foster care and adoption in 21 st century child welfare practice the american adoption congress:...

Foster Care and Adoptionin 21st Century Child Welfare Practice

The American Adoption Congress:

Take the Freedom Trail to Truth in Adoption

Wakefield, MAMarch 9, 2007

Major Changes in Foster Care in Last Ten Years

Signing of Adoption and Safe Families Legislation, 1997

Creation of Child & Family Service Review System in States, 2001

Movement Toward Dual Licensure, 1998

Signing of Chaffee Legislation, 1999

Focus on Permanency for Older Youth, 2002

Some Statistics About Youth In Foster Care

AFCARS (Adoption and Foster Care Analysis and Reporting System) data, as of September, 2005, indicates that there are:

513,000 children and youth in foster care youth ages 11 years and up accounting

for forty nine percent (n=220,564)

Race/Ethnicity

Nationally, 56% of the children and youth in care are children and youth of color:

32% African American; 18% Latino; Indian Children in many states are over-represented as well, especially in South Dakota where 3% of the population identify as Indian and 63% of the children and youth in the foster care systems are of Indian ancestry.

Permanency Planning Goals

Reunification – 51%

Adoption – 20%

Relative care – 4%

Despite the fact that it was stricken from the ASFA statue, 7% (n= 37,628) of these children and youth had a goal of Long Term Foster Care.

6% or 31,928 youth had a goal of emancipation.

Children And Youth Waiting to Be Adopted

On September 30, 2005, 114,000 were waiting to be adopted. Waiting children and youth are identified as those who have a goal of adoption and/or whose parental rights have been terminated.

Who Adopted These Young People?

During FY 2005, 51,000 children or youth were adopted from the public foster care system. 89% will receive an adoption subsidy.

60% of young people were adopted by a foster parent

25% were adopted by relatives 15% were adopted by non-relatives.

Who Adopted These Young People?

60% of young people were adopted by a foster parent

What is the family structure of the child’s adoptive family?

Married Couple - 68% (34,898) Unmarried Couples - 2% (797) Single Females - 27% (13,822) Single Males - 3% (1,483)

What is the family structure of the child’s adoptive family?

What about lesbian and gay headed families?

An area of untapped resource

Defining Permanency

Permanency planning involves a mix of:

family-centered

youth-focused

culturally relevant philosophies, program components and practice strategies.

Family Centered Casework and Legal Strategies Which Support Permanency

Targeted and appropriate efforts to ensured safety, achieve permanence, and strengthen family and youth well-being.

Reasonable efforts to prevent unnecessary placement in out-of-home care when safety can be assured.


Appropriate, least restrictive out-of-home placements within family, culture and community - with comprehensive family and youth assessments, written case plans, goal-oriented practice and concurrent permanency plans encouraged.

Reasonable efforts to reunify families and maintain family connections and continuity in young people’s relationships when safety can be assured.


Filing of termination of the parental rights petition at 15 months out of the last 22 months in placement - when in best interests of the youth and when exceptions do not apply.

Collaborative case activity - partnerships among birth parents, foster parents, adoptive parents, the youth, agency staff, court and legal staff, and community service providers.


Frequent and high quality parent-child visiting.

Timely case reviews, permanency hearings and decision-making about where youth will grow up - based on the young person’s sense of time – non-adversarial approaches.

Essential Family Centered Practice Elements to this Process

Everyone deserves to be heard

Everyone deserves respect

Everyone has strengths

Judgment can wait

Partnership is a process

Partnership means sharing power

Permanency for YouthThey’re always talking about this Permanency stuff. You know social workers. . .lawyers . . . always using these big social work terms to talk about simple things. One day one of them finally described what she meant by permanency.

After I listened to her description, which was the first time anyone ever told me what the term meant, I said, “Oh, that’s what you mean? Yeah, I want permanency in my life. I don’t think I ever had that! When can I get it?”

Foster care youth

Permanency for Youth

Permanency flies in the face of typical adolescent development.

I want to be on my own!

I want my own crib!

I don’t want nobody telling me what to do!

I don’t want a family!

Permanency for Youth

But . . . every youth needs life time connections with someone, not just for their childhood, but for their entire life!

Principles of Youth Permanency

Seven key foundational principles:

1. Recognize that every young person is entitled to a permanent family relationship.


2. Permanency can be driven by the young people themselves, in full partnership with their families and the agency in all decision-making and planning for their futures, recognizing that young people are the best source of information about their own strengths and needs.


3. Acknowledge that permanence includes: a stable, healthy and lasting living situation within the context of a family relationship with at least one committed adult; reliable, continuous and healthy connections with siblings, birth parents, extended family and a network of other significant adults; and education and/or employment, life skills, supports and services.


4. Begin at first placement.


5. Honor the cultural, racial, ethnic, linguistic, and religious/spiritual backgrounds of young people and their families and respect differences in sexual orientation.


6. Recognize and build upon the strengths and resilience of young people, their parents, their families, and other significant adults.


7. Ensure that services and supports are provided in ways that are fair, responsive, and accountable to young people and their families, and do not stigmatize them, their families or their caregivers.

Pathways to Permanency for Youth

Youth are reunified safely with their parents or relatives

Youth are adopted by relatives or other families

Youth permanently reside with relatives or other families as legal guardians

Youth are connected to permanent resources via fictive kinship or customary adoption networks

Youth are safely placed in another planned alternative permanent living arrangement which is closely reviewed for appropriateness every six months

I Always Thought I Was Adoptable . .

I always thought that I was adoptable even though I was 16 years old, but my social worker kept saying I was too old every time I asked him about it. I worked after-school at this hardware store and the guy who owned it was so kind to me. He was such a good guy and I always talked to him. I never really told him I was in foster care, but one day when we got to talking, he started to ask me a lot of questions about my family and then about life in foster care. I invited him to my case conference because my social worker said I could invite anyone who I wanted to, and at that point he asked about adoption. I was shocked at first, but it made sense. We finalized my adoption three months ago. That day was the happiest day of my life.

- Former foster youth

Adoption of Adolescents

Adoption, has become the permanency goal for a growing number of children and youth in care since the enactment of ASFA

Adoption is considered the preferred permanency option, when youth cannot be safely reunited with their families.

Adoption of Adolescents Reconceptualization of adoption for older

youth will require expanded permanent options that meet the youth’s need for lifelong, meaningful relationships.

Open adoption, shared parenting, and practices which permit the adopted youth to maintain contact with their birth family members are contemporary approaches which support permanency and may be useful for practitioners to consider in exploring the array of permanency options for youth.

Adoption of Older Adolescents ASFA explicitly rejects the notion that there

is an “age limit” for adoption or that adolescents are “too old” to be adopted. Adoption is a viable option for adolescents, who have a critical role to play in identifying their own potential adoptive resources.

Too often, it is the misplaced fear that adoption will lead to the severing of their emotional ties with members of their birth families that leads some adolescents to reject the idea of adoption for themselves. Adolescents, along with child care staff, caseworkers, mental health professionals and others, need help to understand that the nature of adoption has undergone a radical transformation over the past several decades.

Adoption of Older Adolescents

The participation of adolescents in planning for their own adoption is critical. Adolescents need to be actively involved in identifying past and present connections that can be explored as potential adoptive resources.

Young people 18 and older should be informed by their caseworker that they can consent to their own adoption and that there is no need for legal proceedings to terminate their parents’ parental rights.

Leadership in Promoting an Adoption Positive Approach

It is incumbent upon adults who have a relationship with the young person to help them to consider the option of lifetime connections by helping to reframe the initial “NO!” into a “YES” or “I’ll Think About it” response.

It may initially help the young person to review their past connections and experiences to help put their thoughts and feelings into context.

Leadership in Promoting an Adoption Positive Approach

Helping youth to play an active role in their own planning and assisting them in developing a promising pathway to permanency that will be lifelong and sustaining can be a challenge, but it is not an unattainable goal.

Helping youth to consider permanency and lifetime connectedness only becomes possible when adults who work with young people are committed to facilitating the identification of connections in their lives.

Changing the Initial “NO” to “Yes”

Exploring the permanency option of adoption is a process, not a one time event.

“I don’t want to give up past connections” “I don’t want to lose contact with my family” “I don’t want to lose contact with important people” “I will have to change my name” “No one will want me” “I am too destructive for a family” “Families are for little kids” “I don’t want to betray my birth family” “Mom said she would come back” “I want to make my own decisions” “I’ll just mess up again” “I don’t want to risk losing anyone else”

How to Approach Adoption with Adolescents?

What do you say instead of accepting NO

Who are the three people in your life with whom you have had the best relationship?

Would it help to review where you have lived in the past to help you recall important adults in your life?

To whom have you felt connected to in the past?

Who from the past or present that you want to stay connected to? How? Why?

How are you feeling about this process? What memories, fears, and anxieties is it stirring up?

What do you say instead of accepting NO?

Who cared for you when your parents could not? Who paid attention to you, looked out for you, cared about what happened to you?

With whom have you shared holidays and/or special occasions?

Who do you like? feel good about? enjoy being with? Admire? look up to? want to be like someday?

Who believes in you? stands by you? compliments or praises you? appreciates you?

Who can you count on? Who would you call at 2 am if you were in trouble? Wanted to share good news? Bad news?

What Else Can You Do?

Carefully Review the Case Record

Review the youth’s entire case record in search of anyone who has done anything that could be construed as an expression of concern for the youth, including former foster parents, former neighbors or parents of friends, members of their extended families (aunts, uncles, cousins, older siblings), teachers, coaches, guidance counselors, group home staff, or independent living staff. Given that some youth have been in care for prolonged periods of time, case records can have many volumes – the entire record – all volumes should be explored in an effort to uncover clues about possible connections both past and present. Third party reviewers can be helpful in the process of uncovering these possible connections as case workers who have been assigned the case may inadvertently miss connections that may be more visible to as fresh eye.

Work With Youth to Identify Important Adults in their Life

Work with the youth to identify caring, committed adults with whom the youth would like to establish a connection or re-establish a former connection. Youth should be asked who they feel most comfortable with, who they trust (or with whom they might like to build a trusting relationship) and who they feel they have formed bonds to, such as former foster parents, former neighbors, parents of close friends, members of their extended family, group home staff, cafeteria workers, maintenance staff, administrators, teachers, coaches, and work colleagues.

Carefully Look at Foster Parents and Others Known to the Youth

Interview the young person’s current and former foster parents, as well as group home staff and child care staff to determine who the youth currently has connections to: who does the young person get telephone calls from? Who has the young person had a special relationship with in the past? Who visits the young person and whom does the young person visit? Has the young person formed a bond with any group home or child care staff that might turn into a permanent connection?

Unpack the “NO”

Discuss sensitively with the youth where they might like to belong and to address the strong feelings that might underlie a statement by a young person that he or she does not want to be adopted. A concurrent adoption plan must include plans to help the young person “unpack the ‘No’” and to find out what underlies their reluctance to consider adoption.

Provide Information About Adoption to Youth and Family

Engage the youth, his or her parents (if the youth is not currently freed for adoption) and foster parents or prospective adoptive parents in a discussion about shared parenting and ongoing contacts with members of the youth’s birth family after the adoption. Youth and parents need help understanding that although a termination of parental rights ends the rights of the birth parents to petition the court for visits or other contacts with their child, a TPR does not prevent the young person from visiting or contacting members of his or her birth family.

Keep Searching for Permanent Connections

Identify permanency leads if a record review and interviews with the youth and staff do not yield possible permanent connections.

Consider mentoring relationships

Prepare Families Who Wish to Adopt an Adolescent

Help prepare prospective adoptive parents to understand the commitment they are making when they undertake to provide a permanent home for an adolescent.

Provide On-Going Support

Post-permanency services must be put in place to support the adoptive placement

Promoting Life Time Connections

What would it take to maintain a life long relationship with this youth?

Be a mentor, be a visiting resource, be a friend . . . .

Involving Youth in Permanency Efforts

Youth must be involved in the process and must have input

Many youth do want to be adopted, even if they initially say no

Youth need to be involved in recruitment efforts

Youth need to be able to identify persons with whom they feel they have connections

Youth need to work with professionals who understand them and enjoy working with them

In Summary...

Believe that permanency for this teen is possible!

Don’t take “No” for an answer Be ready to identify a permanent

life time connection for every young person, one young person at a time

Be Youth-Focused! Take The Risk!

SOUL OF A SONG

When a woman in a certain African tribe knows she is pregnant, she goes out into the wilderness with a few friends and together they pray and meditate until they hear the song of the child. They recognize that every soul has its own vibration that expresses its unique flavor and purpose. When the women attune to the song, they sing it out loud. Then they return to the tribe and teach it to everyone else.

SOUL OF A SONG When the child is born, the community gathers and sings the child’s song to him or her. Later, when the child enters education, the village gathers and chants the child’s song. When the child passes through the initiation to adulthood, the people again come together and sing. At the time of marriage, the person hears his or her song.

Finally, when the soul is about to pass from the world, the family and friends gather at the person’s bed, just as they did at their birth, and they sing the person to the next life.

SOUL OF A SONGIn the African tribe there is one other occasion upon which the villagers sing to the child. If at any time during his or her life, the person commits a crime or aberrant social act, the individual is called to the center of the village and the people in the community form a circle around them. Then they sing their song to them.

The tribe recognizes that the correction for antisocial behavior is not punishment; it is love and the remembrance of identity. When you recognize your own song, you have no desire or need to do anything that would hurt another.

SOUL OF A SONG A friend is someone who knows your song and sings it to you when you have forgotten it. Those who love you are not fooled by mistakes you have made or dark images you hold about yourself. They remember your beauty when you feel ugly; your wholeness when you are broken; your innocence when you feel guilty; and your purpose when you are confused.

SOUL OF A SONG You may not have grown up in an African tribe that sings your song to you at crucial life transitions, but life is always reminding you when you are in tune with yourself and when you are not. When you feel good, what you are doing matches your song, and when you feel awful, it doesn’t. You may feel a little warble at the moment, but so have all the great singers. Just keep singing and you’ll find your way home.”

Gerald P. Mallon, DSW, Exec. DirectorThe National Resource Center for Family

Centered Practice and Permanency Planning

Hunter College School of Social WorkA Service of the Children’s Bureau/ACF\DHHS

129 East 79th StreetNew York, New York 10021

(212) 452-7043 – Direct Line (212) 452-7475 - Fax

[email protected]

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