Candace

Talmadge

Read Candace's bio and previous columns

February 13, 2009

Make Adopting Older Kids Less of an Ordeal

God must have a truly strange sense of humor. Via the marvels of in-vitro fertilization, an unemployed, divorced woman can have 14 children, yet a couple I know cannot find even one U.S. child to adopt.

As usual, our priorities are backward. We celebrate complex, costly technology to promote fertility even to notorious Nadya Suleman’s procreative extreme. Yet potential parents who want to provide a loving, stable home for kids who desperately need one face adoption hurdles so arduous and time-consuming that a third of them bail out empty-handed.

This depressing statistic comes from a 2007 report to Congress about problems and successes uncovered in a nationwide study of couples and singles seeking to adopt children in foster care. The four-year project found that 34 percent of those who began the process of adopting a child through the welfare system gave up before succeeding. The report also notes that the further they moved along the process, the more would-be adoptive parents regarded “adoption process logistics” as a significant barrier to their goal of adopting.

Wandering through the older-child adoption wilderness right now are Carol and Ted (names changed for privacy), both 42. They have been married since 1994, and tried to have children the old-fashioned way but gave up after four miscarriages. They entered the adoption maze in May 2008, completed their home study and training requirements, and since then have searched in vain for a child aged four or older.

They (and other) would-be adoptive parents have been aided considerably by a national web site established to encourage adoptions from foster care (www.adoptuskids.org). The technology has its limitations, however. “By the time they (kids) get on the web site, they have been in the system for a long time,” Carol says.

That so-called child welfare system seems designed to inflict the maximum possible amount of pain on children in state custody before freeing them to be adopted. Laws that remain fixated on the rights of parents at the expense of offspring are a good part of the problem. It takes far too long to terminate parental rights, especially if the parents fight to retain custody.

And while they’re in legal limbo, abused and/or neglected youngsters bounce from one foster placement to another, racking up ever more emotional scars over months and years. “I don’t think parents should get a lot of second chances,” Carol says. “By the time CPS (child welfare) is called in, these kids have been materially damaged.”

Amen to that. In addition, child welfare workers are usually reluctant to place children more than 50 miles away from where they live, making out-of-state adoptions that much more dicey. They put this limit in place to keep adopted children near other siblings and/or grandparents, and even their biological parents if there is no criminal behavior involved, Carol explains. They also don’t want to move children if they are doing well in school.

“The goal is always reconciliation and keeping families together,” she says.

These are valid points, but Carol and Ted are willing to help their adopted child/children maintain contacts with siblings and other family members. In the age of Internet-based social networking and dirt-cheap long-distance phone rates, keeping in touch is not as difficult as it has been in the past and should no longer be a valid excuse to rule out long-distance adoptive situations.

Carol’s biggest fear now is that their wait will be so long that she and her husband will be ruled out as too old before they are able find a child to adopt. This is another attitude in the system that has to evolve if we are ever going to find homes for the thousands of children who deserve them.

Would-be parents of older children in welfare not only face major obstacles in trying to adopt, they also often face enormous challenges when they succeed. The next column will look at some of these issues.

© 2009 North Star Writers Group. May not be republished without permission.

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