Wednesday, April 7, 2010
Thursday, February 12, 2009
The Search Begins
Warning: Venting Ahead
Adoption from foster care....it seems like it wouldn't be so hard because there are so many waiting children right? I mean I heard it was hard but I thought the hard part was the court and legal struggles..Even my adoption savvy self went into this expecting to get the training done, home study done, and then there would be children needing homes ready to be placed with a family like us. Boy was I wrong .Or am I?
Having done an international adoption first I guess I just took for granted that there is a system of steps to follow to bring home children in need. I'm learning the hard way that our foster "adoption" system is VERY broken. There are so many families out here waiting to adopt and there is no effective way to link us to the children...there is no real system. There are so many branches dealing with child services that no one seems to have a clue how to connect it all. Social workers are over run with far more urgent cases than they can handle which leaves no time to move waiting children into adoptive homes or god forbid read home studies. There are state DSS offices who actually place children, but a whole other agency does the training and approval for adoptive families and then there is no way to link the two. They throw your home study in the pool of other waiting families on a registry and it pretty much just sits there hoping to get noticed.
Then there are families like us who are not content to wait so we take the searching upon ourselves. We are told to locate children online though websites like adoptuskids.org or other national registries. The thing with these websites though is that for the most part, only the most difficult children to place ever make it to the site. Most children get adopted through a networking game of who knows who or...oh yea I saw this home study somewhere long ago...now where was that? This is of no fault to social workers...they have their hands so full that there is no other option but for this to be the reality. It's just sad that children get lost in the system until they are at an age where their pool of adoptive parents is much smaller all because there is no one to link families to children.
John and I have located quiet a large handful of children who actually were lucky enough to be listed on some of the few websites that are proactive in trying to link children to parents. We have submitted our home study for many of them only to find out that we were one of 60 sometimes even 100 families who submitted their home study. That is such great news for the kids who get listed because that means they are for certain going to find a family. But for the huge pool of adoptive parents who are waiting its heart breaking to loose out over and over again on children that you fall in love with online.
It's hard not to become consumed with the search because you know that you've got to be one of the first ones to see the kids listed to actually get your info submitted. On Friday of last week two amazing Hispanic siblings were listed by NC. We called and had our info faxed right away. Their intake department took a few hours to process it on Monday morning but by noon their social worker cut off intake of home studies because she already had over 80 already. Ours did not get in.
In Oregon we located a little girl who knocked our socks off. She was 1/2 Guatemalan which would be a dream come true for us. It took us over a week to get our home study submitted because the social workers inbox, fax line, and voice mail was so over run with interested families we could not get through. Now we wait, but usually the social workers only contact the family that is selected maybe a week from now or two months down the line when he gets to it. So that means we have to wait that long hoping to hear something when in all reality our chances of doing so are very slim.
Meanwhile...there are thousands of children whose info is stuck in a file somewhere because their case workers have no time to list them or advocate for them. Or even worse, the social workers forget to set court dates for children to have parental rights terminated so children can more towards adoption instead of lingering in foster care or being bounced around from relative to relative.
How can we fix this system? There has to be a better way to protect America's kids than this. I plan to get involved in reform once we've added another child into our home successfully. For now, I'll just keep complaining about the system and searching for our child. I'm not going down with out a fight and I'll pester every social worker I can find contact info for until someone finally say. Lord , God give this woman a child so she will leave me alone!
Adoption from foster care....it seems like it wouldn't be so hard because there are so many waiting children right? I mean I heard it was hard but I thought the hard part was the court and legal struggles..Even my adoption savvy self went into this expecting to get the training done, home study done, and then there would be children needing homes ready to be placed with a family like us. Boy was I wrong .Or am I?
Having done an international adoption first I guess I just took for granted that there is a system of steps to follow to bring home children in need. I'm learning the hard way that our foster "adoption" system is VERY broken. There are so many families out here waiting to adopt and there is no effective way to link us to the children...there is no real system. There are so many branches dealing with child services that no one seems to have a clue how to connect it all. Social workers are over run with far more urgent cases than they can handle which leaves no time to move waiting children into adoptive homes or god forbid read home studies. There are state DSS offices who actually place children, but a whole other agency does the training and approval for adoptive families and then there is no way to link the two. They throw your home study in the pool of other waiting families on a registry and it pretty much just sits there hoping to get noticed.
Then there are families like us who are not content to wait so we take the searching upon ourselves. We are told to locate children online though websites like adoptuskids.org or other national registries. The thing with these websites though is that for the most part, only the most difficult children to place ever make it to the site. Most children get adopted through a networking game of who knows who or...oh yea I saw this home study somewhere long ago...now where was that? This is of no fault to social workers...they have their hands so full that there is no other option but for this to be the reality. It's just sad that children get lost in the system until they are at an age where their pool of adoptive parents is much smaller all because there is no one to link families to children.
John and I have located quiet a large handful of children who actually were lucky enough to be listed on some of the few websites that are proactive in trying to link children to parents. We have submitted our home study for many of them only to find out that we were one of 60 sometimes even 100 families who submitted their home study. That is such great news for the kids who get listed because that means they are for certain going to find a family. But for the huge pool of adoptive parents who are waiting its heart breaking to loose out over and over again on children that you fall in love with online.
It's hard not to become consumed with the search because you know that you've got to be one of the first ones to see the kids listed to actually get your info submitted. On Friday of last week two amazing Hispanic siblings were listed by NC. We called and had our info faxed right away. Their intake department took a few hours to process it on Monday morning but by noon their social worker cut off intake of home studies because she already had over 80 already. Ours did not get in.
In Oregon we located a little girl who knocked our socks off. She was 1/2 Guatemalan which would be a dream come true for us. It took us over a week to get our home study submitted because the social workers inbox, fax line, and voice mail was so over run with interested families we could not get through. Now we wait, but usually the social workers only contact the family that is selected maybe a week from now or two months down the line when he gets to it. So that means we have to wait that long hoping to hear something when in all reality our chances of doing so are very slim.
Meanwhile...there are thousands of children whose info is stuck in a file somewhere because their case workers have no time to list them or advocate for them. Or even worse, the social workers forget to set court dates for children to have parental rights terminated so children can more towards adoption instead of lingering in foster care or being bounced around from relative to relative.
How can we fix this system? There has to be a better way to protect America's kids than this. I plan to get involved in reform once we've added another child into our home successfully. For now, I'll just keep complaining about the system and searching for our child. I'm not going down with out a fight and I'll pester every social worker I can find contact info for until someone finally say. Lord , God give this woman a child so she will leave me alone!
Sunday, December 21, 2008
Here We Go Again
It only took me 3 years to forget enough about how hard adoption is to make me ready to start down this road again. Everything worth having comes at a price, and I know that the child that is out there waiting for us will bless us immensely and it will be totally worth all the heartache. The adoption journey has many highs along the way but I'm also trying to prepare for the lows we will face as well.
Deciding where to adopt from was a very hard process for me. We really want to go back to Guatemala after seeing the conditions there and all the suffering children. Their program is still closed though and even if it were not there is the expense hurdle that I'm not sure we could jump again. Then we started thinking...there are children here who need homes too so why not us?
After much thought and discussion we decided that we are going to adopt from the US foster care system this time. I've been against this idea for a long time because of all the risk involved, (or so I thought anyway) but I learned that we can be strictly adoptive parents and not have to foster so the risk of a child be taken away once placed with us is very very low. However, the process with this adoption is TOTALLY different from Isabella's adoption and I 've had a lot to learn so far.
So where to begin?? John and I did 8 weeks of training for 3.5 hours a night once a week. That is in addition to 2 all day Saturday trainings and all of the training we already had from the first adoption. We trained through Lutheran Family Services and I'm so thankful for the staff there. They have been amazing so far and when John and I graduated that class we felt like we can handle anything that comes our way. They guided us through the moutain of papework, though it was a considerably smaller mountain than the international process. We have a great home study case worker too and she made the home study process very comfortable for us. We found out on Friday that our home study has been signed off and we are officially beginning the matching stage. So now my adoption obesessed side kick in. It's like this switch inside you turns on and you are on a mission to find your child and nothing will stop you until you get there kind of feeling. Thank God, I have Isabella this time around, I know that meeting her needs will help keep me more balanced and not so obsessed :-)
The hardest thing about this adoption for me so far is that there is even less control than there was with the international adoption. We're being judged more in a "we will have to turn you down", kind of way. They're not usually turning you down because you're not a good enough parent...it's usually something very simple that makes that child not a good match for you, but still you get that feeling you're being judged and it's hard to remember not to take it personal. I imagine it will be espeically hard when we really feel a connection to that child but the caseworkers think otherwise. It's really hard not knowing what to expect. Even with all the uncertainty of international adoption we did know that once we fell in love with our referral that that child was %95 ours. We also had a clear outline of all the steps needing to be done so I could track our progress.
With this adoption, we have no timeline at all as to when things "should" be done. Our agency will start sending us profiles of children that match our criteria. If we like a certain child we can submit our home study to that child's caseworker, who then has an unlimited amount of time to collect other home studies to compare and then she chooses which family she thinks is best for that child. That means we could be turned down many many times before we actually have a child placed with us. It seems absurd when you consider how many waiting children are stuck in the foster care system, but that's how things work. If a caseworker likes us, then we will meet with the child and their care team a few times for many rounds of interviews, and then finally a transition plan will be made based upon our childs age and needs.
John and I are hoping for a child near Isabella's age, but we are trying to keep our minds and hearts open to whatever God brings us. He knew the plan when we thought we wanted a boy during our first adoption so I'm sure he will surprise us again. It is very hard to look at a childn's profile and know that they need a family and be able to say this is not the one for us. All children deserve a home and a family, but we have to remember we can't save them all. Until God's plan is revealed, we will continue to consider all the profiles of children we are given, until we find that one special child he has intended for us. I will keep you updated during this "Journey to ???".
Deciding where to adopt from was a very hard process for me. We really want to go back to Guatemala after seeing the conditions there and all the suffering children. Their program is still closed though and even if it were not there is the expense hurdle that I'm not sure we could jump again. Then we started thinking...there are children here who need homes too so why not us?
After much thought and discussion we decided that we are going to adopt from the US foster care system this time. I've been against this idea for a long time because of all the risk involved, (or so I thought anyway) but I learned that we can be strictly adoptive parents and not have to foster so the risk of a child be taken away once placed with us is very very low. However, the process with this adoption is TOTALLY different from Isabella's adoption and I 've had a lot to learn so far.
So where to begin?? John and I did 8 weeks of training for 3.5 hours a night once a week. That is in addition to 2 all day Saturday trainings and all of the training we already had from the first adoption. We trained through Lutheran Family Services and I'm so thankful for the staff there. They have been amazing so far and when John and I graduated that class we felt like we can handle anything that comes our way. They guided us through the moutain of papework, though it was a considerably smaller mountain than the international process. We have a great home study case worker too and she made the home study process very comfortable for us. We found out on Friday that our home study has been signed off and we are officially beginning the matching stage. So now my adoption obesessed side kick in. It's like this switch inside you turns on and you are on a mission to find your child and nothing will stop you until you get there kind of feeling. Thank God, I have Isabella this time around, I know that meeting her needs will help keep me more balanced and not so obsessed :-)
The hardest thing about this adoption for me so far is that there is even less control than there was with the international adoption. We're being judged more in a "we will have to turn you down", kind of way. They're not usually turning you down because you're not a good enough parent...it's usually something very simple that makes that child not a good match for you, but still you get that feeling you're being judged and it's hard to remember not to take it personal. I imagine it will be espeically hard when we really feel a connection to that child but the caseworkers think otherwise. It's really hard not knowing what to expect. Even with all the uncertainty of international adoption we did know that once we fell in love with our referral that that child was %95 ours. We also had a clear outline of all the steps needing to be done so I could track our progress.
With this adoption, we have no timeline at all as to when things "should" be done. Our agency will start sending us profiles of children that match our criteria. If we like a certain child we can submit our home study to that child's caseworker, who then has an unlimited amount of time to collect other home studies to compare and then she chooses which family she thinks is best for that child. That means we could be turned down many many times before we actually have a child placed with us. It seems absurd when you consider how many waiting children are stuck in the foster care system, but that's how things work. If a caseworker likes us, then we will meet with the child and their care team a few times for many rounds of interviews, and then finally a transition plan will be made based upon our childs age and needs.
John and I are hoping for a child near Isabella's age, but we are trying to keep our minds and hearts open to whatever God brings us. He knew the plan when we thought we wanted a boy during our first adoption so I'm sure he will surprise us again. It is very hard to look at a childn's profile and know that they need a family and be able to say this is not the one for us. All children deserve a home and a family, but we have to remember we can't save them all. Until God's plan is revealed, we will continue to consider all the profiles of children we are given, until we find that one special child he has intended for us. I will keep you updated during this "Journey to ???".
Subscribe to:
Comments (Atom)