Permanency Tip of the Week: Reunification After an Adoption Disrupts
Sometimes after all our best efforts, an Adoption disrupts, and the Youth is returned to foster care. This is a major loss and the grief must be appropriately and thoroughly worked through open and honest dialogue along with supportive mental health services. As a crisis event, this is an opportunity to step back and reevaluate all our Permanency efforts to see if some form of reunification with the family of origin both is indicated and possible. Hopefully, the Youth has remained connected with their family of origin throughout the adoption journey. If not, this is a good time to seek out those connections. Exploring this option will present us with some significant challenges; however, we owe it to our Youth to explore ALL options, not just the easy ones.
Next week, we will address transracial Adoption.
Permanency Success Story of the Week: How Having a Family Changed My Future
The Adoption Exchange – For most of my childhood, I bounced from home to home within my biological family. In the seventh grade, a teacher noticed my bruises, and child protective services visited our house for the first time. That’s when my biological family pulled me out of school. For the next four years, I was trapped in the house. I simply vanished from society … and nobody noticed. This continued until I was placed in foster care at age 16. I felt unlovable. I didn’t know why people treated me so horribly and why I didn’t have a normal life. I felt like I didn’t belong anywhere. I felt like my life was already over…
But my world changed because of a special person named Chelsey. Chelsey was my adoption recruiter with The Adoption Exchange and the Dave Thomas Foundation for Adoption’s Wendy’s Wonderful Kids program, and she was dedicated to finding the right family for me. Chelsey is the first adult who I felt truly cared if I lived or died. More than that, she cared that I was happy. For so long, I had been surviving, and there was no time to dream about my future … but Chelsey changed that.
It didn’t happen overnight, but I eventually connected with Shawn and Matt, who were volunteering at my group home. With support from Chelsey, I took a big step and asked them to foster me. That’s when I found out they were already planning to become licensed as foster parents in hopes of bringing me to their home. Shawn and Matt officially became my mom and dad in 2018…
Permanency Related Articles:
Annie E Casey Foundation – The U.S. Children’s Bureau, Casey Family Programs, the Annie E. Casey Foundation and Prevent Child Abuse America are partnering to launch a national effort to prove it is possible to fundamentally rethink child welfare by creating the conditions for strong, thriving families where children are free from harm.
This first-of-its-kind effort — Thriving Families, Safer Children: A National Commitment to Well-Being — will work across the public, private and philanthropic sectors to assist jurisdictions in developing more just and equitable systems that benefit all children and families and break harmful intergenerational cycles of trauma and poverty.
“Having invested heavily in elevating the voices of parents and youth with lived experience in child welfare, we now have not only the opportunity but the obligation to act on what they’ve told us they need to stay strong and healthy,” says Jerry Milner, associate commissioner for the Children’s Bureau at the U.S. Administration of Children and Families. “Our four organizations are uniquely prepared and driven to do just that, by transforming child welfare into a child and family well-being system.”
Enabling Young People’s Participation in Residential Care Decision Making
Centre for Excellence in Therapeutic Care (CETC) – The literature on how young people participate in decision-making in residential care identifies three main aspects of participation: being able to access information to take part in decisions that matter; having opportunities and capabilities to express their views freely, and having an impact on the outcome of the decision-making process. These key aspects of meaningful and authentic participation also include having the space and time to reflect, form a view, change one’s mind, and consult with an advocate that may shift the inherent power imbalance in residential care decision-making. Because young people in residential care have experienced an extreme intervention in their freedoms and rights, participation should necessarily involve more than having a say in individual matters and include expressing views and being taken seriously in matters relating to policies and systemic decisions that affect their lives…
Kinship Care: Proactively Addressing Systemic Racism in Child Welfare
Generocity – Across the nation, Black families are torn apart by the child welfare system more frequently than white families experiencing similar levels of abuse or neglect.
Government intervention to separate parents and children is one of the highest forms of power exerted over the individual and undermines one’s sense of security and personal identity at a fundamental level. The disproportionate deconstruction of Black families involved in child welfare paints a quantifiable picture that our systems treat Black families and Black familial ties as less worthy of protection.
Using kinship placements, or “kinship care,” when the removal of children from their parents cannot be avoided, offers a secondary safeguard to maintaining family connectivity. Kin are relatives and family friends with whom the child already has a relationship. Extensive research indicates that children experience better outcomes when placed with kin. By keeping children within their family and community circles, we can counteract the inherent racism in a system that routinely undermines strong Black families and strong Black identity.
Engaging Youth Isn’t Just the Right Thing to Do, It’s a Path to Permanency
AdoptUSKids – Every youth in foster care has a story to tell—their own. At the Northwest Adoption Exchange, that belief is what led us to launch our In-Depth Profile project in 2017. Now, more than three years later, the work is expanding to other states through the Family Finding and Engagement Initiative funded by the Children’s Bureau, as part of the national Adoption Call to Action. This year, some amazing youth in Michigan started creating In-Depth Profiles by collaborating with our staff and the staff at the Michigan Adoption Resource Exchange. You can see their profiles by visiting their 20 in 2020 In-Depth Profile site.
At their core, In-Depth Profiles are creative storytelling projects where teens have the opportunity to answer two questions: “What do you want to share with potential adoptive families, and how do you want to share it?” The resulting content gives teens the opportunity to tell their stories, share their hopes, and give potential families insight into their personalities. These stories can be shared through videos, photos, podcasts, narratives, artwork, or anything else that helps give an authentic snapshot into who they are. No two In-Depth Profiles are the same, because no two youth are the same…
Making the Most of the Family First Act
Chapin Hall – The Family First Prevention Services Act has the potential to transform our family and child well-being systems—but only if agencies know how best to leverage its provisions. Chapin Hall has developed a series of clearly defined steps for jurisdictions to make the most of this new legislation. These steps are illustrated in this animated visualization. Rollover it with your cursor, click where you want to learn more, and then click again to get a description of that piece of the work. From planning to implementation to evaluation, Chapin Hall is providing policy and practice guidance on Family First across the country.
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Take care and keep up the Permanency work – Our children, youth, young adults, families, and communities are depending on it!