Today I would like to continue with my discussion about Listening to Parents, the report and website designed to address the disconnect between parents wanting to adopt children in foster care and the agencies responsible for finding families for those children. Nancy Deren, one of my blog readers, commented on the report. Her experience mirrors the statistics provided by the report; of the ten families who started training with her, she was the only one who had adopted within two years of the training.

One of the underlying and oft-repeated themes in the report was the difficulty inherent in preparing parents for the realities of life with traumatized children, without unnecessarily scaring them away. How can that best be done? The logo for the Attachment & Trauma Network is a running horse and zebra. This link will provide a complete explanation of the origin of that logo.

How does one explain a zebra to a prospective parent whose only frame of reference is a horse? Please understand, this is not about denigrating zebras … only noting that zebras and horses are not the same. When one reads the Listening to Parents report, the prospective adoptive parents complain about the “negativity” of the training, and the agency workers note that the parents don’t hear the realities that are presented. I have seen this so often myself. When I present a workshop, there are generally three types of attendees: the folks who still have only horses as a frame of reference (they often find my words to be “too negative” and may, in fact, leave the workshop) the folks who are starting to realize they might have a zebra (they don’t like my words, but they stay) and the folks who know without a doubt they are living with a zebra (and their heads bob up and down like bobble-head dolls, as they elbow their still-unbelieving spouses and relax with the knowledge that they are not alone.) Some zebras will become very happy and family-friendly, but they still start off as zebras ... will the proper supports be available to those families to aid in this transition?

Consider this quote from the Listening to Parents report:

One of the most common complaints among those people who otherwise expressed satisfaction with their experience is that the agency focuses too much on the challenges they will face parenting children who have been abused or neglected and not enough on the supports available to them and examples of successful adoptions. A second common complaint is that the agency hides information from them. As discussed above, agency workers are reluctant to provide applicants with estimates of how long it may take for them to adopt a child, how often legal-risk placements disrupt, the likelihood that a child will have a significant and long-term problem attaching, etc.

Training
While recognizing the need to present prospective parents with a realistic view of the challenges they will face, applicants expressed a strong need for a more balanced perspective in the training sessions. Bringing adoptive parents into the training curriculum earlier would accomplish this goal, as would talking about support services available for adoptive parents.

What leaps off the page here is … support services available for adoptive parents. This is where I get the most passionate. I am most definitely pro-adoption and would love to see children in permanent placements. But there must be support services for our families after we adopt!!!

I am looking forward to my conversation tomorrow with Jeff Katz, the driving force behind this study. I am passionately enthusiastic about any attempt to reform our child welfare system; however, I have learned the hard way that getting the kids into the home is only the first step ... getting the children healthy while maintaining the mental health of the accepting family is necessary to make this a win/win situation for everyone involved.

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