Today is Sammy’s fifteenth birthday. A far cry from the little five year old boy I brought home just over nine years ago. At that point I never imagined I would have a child in a residential treatment center, and actually, had never even heard of them.

While talking with my father-in-law last weekend, we were talking about Sammy’s upcoming birthday and his impending adulthood. He asked me what was going to happen in three years when Sammy became a legal adult and was no longer in a residential center. In no way will he be ready for the real world.

I have been thinking about this for at least a year now, when I came to the realization that the chances of Sammy ever being a full time member of our household again fall somewhere between slim and none. Our plan is to take the money that we had invested for college and use that to set Sammy up in his own apartment, help him with his bills and do job training at that time. If I were a hoping person, I’d hope that he could attend community college or something similar at that time, but it’s probably fairly unrealistic.

There are many parents who face these same realizations and decisions on a regular basis. Most court orders and state assistance ends when a child turns eighteen, because the child is legally an adult at that point, but many cannot sustain themselves and in cases like ours, the child cannot succeed in a home and family setting. It doesn’t leave a family many choices.

In some cases assistance can extend until age nineteen or twenty-one, but those are the minority. In order to accomplish this, it usually involves going to court and getting an extension. In some cases exceptions are written into court orders, such as if the child is still in school at the age of eighteen. Our court order has the wording that Sammy may remain in a residential placement until he’s nineteen if he’s still in school. Sammy is bright enough to graduate by then, but given his less than stellar performance for the majority of his freshman year in high school, it is highly likely that he will take five years to graduate, if he graduates at all.

My dreams for my brown eyed little boy have changed drastically, but he is still my son and I thank his birthmother for choosing to give him life. He can be a great man if he gives himself the chance.



Photo credit - Kelly L. Killian