Important Foster Care Adoption Links

I'm working up to a longer post about the relationship between international adoption, private adoption and foster care adoption.

In the meantime, here are two important links I came across.

Eos linked to Brenda McCreight's blog. I didn't know she had one, so I'm looking forward to reading through it. McCreight wrote Parenting Your Adopted Older Child, which is one of the books I first read when we started along our road. I recommend it to everyone. It'll scare the bejeezus out of you. It's an incredibly depressing book because it's organized as a series of fictional problems, or issues, and none of them really have clear-cut solutions. One of the most terrifying was a scenario in which a couple adopted a child with no special needs except for ADHD, and they kept saying "but it's only ADHD!" as they slowly lost their sanity and their marriage fell apart.

Reform Foster Care Now, the NACAC blog, links to a major new report from adoptuskids.org: Barriers & Success Factors in Adoption From Foster Care: Perspectives of Families & Staff. I will also be reading through that report and summarizing it here as soon as I can. A while back, I commented on a prior report on the same topic from the Evan B. Donaldson Institute.

The NACAC blog also published this not very encouraging set of numbers.

More Children and Youth Waiting for a Family

The release of the latest AFCARS data shows that even more foster children and youth—129,000 in FY 2006 up from 114,000 in 2005—are waiting for a permanent, loving family. Sadly, the data also shows that more than 26,000 youth aged out of care in FY 2006 without finding a family—higher numbers than we've seen before. Adoptions from foster care remained steady at 51,000, and the overall number of children in care dropped slightly.

Clearly, there is a need for increased federal and state attention to finding and supporting families for foster children who cannot return home. It's time for legislative action that provides federal support of subsidized guardianship, increases access to adoption assistance, and enhances post-adoption support. Changes such as these would all help ensure that every child finds the permanent, loving family he needs and deserves, and that eventually no child leaves care without a legal connection to a family.