About Fostering Teens

This comes up frequently in adoptee discussion groups. The concern is the many older children in foster care who would benefit from the stability of being in one single home/family for the duration of their childhood – where the possibility of being returned to their original parents may never exist, for whatever reason that is the case.

That’s a whole different ballgame than adopting healthy infants or toddlers.

Nobody is stealing teens from their families. They’re just harder to place and most child welfare agencies would rather not have to bother doing the work, quite frankly. Teens who’ve been in the system since their younger years are even harder to place because of the continual trauma that being in the system has done/continues to do to them. The best (and possibly only) thing a Foster Parent can do for a teen Foster Youth is give them a safe, supportive place to land until they can be reunited with their parents or other biological family members; or if that isn’t possible, at least support them through to maturity and beyond the Foster Care Emancipation process.

In 2016, over 400,000 children were in Foster Care in these United States.

The Safe Families Act has been implemented in several American states.

There are three pillars of the Safe Families Act, all with the intention of returning children to their parents as soon as possible.

[1] Hosting – parents choose to allow certain approved families to care for their child until the parents are able to again.

[2] Befriending – providing a supportive environment for the parents of children in care. Support meant to return the ability of parents to adequately provide for their children.

[3] Resources/Physical Needs – rehabilitation services, job assistance and counseling. Food and childcare help. Community organizations willing to step in.

Especially because of the Opioid Crisis, the Foster Care System is overwhelmed.

It is heartening to know that there are so many people looking for better ways to ensure the well-being of our nation’s children.

Simone Biles – Kinship Adoption

I am often amazed at who has adoption and/or foster care in their background. Simone Biles spent 3 years in foster care at a young age. Fortunately, her grandfather and his wife made the decision to adopt her when she was six. Biles’ birth mother suffered from drug addiction,. When she was only three years old, her siblings were removed from the mom’s custody along with Simone.

Today, she speaks out as an advocate for other foster youth.

Did you know that in the United States there are nearly 400,000 children and youth in foster care?

Simone Biles views them as 400,000 unrecognized talents waiting to be discovered.

She also notes that only 3% of foster youth ever go on to earn a bachelor’s degree. This is compared to a rate of 30% in the general population. There are academic and emotional challenges that accompany multiple family and school placements over the course of a foster youth childhood.

Although she was young when her foster care ordeal began, she remembers how it felt to be passed off and over-looked. Like nobody knew her or wanted to know her. Like her talents didn’t count, and her voice didn’t matter. Recovering family made her feel like she mattered. Finding a passion, something she loved and was really good at, gave her grace and self-confidence.

Trying To Do Better

Though fraught with its own challenges, Open Adoption is an attempt to do the process better by considering the needs of the adoptee and their original parents with equal compassion to the needs of the adopting couple.

Generally speaking, there will be a higher level of personal interaction among the parties. This interaction may take the form of letters, e-mails, photos, telephone calls and visits.

Some of the pitfalls that may occur include an abuse of the trust that the original parents have placed on the assurances of the adopting couple. Interactions may lead to a variety of disappointments. When the adopting couple has invested in the unborn child, financially and emotionally, the original parents may feel obligated to go through with relinquishing the baby. If the adopting couple changes their mind shortly before or after the birth, it may place the child in a state of limbo and cause a referral to foster care.

In agreeing to an open adoption, the adopting couple may find the original family has greater expectations than they anticipated in agreeing to the situation. Within the extended birth family may be individuals who are not conventionally stable which may even be part of the reason the child was surrendered.

Some of the original justifications of closed adoptions have included fears that having duplicate mothers, fathers, grandparents and other extended family would make it more difficult for the child to assimilate into the new family unit. If contact between the original and adopting families ceases for whatever reason, the adoptee could be left feeling even more rejected than is commonly the experience for adopted children. There can be social complications for the child among their peers.

Identity and family history are the most important reason for open adoptions. Denying the child access to that information violates basic human rights. Adoption will never be the perfect circumstance for any child but trying to do it better does matter.

What Is It About Babies?

The reason there is a business related to adoption is that couples are willing to wait a long time and pay a lot of money to adopt an infant. It is the blank slate idea that Georgia Tann (the baby scandal thief) was fond of utilizing to obtain customers.

After 10 years of marriage, my husband decided he actually wanted to become a father after all. Before that, he was glad that there was no pressure from me because I had been there and done that (I gave birth to a daughter in a previous marriage at age 19). Therefore, when he announced to me over Margaritas at a Mexican restaurant that he had been thinking, I think my mouth dropped open in amazement.

At first, we considered adoption. We weren’t actually thinking about infants. My husband’s uncle had adopted an older boy. We considered the problems that had resulted from that choice. We wanted a child without someone else’s baggage. Ours was not an uncommon perspective. At the time, I really knew nothing about adoption beyond the fact that both of my parents were adoptees.

Ultimately, we did find a way to conceive our two sons that required a lot of medical assistance and thankfully, in our case, it worked. Half of all women who try to conceive in the manner we did – fail. Because my husband waited until he was truly ready and did not have fatherhood forced upon him without intention, he is a wonderful father.

There are lots of older children in foster care who would benefit from a more conventional kind of home situation. Many never receive that and age out of the system without any resources to be independent and self-reliant. There is no profit in taking any older child into one’s home and the attendant complications can be daunting.

The only request adoptees make of hoping to adopt couples is that they first understand the impacts of their own infertility and what it is they seek to do, in taking another woman’s child and raising it as their own. I’ve previously discussed some of the common reforms suggested. [1] Not changing the child’s name or birthdate. [2] Making possible their awareness of and eventual reunion with the people who conceived them as well as any other siblings that exist. Those two are some primary ones.

God Isn’t Breaking Up Families

I am a person of faith in a Divine Order to the Universe. I do believe everything happens for a reason. Even so, that does not absolve us from an evolution into doing “better”.

There are adoptive parents who reassure themselves that God has broken up a family in order for them to have one, when they are unable to do so naturally. Nothing could be further from the truth.

However, there are situations where children are left adrift from the people who caused their birth.

Adoption is intended to provide a healthy and stable environment when contrasted with the foster care system. The idea is to place children so that they can be loved unconditionally and have a family of their own. That last thought is problematic. One needs to define “family”.

Family is defined as a group of people who are closely related to one another (by blood, marriage or adoption); kin; for example, a set of parents and their children; an immediate family. Adoption is therefore one of the avenues for “creating” a family. Even so, an adoptive family is not equivalent to a natural family. This is a reality.

Adoptive parents are never going to be equivalent to natural parents. This is simply a fact and one that anyone contemplating adoption needs to consider. Babies are not the blank slates they have been considered to be throughout decades. They are born with factors inherited from their natural parents already in place and effects from having been in their mother’s womb.

Society needs to do better on a lot of fronts. Family preservation and support for a struggling family is one of those fronts.

Adoption Disruptions

This is a topic I had not previously considered. An adoption disruption is every hopeful adoptive parent’s biggest fear. After all, prospective birth parents can change their mind about adoption at any time until they legally sign their consent — and when that does happen, it can be extremely difficult for the adoptive family that has invested so much hope and energy into the adoption opportunity. While adoption disruptions are not incredibly common, they do happen.

An adoption disruption is sometimes referred to as a “failed adoption.” It’s not surprising to know that older children adopted out of foster care would experience a higher rate of adoption disruption than younger children. Every adoption is unique.

A family whose adoption failed is left trying to piece together a difficult situation. From the perspective of an adoptee there is always some “back” place where they could be sent if the adoptive parents are unhappy with them.

One adoptee discussing this recently shared – “I wasn’t HIS kid. I was her kid and so anything related to me – she had to deal with because he wasn’t interested. As far as he was concerned, I should have been returned to foster care when I was a little kid.” The clincher was that this man was a religious minister.

While there are many causes – legal disruptions, children returned to care, adoptees placed in residential facilities or other out of home situations – it is also potentially caused by a breakdown in the parent child relationship.

Guardianship vs Adoption

Within adoption reform movements, guardianship is seen as a better alternative for the potential adoptee than the formal process of adoption as it has been practiced over decades.

Guardianship preserves the identity of the child and gives the parents an opportunity to make changes and get any help they might need to be in a better position to parent the child.

What is needed is a complete restructuring of the system (and of the public’s understanding of the system) to get people thinking in a new way. For many years, the public has been encouraged to think of foster care=temporary and adoption=permanent.

It has been difficult to get couples to accept guardianship. This alternative means the child doesn’t feel like it’s fully theirs. So many prospective adopters want an “all in” method and to them adoption finalizes the transfer of a child from one parent set to another, making that child “theirs”.

Guardianship may feel as though it puts the hopeful adoptive couple in a worrisome space of fulfilling a “temporary” role. Not what many of them are seeking when they chose to adopt.

Approval

I came across a perception recently that adoptive parents are always hungry for stories coming from adoptees. That what they are really seeking is approval that they are doing the right thing.

As adoptees are speaking up more in these modern times about how adoption has impacted their lives and affected their choices, the people who always had the privileged position in the adoption triad are now questioning their motives (or should be, if they aren’t).

What’s been done cannot be undone and the results are a fact of life. That is the case for all of the adoptees in my own inner family circle.

But caring people should be paying attention because prospective parents could still seek to help a life be more stable by looking to the foster care system and offering a permanent solution for the older youth incarcerated within it.

Society could find it in it’s compassionate heart to be supportive of young women who find themselves pregnant with inadequate resources to parent their child. We could find ways to help them rather than leave them at the mercy of a profit focused business model seeking to effectively sell their babies away from them.

Every person and every action affects the whole collective. It is said that the flutter of a butterfly’s wing can cause a tsunami of good around the world. Adoptees are fluttering their wings these days.

A New Way – Adoption

If I could, this is the “new way” I’d like to see adoption, going forward.

No secrets.

No change to the original birth certificate.

Prospective adoptive parents really should adopt out of the foster care system
and not take young woman’s infant from them.

Always family preservation should be the primary goal. Mothers should be encouraged to keep and raise their babies.

Any adoption that does occur should be centered on the child’s needs.

Lifetime counseling for adoptees should be part of any licensed agency’s business model. Post-adoption issues are real and prevalent.

No intermediaries at reunions.

Do away from the concept of “non-identifying” information. Adoptees have the
right to know the specific details of their origins.

It’s NOT A Rescue Mission

Wendy’s Dave Thomas

I don’t eat fast food and so I wasn’t aware of the huge push for adoption that Wendy’s is a part of. It turns out that the founder, Dave Thomas, was himself an adoptee. To the extent that his foundation seeks to move children out of foster care, I suppose that is somewhat commendable.

Images of waiting children the foundation uses in it’s promotions play into the “rescue the child” attitude so prevalent in adoption marketing. There is a strong emotional pull to pick up this lonely child. Many prospective adoptive parents begin from a “missionary” mindset which is why an adoptive mindset is also prevalent among Christians. They expect the child to be forever grateful and well-behaved – after all the adoptive parents have “saved” a child from squalor.

No adoptee wants to be pitied or made to feel that they are getting a handout or are some kind of charity case. It’s demoralizing.

Adoptive parents often find that the child has complex issues they didn’t expect. They are surprised that the child is often angry or resentful. There are other complicated emotions as well – rejection, abandonment, confusion, fear, isolation . . . the list goes on.

The best advice for anyone who seeks to get involved in such a situation is always respect the child as a full person. Don’t take away their name or identity. Don’t falsify their birth certificate. If there is any opportunity for them to be reunified with their original family, do your best to support and encourage that.