How Come ?

In my all things adoption group the question was asked – “If these families are so great, how come kids end up in foster care?” Basically supply chain issues with unfulfilled demand make it necessary to remove children from families ?

The Adoption and Safe Families Act provides federal funds to stage foster care agencies for adoptions out of foster care. In order for children to be adopted out of foster care, there must first be children *in* foster care. In order to obtain this federal funding, the state agency must have more adoptions out of foster care than the previous year, which means the agencies must constantly be increasing the number of children in foster care in order to have them adopted *from* foster care.

There are as many as 100 hopeful adoptive parents waiting for every infant who becomes available, and in order to provide children for those families who are waiting for them, those children must first be removed from their biological families in order to be placed with adoptive families who are waiting to adopt them. Hence, coercion in adoption and foster care. A smaller but still large number of hopeful adopters will fight over a child between the ages of 1-5. After that the ‘demand’ starts to drop off, which is why no one is talking about a shortage in the domestic supply of adoptable teens.

Children are *frequently* removed from families for issues relating to poverty or trauma in the parents, and this is not resolved by taking the children from the parents and forcing the parents to pay into the system that has taken their children from them.

A simplistic way to understand suspicious things going on in the foster care space is often (not always) to look at how different ages of children are treated. Another major question is why children are more likely to be removed from their biological parents than from foster caregivers who are abusive toward those children? Foster carers, social workers, and professionals who work with foster youth are quick to believe a child is lying when it’s about one of them.