there are, like the situation is absolutely *dire* to whoever they are asking to take them home even when it is a bald-faced lie. It's definitely a part of the disorder to ask various people in your life (and even strangers) to take you home and/or adopt you.
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Originally Posted by queenjane Also...its possible that some of the kids you cared for had families to eventually go home to....were they ALL in the system? Usually they want to reunify the family if at all possible. If the child isnt ready for adoption and might not be for a number of months or even years, and if the bio parents are even half heartedly working a plan, and if the child is incredibly hard to place anyway (being a teen for example, or having mental illness or acting out aggressively etc), then a judge would probably be less likely to TPR knowing that would mean this child would be a legal orphan for a long time.
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Absolutely.
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Originally Posted by RedOakMomma There are DEFINITELY more kids who need families than families who want to adopt. There's no question of that.
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Yes! Yes! Looking at all types of adoption combined, overall yes. Different types of adoption will have different specific numbers, but yes, there are kids who need families.
I consider adoption the mutual fulfillment of needs in that kids have families and families have kids, when they are needed.
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Originally Posted by RedOakMomma As for your primary motivation...I think a lot of people start out that way. I'd hope you'd move toward different motivations as you got into the process (imo, charitable reasons for adopting generally don't go very far when it comes to dealing with the real-life demands of parenting a child, so in the end having more selfish motivations to adopt ends up being a good thing).
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Well-put.
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Originally Posted by RedOakMomma I felt there was a need, and that our family fit that need well.
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That's how it was for us in foster-adopt.
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Originally Posted by RedOakMomma Don't ever let someone make you feel guilty for wanting to adopt a healthy child. No one ever makes a pregnant woman feel guilty for wanting to have a healthy child, and it's just wrong for people to expect adoptive parents to wish or dream otherwise. It's okay to want a child who's had the best possible start in life. As I'm sure others have mentioned, the trauma of adoption (losing the mother a child has known for at least 9 months, time in institutions, the loss of foster family, or even the loss of language/culture) are challenges enough in "healthy" adoptions. You should always be honest about what you want, what you think you can handle, and what you want to handle. Doing otherwise, out of guilt or obligation, is really unhealthy for you and the child.
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This is very well articulated.
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Originally Posted by RedOakMomma |
Yes, or start getting a copy of the magazine! It's very good.
BUT DH and I are fertile and could just have more kids. However, we are considering adoption because of the notion (correct? maybe, maybe not) that there are kids out there who need a family, and who are we to birth more kids when we could adopt kids that already exist that are in need of a family? Does that make sense? Is this not an acceptable motivation to have for adoption? Do I need to examine/reflect on that? What is a proper motivation for adoption? Hope that's not coming across as snarky, obviously I want to adopt for the right reasons.
, but I certainly don't want to be snarky.
. She was a great kid. I feel badly for her.
: , these sweet little healthy girls, but no one in this country wants older kids, no one wants older black boys. Its just not true. In my state, as far as i can tell, younger (under 10) AA boys seem to be placed just fine. To the point where when i see a five or six or eight yr old boy on our photolisting, i dont even inquire because i know he'll be matched in a nanosecond. There was a little boy with *dwarfism* for Pete's sake, five yrs old, AA, he was listed as "severe" (personally i wouldnt consider dwarfism a severe disability but most would...) i SOOO wanted this boy, nope he was matched like *that*. And thats GREAT for him. But still....
