Home > Post-Legal Adoption Services for Children with Special Needs and Their Families: Challenges and Lessons Learned > Overview of Services and Outcomes

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Post-Legal Adoption Services For Children with Special Needs and Their Families : Challenges and Lessons Learned
Grantee Lessons Learned

Author(s):  Child Welfare Information Gateway

Year Published:  2005

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You are in section: Table of Contents 1 - Overview of Services and … 2 - Common Challenges/Promising … 3 - Lessons Learned 4 - Conclusion 5 - Appendix A: Project Information 6 - Appendix B: Services Provided, …

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1. Overview of Services and Outcomes

The projects funded in this cluster were collaborative efforts, usually involving the public child welfare agency at the State or local level, foster and adoptive parent support groups, private adoption or family service agencies, and, in many cases, the local mental health system. Each of the projects targeted post-legal adoptive families and their children with special needs. Other target populations included:

• Pre-adoptive families
• Single adoptive parents
• Transracial adoptive families
• Kinship families

In the absence of a best-practices model for post-adoption services, grantees involved adoptive families of children with special needs and adoption professionals in designing their programs. This was accomplished primarily through focus groups and in-person, telephone, and mailed surveys. The programs were then designed to meet the needs and fill the service gaps survey participants identified.

1.1 Core Services

The projects varied significantly in their approach to serving adoptive families. Most of the programs, however, did provide a basic set of core services.

Parent Support and Educational Groups. All 15 projects provided or assisted families in developing support or educational groups for adoptive parents. Parents who regularly attended group meetings reported developing a sense of group cohesion that evolved into an informal mentoring network. Participating families reported feeling less isolated, more knowledgeable about adoption-related issues, more empowered, more confident in their ability to parent their children successfully, more committed to working through problems, and more comfortable talking about adoption within their families and with professionals whose services they needed. Grantees reported that these families tended to seek help sooner - before situations reached the point of crisis - than families who did not participate on an ongoing basis.

Children's Support and Educational Groups. Ten projects also provided support and educational groups for the adopted children. These groups gave children an opportunity, sometimes their first, to meet and interact with other children who were adopted. Grantees reported that the groups provided a safe environment where children and teens could talk about their issues with others who understood and even shared their concerns. Grantees and adoptive parents also reported that therapeutic groups helped adoptees consider and deal with the losses in their lives and examine their feelings and behavior in light of their past experiences.

Information and Referral. During the needs assessment phases of these projects, adoptive families identified a critical need for information. All 15 projects provided information and referral services, either directly (through case managers or hot lines) or through resource directories (6 projects), lending libraries (4), websites (6), and newsletters (7). Adoptive families reported these information and referral services helped them locate services and other resources when needed.

Training for Service Providers. Ten projects provided adoption competency training for providers within the professional community (including the health, mental health, education, and justice systems). Grantees developed and delivered local, regional, and even national trainings for hundreds of service providers across the country during the grant period. The focus of these trainings was on helping providers better understand the impacts of abuse and neglect, involvement with the child welfare system, and separation and loss on children who are adopted and their families. Participating providers gained an understanding of adoption issues and reported greater confidence in working with adoptive families of children with special needs.

1.2 Additional Services

The following services were provided by smaller numbers of grantees, but they were also reported as being important to the families who received them.

Recreational/Social Activities. Ten of the grantees offered a wide variety of activities such as family picnics, sporting events, rope challenge courses, and museum visits. These activities provided parents, adoptees, and their siblings opportunities to meet and interact with others like them in informal settings. Families reported this casual contact in relaxed settings was therapeutic, providing opportunities for parent-child attachment and for the formation of informal support networks.

Advocacy. Grantees reported that many adoptive parents needed support in dealing with schools and other community services. Eight projects provided advocacy services, accompanying families to meetings and conferences. During this process they also taught advocacy skills to the parents, who reported feeling better able to advocate for their children on their own after these experiences.

Case Management. Varying levels of case management services were provided by eight projects in conjunction with crisis intervention, counseling, or information and referral services.

Crisis Intervention/Family Preservation. Crisis intervention or family preservation services were available through eight projects. A variety of approaches were used in delivering these services, including multidisciplinary teams and in-home wraparound services.

Respite or Respite Referral. Eight projects provided respite services for adoptive families. One project sponsored activities such as movie night or a trip to the zoo for children so the parents could have time to themselves. Another organized a summer camp for children.

Services for Families Who Have Adopted Transracially. At least five projects provided services specifically for families who had adopted transracially. These shared a common goal of strengthening the children's racial and cultural identities and providing assistance with issues related to transracial adoption. The most frequently provided service for these families was support groups. Other programs included matching adoptive families with "buddy" families of the same race as the adopted child; recruiting and training same-race mentors for transracially adopted children; multicultural book reviews and book fairs; workshops on how to choose and use books effectively to help children get in touch with their culture; and multicultural camps for transracially adopted children and their families. Participating families reported these programs to be very beneficial. Many of the relationships formed through these programs continued beyond the life of the grant.

Less Frequently Offered Services. Other services offered by some grantees included:

• Mini-grants ($1,000 to $5,000) to adoptive parent groups to develop educational or respite care services for families (6 projects).
• Formal needs assessments of individual families and children to determine the services the families and children needed most (7).
• Individual or family counseling for parents and children (6).
• Mentorship programs for children, or "buddy" programs for adoptive parents to be mentored by more experienced adoptive families (5).

1.3 Project Outcomes

Evaluating post-adoption services programs is challenging for a number of reasons. Challenges identified by these grantees and through a review of the literature include:

• It is difficult to demonstrate that outcomes are related to the services provided.
• Clear points in time at which to measure outcomes do not exist.
• There is no consensus within the field about which outcomes and measures to focus on.
• Direct service staff may not have the skills or an interest in conducting rigorous evaluations.
• Locating skilled evaluators with knowledge of adoption can be difficult.
• The total number of families served by post-adoption services programs is typically small.
• Outcomes achieved may be relatively modest and difficult to measure.
• Tangible outcomes, such as prevention of adoption disruption or dissolution, are very difficult to track. It is challenging to prove conclusively that families would have had a negative experience without a program's intervention.
• The diversity of programs makes cross-site evaluations difficult.

Outcomes reported by grantees included:

• Improved parenting skills. A number of participating families reported being able to care for their children in their homes despite challenging behaviors because of the post-adoption services they received. Those same families reported an overall improvement in their ability to cope with adoption-related issues and an increased use of community resources. They also expressed an increased awareness and understanding of how childhood trauma can affect children's behavior, an increased commitment to working through problem behaviors, and greater confidence in their ability to do so.
  
  
• Improved child functioning. Some of the projects reported improvements in the children's well-being and behavior. Several grantees reported support groups helped children explore their own issues concerning adoption, understand themselves and their families, develop social skills, and connect with other adopted children. At least two projects reported these groups had the additional benefit of improving children's relationships with their parents. Counseling, support groups, and community resources were cited as helping families work through children's behavioral and emotional problems. Improvements in children's behavior were measured through child assessments, surveys of family functioning, observations by staff, or parents' reports.
  
  
• Increase in adoptions. One statewide project reported a 72 percent increase in the number of adoptions in the State during the course of the grant. While the passage of ASFA during this period certainly had an impact, it had also been the program's hypothesis that an increase in the availability and accessibility of post-adoption services might result in an increase in the number of finalized adoptions, as families were confident they would have support.
  
  
• Prevention of adoption disruptions. Three of the five projects that reported disruption data reported that no disruptions had occurred among the families served by the end of the project. One project reported that only one of the families served had experienced a disruption. Another grantee, however, reported that, while eight disruptions had been prevented, nine had occurred. It is difficult to know how to interpret these data, because different families received different sets of services, there were no control groups, grantees offered limited information about sample sizes, and the projects varied so that comparison of populations across projects was not possible.

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Updated on July 3, 2008