Letter to a Prospective Adoptive Parent Part II

I didn't scare her off with Part I! She emailed me back with lots of questions about the photolistings, some questions about foster care and a few remarks about people she knew who had done international. Here's my response.

Hi [],

I'm happy to help as much as I can. I'll go through your questions with as much detail as possible.

Children who have been neglected and abused have emotional and behavioral problems. Sometimes these problems are too much for a regular foster care home. The next step up is "therapeutic foster care". Therapeutic foster parents have had special training to work with children and help them heal. The next step up after that is residential treatment. For example, if a child is very depressed and harming themselves, they might be placed into a therapeutic foster home, then if the therapeutic parent says the child doesn't seem to be getting better, they are placed under intensive treatment in a residential setting.

As they get better, children are stepped down in the level of care. Children are generally not put up for adoption if they're still in a residential setting or a therapeutic foster home. Ideally, when children are put up for adoption, they are emotionally ready for adoption. Their foster parents and therapists will have prepared them over a period of time about what adoption means.

Unfortunately, things don't work according to the ideal sometimes. If the child is not ready for adoption, or the social worker places them in an adoptive home that turns out to not be compatible, then the adoption is going to disrupt and the child is going to have to go back into foster care. This represents a terrible setback and makes it that much harder for the child to trust anyone ever again. Many of the children in the national photolistings will have been through disrupted adoptions.

Especially if it's a large sibling group or really older children, like teenagers, the standards for matching tend to get relaxed. It's so difficult to find parents for these children that the social workers will take anyone they can get and hope for the best, because otherwise they might not get adopted at all.

The workers want to match children with homes that are prepared for them. This is where it gets complicated:

Parents with no children are at a disadvantage. How can they prove they can handle a lot of the special needs that children in foster care have? On the other hand, I've often heard that parents with no children are a blank slate because they don't have expectations of how a "normal child" is supposed to act, whereas regular parents may have some unrealistic expectations.

We went in one direction. We decided we had a pretty high requirement and could take no more than moderate special needs -- no FASD, ODD or RAD (you'll find out what all these mean if you stay on the path). We ended up with a child who probably has less special needs than stated. However, it took us a year of waiting and applying. We submitted short applications for many children. Many of the children we were applying for had a lot of other parents who wanted to adopt them, so that's why it took so long.

The workers are looking for parents with past success and special experience. For example, if a child has autism or cerebral palsy or multiple sclerosis, maybe one of the parents grew up in a family where there was autism or cerebral palsy or multiple sclerosis.

Our son is doing great and I think the match was really good. But if he had been placed in a home with elderly parents, or a single parent who had to work out of their home a lot, the match probably wouldn't have gone so well. He's extremely active and needs lots of exercise; emotionally, he needs a lot of attention. He has ADHD or ADHD-like symptoms, and I was prepared for that because I have a cousin who had a much more severe form of ADHD.

The photolistings really soft-pedal the issues that the kids have. They don't want to frighten off potential parents too much. Also, it's not a good idea from a privacy perspective to list all the issues a child has on a public website. Once you're approved for foster care adoption, you should be able to access a little more realistic information about the children in the photolistings. Sometimes the language is very coded. "Needs to be the only child" could mean that the child has been sexually aggressive to other children as a result of sexual abuse they have suffered.

On the other hand, it was suggested (but not required) that our son be placed in a smaller family, and he actually does very well with younger children and can play gently with them... but there were so many older children in his foster family that he felt like he had to compete for attention all the time.

Descriptions can underplay issues the children have, but they can also exaggerate and define the children by their diagnoses way too much. Some unscrupulous foster parents will exaggerate the problems their child has in order to get a higher subsidy payment.

Anyway, moving on to foster-to-adopt:

Bio parents often get their children back. Also, their relatives often get the children back instead. Reunification happens much more than adoption. To get your head around the dynamic, imagine if one of your relatives had a baby and then freaked out in some major way, got addicted to something and was sent to jail. What would happen? In the majority of families, a relative would step in and foster care would not be involved, or would only be involved for a short time.

People who do foster-to-adopt with the goal of adoption have to return more babies than they adopt, and they have to deal with that emotionally. I've heard it's very difficult, especially if you don't already have children. The reward is that you made a positive difference in a child's life. I should put you in touch with my son's foster mom, because she's really great, and she's been fostering for a long time. She has adult kids (biological), younger adopted kids and then also foster kids.

The way she approached getting [Sunny] ready for adoption was moving from a mother role to a grandmother kind of role. She told him she will still be in his life, just orbiting at a greater distance.

She lives in another state so we've only visited once so far. We plan on visiting maybe once a year. He talks to her on the phone at least once a week, and we sometimes chat on the webcam for special occasions.

We were planning on establishing a relationship with his biological mom. We had exchanged several letters through the agency. She had problems with addiction but had been doing well lately and everyone said she was on the right track. Sadly, she passed away recently, very unexpectedly. That is why we will probably be adopting [Sunny]'s brother. We've met his maternal family and we'll keep in touch with his grandmother. His father is not a positive person for [Sunny] to know, and he doesn't have any good memories of his father, so we have had no contact there. Once [Sunny]'s a lot older, maybe 16-18, it's going to be up to him if he wants to track down his father and initiate contact. Right now his old foster family is the family that figures most fondly in his memory, and he also misses his biological mom.

Social workers establish the parameters of visitations with bio families until the point of termination of parental rights. Sometimes children have been abandoned and parents will not show up at all, but usually there is some kind of contact. After adoption, the relationship is all up to you. If you foster to adopt, you would probably meet parents during supervised visits. But we didn't meet anyone besides his foster family before getting placed with [Sunny], because their parental rights had already been terminated.

It's rare, but it does happen, that some bio family members are dangerous criminals and in that case foster and adoptive families have to stay anonymous and make sure no identifying info like last names or phone numbers is given out.

Often they are just very depressed and passive people who were trapped in a cycle of abuse themselves as children. Contact with them should be dictated by whether or not it's healthy for the child. If the child was seriously harmed by them, it's better to have a clean break and a fresh start... but there are often other extended family members who can still maintain healthy contact and keep the child connected to their roots. Also, sometimes a parent will turn their life around and become a positive person for the child to have contact with.

As far as wanting to help out bio family, I think the boundaries are made pretty clear to all parties. As a foster parent you're taking care of their children and probably helping reunify them with their children, so asking you for money or non-child-related help is totally out of bounds of the relationship.

As for support: after adopting from foster care, support level really varies. I went with a private (non-county) agency that has great support. We have support group meetings every month and special activities for the children on a quarterly basis. If you go through local counties or states, they will often have nothing and you're on your own. The major help that you get is the subsidy and Medicaid. The subsidy pays for a lot of stuff you need. Medicaid means that if your child develops expensive problems, you usually won't have to pay for the treatment. My son is on a prescription that would have cost us EIGHT HUNDRED DOLLARS to fill, but with Medicaid it's free. Medicaid coverage for psychiatric or behavioral issues is much more comprehensive than what you get would get in a company-sponsored health plan... however, the quality of the providers is not as good and the choice is restricted.

International adoption: I think there are a lot of myths about it. A lot of people believe that children from foreign countries are safe to adopt whereas children from the U.S. are "damaged"... that's totally false. All children are damaged in some way when they're removed from the family they were born into; it never happens for a happy reason. You just have less transparency in a foreign country than you do in America. For example, [Sunny]'s foster mother said a neighboring family next to her adopted a baby girl from Russia. When the girl was 12, she was institutionalized for fetal alcohol spectrum disorder. [Sunny]'s foster mom adopted a child with the same issue... but she knew what she was getting into beforehand, and she had financial support from the state, and her adopted child is doing well enough that I think he'll probably graduate regular school and live independently. International adoption families don't get the education that foster adoptive families here do, they're not as prepared, and they pay vast sums of money and wait many years for uncertain outcomes out of foreign bureaucracies.

Also, like you mention, a lot of people go that route because they don't want to deal with birth families. Frankly, I think that's a very selfish and consumeristic attitude. Many international adoptees feel terrible pain because they will never know who their biological parents are. Especially when they grow up and become parents themselves, they miss knowing that. Being happy about that lack of knowledge does not seem fitting. I am not against all international adoption, but the way it's practiced in America really disturbs me for many reasons.

I'd like to put you in touch with [Sunny]'s foster mom, she could answer a lot of questions about fostering. Since she's not in your state, please keep in mind some legal things are different. Here's a good link for your state:

http://www.nacac.org/ [state profile]

The subsidy levels they list are basic levels. Any special need, even a mild one, will be added on top of that.

Here is a forum with lots of personal stories about adopting from foster care, and tons of FAQs.

http://fosteringandadoptingolderchildren.yuku.com/bfosteringandadoptingolderchildren

Here's a very active Yahoo Group:

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/A_O_K/

If you read through the last two you'll hear all kinds of horror stories about what can go wrong. It's important to go into it with eyes open. However, also keep in mind there are many families, like many of the ones I know through my agency, who haven't encounterd a lot of speed bumps and don't post their stories because they have nothing beyond the normal level of family drama.

What kind of times are you available on the phone? If you send me your number, I can ask [Sunny]'s foster mom to give you a call.

Regards,
[atlasien]