I've seen a lot of comments in various debates recounting how some parents were forced to adopt internationally because they were not allowed to adopt from foster care.
I'm skeptical of most of these claims. Not all. Just most. You can see a comment I left here for more details. I've also addressed it several times in older blog posts here. I won't recap those arguments. Instead, I'm going to try and do something constructive: giving a guide to overcoming barriers to adopting from foster care.
I'm really not the best person to do this. I'm sure I'm going to get some things wrong. If anyone wants to comment or email correcting me on details, please go ahead, and I'll update this blog post later and credit you.
This guide is mainly for people who feel overwhelmed by the process, who don't understand it and are terrified of it, and who are worried they'll be discriminated against. You might be even more scared after you finish reading, but you also might feel better about being forewarned. If you've already adopted from foster care, or have a lot of experience, it won't apply as much. It also applies much more to adoption than to fostering.
Get educated
Read this report:
Barriers & Success Factors in Adoption From Foster Care: Perspectives of Families & Staff. Concentrate very hard on the staff section. Also read this report:
"Listening to Parents: Overcoming the Barriers to the Adoption of Children from Foster Care". These two reports will go a long way in giving you a realistic perspective on the process.
Look for Yahoo! Groups and forums and communities for foster care parents, foster care adoptive parents and older child adoptive parents. Get involved and ask questions. Try hard to get as much specific information as possible about your geographical area. Foster care adoption is incredibly local. You might be in a good location, or a hopeless one. Read lots of blogs. Accounts by adults with experiences of being in foster care are especially important to find and read.
Homestudy Yourself
Read this page about homestudies from childwelfare.gov and try to do the process to yourself, in a general way. Are there any general weaknesses or general strengths? Now is the time to address those weaknesses.
If you don't have much documented experience with children, volunteer as a mentor or tutor. Do this with two different age groups, if possible, and also try to find some volunteer work with special needs children. This will help your homestudy and it will help you immeasurably in order to determine what your
specific weaknesses and strengths are. You might find that you loathe carrying babies and changing diapers, and adopting an older kid would be just great. You might find that you have a tendency to get overly irritated with certain behaviors or certain needs. Can you change your own mentality? Are you sure this is right for you? Your motivation is important, but it's less important than your strengths and weaknesses.
You really need to think long term here. In fact, a year of preparation before you walk through the agency doors might not be out of order for some families. If you have children, you need to have talks with them about it. This is a very complicated subject and I don't have any experience with it. While I don't think it's necessary to have your other children's full permission when starting, you'll need to realize this is going to be a huge event for them as well as you. This is
a good link specifically for fostering.
If you're living somewhere with no room for another child, you're going to need to move. Finances are also an issue. You're going to need to have documented stable income. You don't need to have a lot of money, and you don't need to be debt-free, you just need to be able to show reasonable stability of income and housing. Don't start the process if you're in the middle of a foreclosure or bankruptcy.
Start going to church. I'll go into this later, but you should develop some kind of involvement with some kind of at least vaguely Christian church. If you're an atheist, pagan, Muslim, Buddhist, Hindu, Jewish, etc., this is going to be especially crucial, and especially complicated. An interfaith volunteer organization might be the best compromise so that you don't have to lie or compromise your beliefs in any way.
Start Going to Orientations & Meetings
Private and public (county) agencies have regular orientation meetings. Start going to them. This is the point at which you need to start creating a positive impression. Don't dress up or dress down too much, pay attention, and be respectful to the presenter, even if they're terrible. Ask a couple good questions. Otherwise don't talk too much.
If there are support groups and foster care parent meetings in your area that also include prospective adoptive parents, start showing up. Stay in the background and ask questions.
The reason I'm saying not to talk too much is that at this point, I've seen that parents start to become very emotional. This is a wrenching process. You're going to start hearing things that touch you in deep ways. A natural response from many people, if they're particularly extroverted, is to open up and share deeply emotional things from their own lives, or show disagreement by getting into arguments that are much louder and passionate than they would otherwise be...
To put it into a nutshell, the process is going to drive you a little crazy. You'll get over it (probably), but you need to keep a hold on your expression, and prevent others from seeing you out of control, because these others may have some input on the adoption process. If you need to talk it out, go get a therapist and talk it out with them. Or do it in an anonymous internet support group.
Networking with other parents is also very important. You want to start doing respite work for other parents as soon as possible. Other parents will be happy to share lots of stories and advice and tips with you.
Start Making Basic Decisions
By now, you should know yourself better. You're ready to start making decisions. Don't decide on your agency yet, but think about age range, number of children, special needs and fostering versus straight/general adoption. Go back and read those reports again in the first section.
- if you're set on adopting a baby, you'll need to foster. Adopting a baby from general adoption is basically impossible, unless they're extremely medically fragile with severe special needs.
- if you foster, you have to be prepared to work primarily for family reunification. If you think this is impossible, if you think it would hurt you too much, and/or hurt your other children too much, you obviously can't foster. But try revisiting the idea from time to time. At a certain point in the process, a mental switch might flick and you will realize that you can still love while letting go. Children are also very resilient in that they're able to comprehend other models of "family" than the norm. By fostering, you aren't necessarily teaching them that children are mobile and replaceable. You might be teaching them that you can love someone who stays with you,
and you can love someone who
doesn't stay with you.
- one of the most important decisions you can make is how many children. There's a really, really urgent need to keep sibling groups together. But at the same time, parenting more than one child can be incredibly difficult, especially if you don't have a lot of experience or a support network. This is a decision I suggest you spend a lot of time on.
- if you stick with straight/general adoption (adoption without fostering) keep in mind you need to establish a realistic age range. If you tell the workers you are only willing to adopt 1-2 reasonably healthy children from ages 1-4, they might either tell you outright to give up and go away, or else sigh behind their backs at you, and give you passive signals to give up and go away. You'll waste a lot of time.
- knowledge of special needs is crucial. Research them exhaustively. Keep in mind (I'll return to this later) that special needs are both under-reported and over-reported. No matter what the paperwork says, you cannot rely on your child not having substance/alcohol exposure or attachment disorder or mental illness. Also, some foster parents overreport special needs in order to get a higher subsidy level, and some parents overreport special needs out of sheer inexperience. The paperwork gives you clues. It doesn't give you answers. Also, keep in mind the difference between "sexual acting out" and "sexual perpetration"... don't automatically flip at the sight of the word "sexual".
- gender is a tricky one. The trend is that more parents prefer to adopt girls; there are also fewer girls in the system. If you say that you will adopt girls only, the social workers will not be very happy with you. Consider this point very carefully and re-examine your preferences.
Some Categories of Parents
I don't see anything about this in the reports, here are some rough groups of families in the process, and the dangers they face. Think about if you fit in any of these categories, and realize social workers might be slotting you into them.
1) Desperates. They go into fostering with a primary goal of adopting a baby. They frequently burn out when they have to give babies back. Social workers love them when it's emergency baby placement time, but otherwise don't respect them or treat them very well. I think there's a large turnover.
2) Empty-nesters. They're older and they've already raised a batch of grown or nearly-grown children. They're often very relaxed about placements because they don't feel the same urgency to parent, having already done it before. Their main danger is that they might think they know it all based on raising their biological children, and they fall apart when they realize this new kind of parenting is quite different. Social workers will be looking closely at their potential flexibility. However, they generally like this type of family, especially because they're frequently looking to adopt sibling groups.
3) Saints. These are often evangelicals, but they can also be secular ultraliberals. They have no age or special need requirements. They tell the workers they want to be placed with any number of children that have the greatest need. They often have very unrealistic ideas about these needs, and are unprepared. The social workers will be deeply suspicious of these people. They burn out frequently.
4) Targeted. These parents have often done a lot of research, and want to adopt a specific targeted population. For example, the parents who say, "we want to adopt a child with cerebral palsy because we have another child with cerebral palsy." Or "we are deaf and would like to adopt a deaf child." Social workers love these parents because they can be relied on to adopt frequently hard-to-place kids. However, if the parents end up at the wrong agency, they can be exploited... the social workers will keep them around, and string them along, even though another agency might have plenty of the kind of children they want to adopt.
5) Aggressive. These are people that have a fairly specific idea of what they want, often in a high-demand population, and are insistent that the social workers can get them that placement. The social workers will sometimes give these parents quicker placements simply because they're "in their face" and don't get forgotten. Alternately, they develop a dislike for these parents and move them to the bottom of the priority list. Being aggressive can be positive, in a way, because if you advocate this strongly for yourself, you will probably advocate strongly for your child, as well. And you will need to argue and fight with a lot of teachers, doctors and bureaucrats when you adopt a special needs child. But there's a fine line between being aggressive and being a jerk, and if you cross it, it may reflect very badly on your future parenting skills.
6) Photostruck. These are parents who have seen a particular child in the photolistings and are starting the process for the purpose of adopting them. The workers know that there is almost zero chance they'll be matched with that particular child. Their goal is to gently let down the parents and focus them on adopting other children too. The parents are probably frantic to get their process as down as quickly as possible so they can adopt that particular child, and the workers may become irritated with their urgency and give up on treating them gently.
Some Categories of Parents with Specific Problems
Criminal Records
You're going to get fingerprinted and have a background check. How clean do you need to be? What we were told at our agency is that everything was examined on a case by case basis. Anything very violent or anything directed at children is going to disqualify you, of course.
I don't know what to tell people with serious convictions. But I do have some advice for the large population of Americans who've had light brushes with the law. First, the criminal justice system disproportionately targets minorities and poorer people. Second, drug offenses are incredibly common, even for richer white people. Strictly enforcing a no-criminal-convictions-whatsoever rule would be racist and classist, and most social workers recognize this.
My husband had a drug conviction from when he was 18. He fessed up, and our agency asked him to write an addendum explaining what he learned from the experience. He included the sentence "I learned I wouldn't make a good criminal" at the end, but I edited that out because it sounded way too flippant.
I was arrested for shoplifting when I was 15. I did my community service and my record was sealed when I was 18. I don't think this has any bearing whatsoever on my fitness as a parent, so I didn't include it. I would also recommend not sharing any similar juvenile misdemeanors. If the records are sealed, there's no legal requirement to do so.
Having a checkered juvenile history might even help you if you're adopting an older child with a similar history. Hopefully, you also have a documented record, since then, of helping young people avoid similar mistakes. If not, start creating one. Otherwise, having any kind of record is going to be neutral at best, and be another reason to disqualify you for a particular child, or move your homestudy further down the pile.
LGBT
The scale of family desirability for social workers goes something like this: hetero couple > single woman > lesbian couple > gay couple > single dad.
If you're a gay single man or woman, I guess an important question is how much of your sexuality to disclose. But I have a feeling that most social workers assume single dads are gay, anyway, unless proven otherwise.
If you're a couple, you have to work very closely with the agency on how to manage this. Your agency choice is going to be especially important. In some states, gay people cannot adopt at all. Florida's
ban may be changing soon, hopefully. This link
contains some helpful resources to determine laws in your area. If you live in an especially regressive state, maybe you should consider moving. I know that's a hurtful thing to say, and might involve separation from your roots and other family, but in practical terms, it might be the most reliable way to start your own family.
I really wish I could provide a link to specifically transgender resources. I looked, but haven't been able to find anything.
If you sign with a decent agency, they'll support you and try to work around any homophobic social workers. They'll also be honest with you about your chances and avoid creating false hopes. Your status may help you in terms of adopting older LGBT children, but only if conditions are right. Otherwise, any random homophobic worker you submit your homestudy to will sabotage it.
On the bright side, many gay and lesbian couples successfully adopt from foster care. If you read the first report I linked to, you'll see that less same-sex couples drop out before placement! Some of this must be because LGBT parents know they have fewer options, so they work harder and don't give up as easily.
Non-Christian
The vast majority of children are going to be from a Christian background. Not being Christian is a major, major handicap. The foster care system pretends to be secular, but in most areas, it's really not.
This wasn't a serious problem for me to deal with. Neither of us are Christian, but we joined a liberal congregation that doesn't require any particular belief system. I realize that for other non-Christians, this can be a really agonizing issue. The advice I'm giving is hurtful and humiliating, but necessary.
Regular church attendance establishes a support network. You have to think about the social function of churches more than the spiritual function. It provides a sense of stability to the family to do at least one thing the same every week. Social workers want to see as many support networks as possible. Most don't really care what you
believe. They just want proof that you're connected to some greater community. The majority of Americans do this through churches.
Find a church that allows you to believe what you believe, even if you have to drive an hour to get there. If you don't like services, find some other way to be associated... maybe do volunteer work for them. Or find an interfaith organization and get involved with them in some regular way.
Beyond and beneath the support network aspect, which I actually agree with, many Christian social workers are prejudiced against non-Christians. I'm not talking about fire-and-brimstone condemnations... it's more subtle than that. Many will doubt your ability to parent a Christian child. I think it's important to prove in some documented way that you don't hate Christians, you
like Christians and you're comfortable around Christians.
When your worker brings up these questions for the homestudy, and in your autobiographical statement, don't talk about what you believe, just talk about what you do and what your level of involvement is. That way, you're not lying about anything. And don't overshare.
Maybe in some very liberal places or places with a lot of non-Christians, all this doesn't apply. But if you're submitting your homestudy in any wider area, they will apply.
Race/Ethnicity
I'm not going to give a lot of advice to white people adopting transracially. There are a gazillion other resources for that. My only advice is: do your research, and don't act like a martyr. White couples are at the top of the pile when it comes to family rankings. You're number one for white children, and you're a very close number two for everyone else. Do not complain about how being white hurts your chances, especially in front of black social workers. Yes, I've seen that happen, and it's really pathetic.
If you're black, you have higher chances of being matched to black children, and almost zero chances of being matched to any other race. The big exception is going to be sibling groups. There are a lot of multiracial sibling groups out there. If you're considering that seriously, you should try and have something in your homestudy about your connections to other ethnicities and races.
If you're Latino, and you don't live in a very Latino area, it's hard to give advice. If you're a black Latino, white and black social workers will probably just slot you into the "black" category. Latinos will be sort of preferred for Latino children, but if there aren't many Latino social workers in the area, this preference won't be very strong.
If you're Asian, like me, you've got especially big problems. Outside of Hawaii, there aren't many Asian kids who end up in the photolistings. White (foster or otherwise) parents who say they aren't comfortable adopting black children are frequently just fine with adopting Asian children, so many of them don't get to the photolistings. Nobody really cares about recruiting Asian foster parents or adoptive parents. Any adoption you do is going to be transracial. Black and white social workers don't really know what to do with you. You might exist in a strange Twilight Zone, beating your head against a wall.
If you're Native American, you may have difficult issues in the regular system, depending on your geographical location. But you probably have the additional choice of working with a tribal agency to get placements. Networking with other parents is going to be key.
Interracial couples will experience some combination of these issues. In opposite-sex couples, the mother's race is always going to be more important. Adoption is an intensely female sphere, and adoption social workers are overwhelmingly female. That's true for any of these categories, by the way... the woman's attributes are going to be scrutinized most intensely, and she'll have to do most of the work. I think for same-sex couples, a parallel dynamic applies. One partner will get pegged as more "feminine", therefore more maternal, and given greater scrutiny and responsibility.
Like any other of these barriers, the older the child and the more severe the special need, the less they apply. Social workers for hard-to-place children will often set aside many superficial prejudices because they're desperate to get a match.
Physical and Mental Disability
These can both hurt and help, though mostly it hurts. Having a physical disability means you are very unlikely to get placed with a young child. There will be a questions asked about capable you are of carrying children, bathing them, restraining them in a rage. You can anticipate some of these yourself. What would you do if your child is about to run out into the middle of a busy street? If they start attacking another, smaller child? On the other hand, it may help you in getting placed with another child with a physical disability. For example, having a wheelchair-accessible house.
Mental disability can be neutral, but only if you manage it carefully. Many, many children in the system have mental illness. If you have a history of successfully "dealing" with the illness, and "dealing" is defined in such a way that the social workers accepts it, that shows that you won't be afraid with some of the more common issues that children often present.
In short, these are very serious barriers to adopting younger children, but can be neutral or even positive when adopting older children. Again, don't overshare. What you talk about with your therapist should stay with your therapist. Don't volunteer anything that won't come out on the physical anyway. Many social workers have prejudices against specific kinds of disabilities.
Choose Your Agency
Once you choose your agency, you'll go through licensing, training, approval and homestudy. This could take a few months, or maybe even a year. It represents a huge investment of time, energy and emotion.
Even if you do tons of research and networking and make a really informed decision, your agency might still be wrong for you. You have to know when to cut your losses and move to another path. Otherwise, the disappointment will crush you.
The agency choice is going to vary enormously according to region. Some basic divisions:
1) Nationwide. I can only think of two: Adopt America Network and WACAP. I personally did not consider WACAP because they don't focus solely on foster care, and also because they charge some amount of money for the homestudy.
2) County. The quality of your county agency is going to vary. They will have a lot of children to place. Many county agencies pressure parents to switch form adoption to fostering, since they usually have greater need for fostering. County workers are also frequently overworked and have little time for hand-holding or supportive advice. Since county agencies are nominally secular, if you're LGBT or non-Christian, they might be your best bet.
3) Private religious agencies. Again, variable. Some of these have restrictions and practices that horrify me. Otherwise are really about as secular in practice as the county agencies, with slightly better resources.
4) Private secular agencies. These are frequently specialized. There are ones for medically fragile children, for sibling groups, for African-American children, for older children and so on.
A smaller agency might give the matching process more care and attention. On the other hand, if you get stuck with a bad social worker, that makes it harder to switch later on.
Don't be a Jerk in Training
No snorting, eyerolling or loudly arguing with the presenter! Yes, I've seen this. Especially when the topic of spanking comes up. I'm not going to elaborate on this too much, but I feel it deserves an entry.
You need to build up as much goodwill as possible in this stage. Later, when you get aggressive and starting calling your social worker every day to bug them about your homestudy, you will need this store of goodwill. Bring food to the trainings, volunteer to help with training-time childcare, do anything you can to make their difficult job a little bit easier.
Write your Autobiographical Statement Carefully and Stay on Top of Your Homestudy
Our first worker was terrible. The homestudy consisted of large chunks of my own autobiographical statement, woven together with sentences full of misspellings, grammar errors and more serious content errors. I gave it back with edits marked in yellow highlighter and red pen and asked her to fix it. She said she did. I believed her. She didn't, and we only found out about six months later.
The most serious problem is that it said we could parent children with "mild" special needs. It should have said "moderate". If I had to write it over again, I would have written "severe", because I realize that quantified need levels are a bunch of garbage due to massive underreporting and overreporting.
When a child's social worker received our homestudy and saw the word "mild", they would throw it in the trash, because all the children we were submitting for were marked as "moderate".
We only started to see movement once our worker left and another, much better one, took over our case and fixed our homestudy. This time I demanded to read it in order to confirm.
Homestudies are not set in stone, even though your worker will probably act like it. You should demand to read yours and look for serious errors. Social workers are very resistent to changing homestudies, but they will do it if you make a strong enough case. Ideally, if you have a friend or relative who is a social worker and knows a lot about the process, see if you can show them your homestudy.
If your homestudy is bad, and doesn't reflect your family strengths, you should leave and start again somewhere else.
Be Realistic and Be Humble
I'm assuming a somewhat combative relationship with social workers. At the beginning of the process, I believed everything they ever said, and looked up to them greatly. I was disappointed. Ultimately, they're just human beings doing a job. Many of them are very young and inexperienced women who entered the field with idealistic goals that have since started to seem rather far away and futile. The system chews them up and spits them up. They stop caring as much. Some of the ones that stay are amazing, some are terrible, most of them mess up a lot but try to do their best.
I don't think you should trust social workers, but until they prove otherwise, respect them. They know more about the process. If a social worker tells you that have a problem -- attitudinal or otherwise -- listen to them with an open mind.
And realize that although the process is humiliating and difficult, it's nothing compared to what your future child may be going through. This is a chance to experience a tiny portion of what they experience: the fear, shame, guilt and uncertainty. You can back out at any time. They can't.
Matching
Well, I ran out of juice, and time. I'll have to continue this later...
ETA: Here's
the link to Part II. I also corrected the comment link in the beginning.
Foster Care System Perspectives
