Rethinking adoption out of foster care

By Dominique Arrington

Rise spoke about adoption's history -- and future -- with April Dinwoodie, chief executive of the Donaldson Adoption Institute, Dawn J. Post, the co-borough director of the Children’s Law Center, and China Darrington, who provides recovery support services to parents in Ohio struggling with addiction and is a member of the Birth Parent National Network.

"We started the Broken Adoptions Project because, having worked in child welfare  all of these years, we would see adopted children return to family court and go back into foster care," Post says. "It was pretty common to see the parent introducing themselves to the judge as the adoptive parent and then saying, 'I don’t want the child back.'"

In New York, Lawyers for Children recently found that approximately 20% of their caseload is adopted children who have been placed back into foster care. Covenant House, a shelter for homeless youth, also calculates that they see about 120 children per year who were adopted and are now homeless.

Federal law gives foster care agencies a financial bonus for finalizing adoptions--but not reunification. Post says, "My argument is that there should be a bonus for every form of permanency." READ MORE

Adoption: A difficult choice for teens

By Anonymous

A caseworker first introduced the idea of adoption to me when I was 14. after that, I went back and forth, unable to decide whether I wanted to be adopted.

I was already separated from my siblings and I was afraid that if I were adopted, I might love a new family and forget about my family. And a piece of me still wanted to believe my mom would get us back. I didn’t want a new mom. READ MORE

In the News

Last week, The New Yorker published The Separation, an article by Larissa MacFarquhar that follows a mother who first came to the attention of the child welfare system after her daughter burned herself with a curling iron. Speaking on The Brian Lehrer Show, MacFarquhar described it as “an ordinary case” and said, “The thing I wanted to draw attention to in her case is that, because she was poor, and perhaps because she was black, this accident became a reason, ultimately, to take her children away from her in a way that I don’t think it would have been in the case of a middle class family.”

MacFarquhar added that in child protection "it is often considered the cautious, safe thing to do to remove a child from his or her parents if there’s some question of accidents like this. Whereas, in my view, removing a child from his or her parents is an extreme trauma to the child and the parent and should be a last resort.”

MacFarquhar sat in on Bronx Family Court for months but her story gives voice to a perspective rarely heard in court -- the parent's. As the mother, Mercedes, says: “I’ve dealt with everything. Everything they threw at me, I dealt with. After I busted my ass to make sure I got where I needed to be, they just snatched it back like it was nothing.” READ MORE