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Home > Substitute Care Providers: Helping Abused and Neglected Children > Substitute Care Providers: Helping Abused and Neglected Children : Conclusion
Substitute Care Providers: Helping Abused and Neglected Children
ConclusionThe number of children coming into foster care because they have been neglected or abused is increasing. In spite of the community's best efforts to reunify the families from which these children come, some will never return to their birth families or grow up with their birth relatives. Child welfare agencies know that the foster and adoptive families are the best resources for meeting the current needs of most of these children and for helping heal their earlier trauma. A major challenge facing agencies is to identify, develop, train, and support the foster and adoptive families needed for this group of children. The ability of these families to provide love and good nurture for the children in substitute care is essential. Good caretaking in and of itself, however, is not enough. In addition, the child welfare caseworker and the substitute parents must understand the impact of placement on these children, be sensitive to the abuse and neglect issues that brought these children into care, know what to do to meet the specific needs and behaviors of the child in care, know when and how to locate and utilize other community resources, and work together as a team. Although they both serve children who have had to live outside the family into which they were born, adoption and foster care developed independently from quite different historical roots. Each had a different legal basis, different sources of funding, different functions, and different clientele. Agencies viewed these services as quite different, and those agencies that provided both usually established separate departments and procedures for each. Adoption was the preferred service for the child who could not grow up in his/her birth family because its legal base offered the child a greater sense of permanence. Funds from adopting parents supported adoption agencies. Traditionally, the largest group of adoptive parents were white couples who were seeking children who most resembled the child the prospective parents could not produce because of infertility. Usually, minority, older, or special needs children did not physically resemble the prospective parents. Thus, adoption was not usually an option for these children. To some extent, that is still true today. Two factors, however, have significantly altered modern adoption. First, the decline in the birth rate, the availability of legal abortion, and the social acceptability of single parenthood have all meant that fewer white infants are available for adoption. Some couples who initially sought a healthy, white baby are now considering other children in agency foster care who have been waiting for adoption. Some of these parents have weighed the risk of adopting a medically vulnerable baby from an accredited agency against the risk of engaging in an independent placement of a seemingly healthy newborn. More important than the decline in the number of babies available for adoption has been the focus on permanence for foster children and the availability of Federal funds that have helped to defray expenses incurred in the adoption of special needs children. Thus, a new population of potential adoptive parents, many of whom were already foster parents, could now afford to adopt. At one time, agencies were reluctant to allow foster parents to adopt the children for whom they had been caring. These families are now the greatest single resource for the adoption of children with special needs. Furthermore, the current emphasis on kinship care has further blurred distinction between foster care and adoption. When a child's needs are being met by relatives who have become part of the formal child welfare system, the question of whether that child should be adopted by those relatives warrants close examination. Although such adoptions may seem to offer greater legal security, resistance to the idea within the family structure and changes that adoption can make in the functioning of the extended family system need to weighed carefully. As the population of children coming into care has changed, agencies and substitute parents have learned a great deal about adoption and foster care. They face many complicated issues in further conceptualizing and delivering service. Although there are unique problems to solve in both adoption and foster care services, it seems clear that continued attention to their common characteristics and efforts to integrate these services will better meet the needs of children.
This material may be freely reproduced and distributed. However, when doing so, please credit Child Welfare Information Gateway. |
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