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!