I was reading the May/June 2007 issue of Fostering Families Today magazine over breakfast this morning. Yes, I know I need a life.

I dog eared more pages than I normally do, but there is one section that really stuck out to me, and I’m sure it’s one you can relate to. It’s very simply titled “Thoughts on the Child Welfare System.” It asked several different people 3 key questions:

If there is on thing you could change about the current child welfare system, what would it be and why?

Identify one outstanding practice or element within the current child welfare system and why you think it’s outstanding.

What keeps you involved in the child welfare system and why?

These questions are easy and difficult all in one. The first question I could write a novel on. There are so many things wrong with the system as it is. I’ll stay off my soap box, and tell you what the contributors had to say.

First let me tell you about the contributors. There are a variety of backgrounds. We have a couple of child advocates, a couple of foster/adoptive parents, several foster parents, a family liaison, and a former foster child who is a current foster parent.

The answers to question number one were only slightly varied. There was compassion, confidentiality, and teaching relationships, and one answer of something that my husband and I have discussed at length, that all social workers should have to be a foster parent prior to actually working in the field, but the overwhelming majority of the answers focused on permanency. These people agreed that kids flounder in the system way too long waiting for their opportunity to be adopted.

The Adoption and Safe Families Act of 1997 was enacted to cover various issues in foster care and adoption but one of the big ones was to cut down the amount of time that kids spent in foster care.

Here is the exact wording:

Under the new law, states must file a petition to terminate parental rights and concurrently, identify, recruit, process and approve a qualified adoptive family on behalf of any child, regardless of age, that has been in foster care for 15 out of the most recent 22 months. A child would be considered as having entered foster care on the earlier of either the date of the first judicial finding of abuse or neglect, or 60 days after the child is removed from the home.

Sorry gang, this just isn’t happening. I’ve had 4 kids in my house and 2 of them took four years or more to have the parental rights terminated. Mackenzie never lived with either of her birth parents for a single day, and it still took four years for the TPR to happen. Kory was removed from his birthmother when he was about 3 years old, never returned home and still was not freed for adoption until he was almost 8.

In the same issue of the Fostering Families Today magazine was a short blurb about a recent study called “Adoption Dynamics and the Adoption and Safe Families Act”. The study “did not find any significant indication that the amount of time a child spent in foster care prior to be adopted decreased…”

I don’t have the answers, but I do know what we have now isn’t working, and obviously many people agree. Kids need and deserve permanency. Does anyone have the answers?

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