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Home > Postadoption Services: A Bulletin for Professionals > How Can Postadoption Services Help?
Postadoption Services
3. How Can Postadoption Services Help? Postadoption services can help both adoptive families and the foster care and adoption (child welfare) system by helping in the recruitment and retention of adoptive families and helping to prevent disruption or dissolution of existing adoptions. These benefits, in turn, may reduce the number of children in foster care waiting for families. Recruitment of Adoptive Families. There is evidence that the availability of services and supports following adoption plays a critical role in many prospective adoptive parents' decisions to adopt children from foster care. This has been true of kinship families, current foster families, and new families recruited for these children. (Freundlich, 1997; Freundlich, & Wright, 2003; Casey Family Services, 2003b). While children are in the foster care system, there are a number of services and resources available to both the children and their foster families. Foster families receive case management services, while the children qualify for, and many receive, advocacy, mental health, and crisis intervention services. Funds may be available to help with childcare, food and clothing, summer camp, and trips. Foster and adoptive families often have the support of their adoption agency and local foster or adoptive parent associations. The prospect of losing these services once adoptions are finalized may serve as a disincentive to families considering adoption. Prevention of Adoption Dissolution.1 Postadoption services and supports may reduce the risk of adoption dissolution and help sustain healthy family relationships. While the vast majority of adoptions of children adopted from foster care succeed, some research has suggested that as many as 10 to 25 percent of adoptions of older children adopted from the public child welfare system disrupt before the adoption is finalized, and an unknown but significantly smaller percentage dissolve after the adoption has been finalized (Festinger, 2002; Berry, 1997; Goerge, Howard, Yu, & Radomsky, 1997; Freundlich & Wright, 2003). The children whose placements are most at risk of disruption and dissolution are those who are placed when they are older and those with emotional, behavioral, social, medical, or psychiatric challenges, since they are more likely to experience difficulty in forming and sustaining family relationships (Information Gateway, 2004). Children whose adoptions dissolve enter or re-enter the foster care system. This may add to the children's already traumatic experiences of rejection, separation, and loss. Many adoptive families report that lifetime access to adoption-competent services, supports, and resources designed to promote the family's well-being would improve the quality of their family relationships (Howard, Smith & Oppenheim, 2002).
1 The term disruption is used to describe an adoption process that ends after the child is placed in an adoptive home and before the adoption is legally finalized, resulting in the child's return to (or entry into) foster care or placement with new adoptive parents. The term dissolution is used to describe an adoption process that ends after the adoption is legally finalized, resulting in the child's return to (or entry into) foster care or placement with new adoptive parents. Back
This material may be freely reproduced and distributed. However, when doing so, please credit Child Welfare Information Gateway. |
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