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Final part in a 4 part series.
Part 1 – Safety
Part 2 – Fostering a child’s well being
Part 3 – Supporting children’s families
This part of the report was both stunning and expected at the same time.
Here’s part of what I expected. About 75% of the kids were at least six years old when they were adopted, and spent almost five years in their adoptive home before finalization. No big shock there. The system is not working the way it’s supposed to.
Less than 33% of the kids could explain the difference between foster care and adoption, and this correlated to what age they entered care, and whether or not they remembered living in their birth home.
For the kids that could distinguish between the two, it was a fairly simple explanation. Foster care means you keep moving from house to house, and adoption is permanent.
When a group of kids ages 9 – 18 were surveyed about staying in their placement and being adopted, 87% of kids said they wanted to stay where they are, but only 44% said they wanted to be adopted, even though they knew they would never return to their birthparents. That shocked me a little bit until I read the reasoning for this decision.
There were four main reasons that the kids wanted to remain “free”:
1) Keep open the possibility of returning to their birth family.
2) Felt they were too old to need another set of parents.
3) Remain foster children in the current foster home.
4) Did not want to be tied down to ANY home.
Attachment issues just screamed at me in that part. Some children felt that if they were adopted, they would lose all ties to their birth family.
Then there’s the issue of the “fantasy” birth parents that we as foster and adoptive parents deal with on a daily basis. 58% of kids expected to live with their birth parents again, and 75% expected that their parents’ situation would have improved when they returned home.
Another prominent theme is that kids wanted to be included in their case planning. Now, this can be a touchy subject. I know I did not take my kids to their case reviews because they were younger, and I didn’t feel that they needed to hear about the failures of their parents. I may have been very wrong in this. The report makes the kids’ opinions very clear. 75% want to be involved in deciding what happens to them, and they want information as to why they were removed for their birth parents home. In our attempts to protect them from further emotional harm, we may be doing more damage to them.
The last point is made in the conclusion of the report. The fact that social workers have so many cases on their work load, and pretty much spend their time handling the crisis of the day, that little attention is paid to the specific needs of the child.
So, how can we use this report to help our kids?
I urge you to read the full report. There is much that I was unable to include, but you may find very important.
You can read the full report by Adair Fox and Jill Duerr Berrick. “A Response to No One Ever Asked Us: A Review of Children’s Experiences in Out-Of-Home Care”.
