FOSTERING ADOPTION

Fostering Adoption

Fostering Adoption

Four fives decades ago non-traditional families started to merge in our society changing the whole scenario. Today the concept of traditional families and customary living is no longer part of the current system. Adoption is only one in a mix of non-traditional families. Where as others include divorced, step, foster, multi-racial, single, and gay and families headed by grandparents. Adoption has been viewed as a highly successful societal solution for the problems confronting children whose biological parents could not or would not provide for them. In this paper I will discuss the benefits of adoption over foster parenting and also analyze how adoption helps turn the unwanted children of the society into responsible citizens.

What is Foster Care System?

Foster Care is a protective service provided to families experiencing difficulties so severe that children must be removed from their homes for a planned, temporary period of time. Children are removed to insure their physical and emotional safety.

Over 500,000 children in the U.S. currently reside in some form of foster care. Placements in foster care have dramatically increased over the past 10 years. In situations of abuse and neglect, children may be removed from their parents'' home by a child welfare agency and placed in foster care. Other reasons for foster placement include severe behavioral problems in the child and/or a variety of parental problems, such as abandonment, illness (physical or emotional), incarceration, AIDS, alcohol/substance abuse, and death.

A significant number, however, can spend long periods of time in care awaiting adoption or other permanent arrangement. Making decisions about the future for a child in foster care is called 'permanency planning.' Options include:

Returning the child to his/her birth parents;

Termination of parental rights (a formal legal procedure) to be followed, by adoption;

Long-term care with foster parents or relatives

Many kinds of children need foster homes. The need varies from state to state, or province to province. Generally, the greatest needs are foster homes for:

African-American infants

Teenage mothers and their babies

Children with special medical & emotional needs

Adolescents

Brothers and sisters (siblings) who need to stay together

Hispanic children

Babies born with the HIV (AIDS) virus or with cocaine in their system. [In addition, increasing numbers of children who are HIV infected are in foster care. (Michaels, D. & Levine, C., 3456-3461)]

Children who lose their parents to AIDS are another group in need of foster care.

More than 40 percent of children will experience four or five different families during that six year period, so that it's hard to imagine that living in four or five different families in a six year period for a young child can be good for their well being. Children in foster care often struggle with the following issues:

Blaming themselves and feeling guilty about removal from their birth parents

Wishing to return to birth parents even if they were abused by them

Feeling unwanted if awaiting adoption for a long time

Feeling helpless about multiple changes in foster parents over time

Having mixed emotions ...