Reactive Attachment Disorder, RAD Blog

01/28/08

Listening to Parents

Posted by : Nancy Spoolstra in Reactive Attachment Disorder Blog at 11:25 am , 418 words, 465 views
Categories: The System

I spent the weekend reading Andrew Bridge’s book, Hope’s Boy, while hanging out in the crash area at Beth’s 3-day swim meet. (She had a great meet, by the way!) I will be blogging my review of Andrew’s book later this week, and I will hopefully include excerpts from my phone conversation with him, scheduled for a couple of days from now. It’s a great book and raised some interesting questions for me. I am anxious to hear Andrew’s responses.

Flooding my inbox from various listserves and newsletters that I regularly receive is this Special Announcement.

Dear Adoptive Parent Group Leader:

I am delighted to announce "Listening to Parents", a project designed to give voice to adoptive parents, and those seeking to adopt children from foster care.

The goal of this effort is increase the number of children being adopted from foster care by making child welfare agencies more responsive to those interested in adopting a child from foster care.

SPONSOR

Many well-known agencies and/or professionals have responded positively to this organization, including AdoptUSKids, NACAC, Evan B. Donaldson Adoption Institute, Adoption Quarterly, and Wendy’s Wonderful Kids.

This organization grew from the comments and complaints by parents across the country that local social workers and child and family service organizations were unresponsive to parents’ efforts to adopt from the foster care system. More emphasis was placed on screening than on recruitment.

Of course, I read about this movement and have a myriad of responses. I have heard similar complaints from many parents. I know many foster parents who faced unbelievable hurdles in adopting their children. I have stated repeatedly that the system as it stands now is very parent-unfriendly. But I would also like to know how the pre-adoption preparation and training piece, as well as the post-adoption support and services piece, is going to be included in this program. I am totally supportive of getting kids out of foster care and into families, and I completely agree that “family” can mean all kinds of things. One caring, committed person to forever claim a child as his or her own beats the heck out of languishing in foster care. But to make that placement work--to get the forever part--the overhaul of the system can’t stop at getting the kids out of foster care and into adoptive homes. Frankly, the work is just beginning at that point …

Check out the Listening to Parents website and tell me what you think!

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1 comment

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Comment from: nancyderen [Member]

After reading the full report that led to the Listening to Parents program, it sounds like training and support are major components. If the project actually addresses the issues raised in the report, it may really help with both the recruitment and with making sure parents know what they are in for. They suggested things like a buddy system where a prospective adoptive parent is paired with an experienced adoptive parent to be mentored. They also suggest beginning training immediately, rather than screen first and train later. That's exactly how it was done at the agency I adopted through, and I think it makes a lot of sense. Why not start training right away? You waste more of the worker's time doing all the fingerprinting and homestudy stuff right away when so many people drop out, and when training happens right at the start, people often screen themselves out when it's not right for them. My training group started with 10 of us. It ended with 6. Of the 6, I was the only one who adopted a child within two years of the training- none of the others were pursuing it at that time. I was told this was typical of the training groups. I think people may be more open to really hearing the negatives early on in the process, whereas once they invest so much time in jumping through hoops being screened, it is hard for them to let go of their investment in the process and admit it's not right for their family. On the other hand, many people who would be great parents get tired of jumping through hoops and don't even make it to training.

Permalink 01/28/08 @ 18:58