Permanency Tip of the Week:
Anniversaries of any sort (whether they be birthdays, holidays or significant dates in our life) can serve as triggers for painful / difficult feelings and memories – especially when they are paired with the expectations / actions of others, including our society. Because of a challenging life history, current and former Foster Youth without Permanency may be at increased risk of struggling during anniversaries and holidays. It is important to be especially engaged with these individuals and seek to both provide additional support and increase efforts to secure Permanency.
Story of the Week: A visual story for this week
Current Permanency related articles:
Older Child Adoption: Parenting Many Kids in One Body
One of the challenges of adopting a toddler or older child from foster care or international adoption is that you are actually adopting and ultimately parenting many different kids at different developmental levels all in the same child. Your four year old may be three in her physical development, two in her cognitive development, and nine months in her emotional development. Our challenge as an adoptive parent is to meet all these developmental need. Whew, talk about a parental balancing act.
Adoption Today – Attachment and Trauma Issue
Adoption Today is excited to announce the release of its June issue on Attachment & Trauma. This issue is available for FREE by clicking on the flipping icon at www.adoptinfo.net or by visiting. We want to thank all of the advertisers, writers, therapists and supporters that help us put together this incredible issue and provide it for free to the adoption community. Please pass along the link and share this issue with others.
Thanks,
Kim Hansel l Editor – Adoption Today & Fostering Families Today – 888-924-6736 – www.adoptinfo.net
Making Unadoptable Unacceptable
CCAI is founded upon the ideal that every child in the world both needs and deserves a safe, loving and permanent family. And we exist to identify the legal and policy barriers that prevent children from realizing this basic right. It is important to remember that foster care is not meant to be a permanent solution for children. Children need families and yet of the 101,666 children available for adoption out of foster care in FY 2012, only 52,039 were adopted. Even more concerning, children age nine or older, while accounting for 48 percent of the total number of children in foster care, accounted for only 25 percent (13,184) of these adoptions (U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, 2013).
We are not the only ones who believe that there is no such thing as an unadoptable child. Our friends and partners at the Dave Thomas Foundation for Adoption not only advance this message every day, they practice what they preach. In celebration of National Foster Care Month, CCAI is excited to share the perspective of a social worker who has successfully recruited adoptive families for those children the foster care system said could not be adopted. In his five years as a Wendy’s Wonderful Kids Recruiter in Wyoming, Bryan Cook has been instrumental in helping many kids find permanent homes.
Feds Eye New Measures for Child Welfare Reviews
Chronicle of Social Change – The Department of Health and Human Services is amending its Child and Family Services Review (CSFR) process, including the addition of a few key measurements. The CFSR process, which began during the Bush administration, includes a litany of metrics and case studies created to gauge the performance and progress of state child welfare agencies. In a nutshell: every state is reviewed over a four-year period, and notified of indicators on which they failed. States are given a chance to submit program improvement plans aimed at addressing those shortcomings; they face financial penalties for continued failure. The second round of reviews was completed in 2010.
Youth Speak: What’s one FACT you would like the PUBLIC to know about foster care?
California College Pathways – We asked California Scholars: “May is National Foster Care Month! What’s one FACT you would like the PUBLIC to know about foster care? Or – is there a foster care MYTH you would like to dispel?”
The Treehouse Foundation Presents Project Thrive: Zero to Five
All young children placed in foster care deserve to live a connected, healthy, and fulfilling life. Investing in their first five years of life is smart. Currently, the majority of our resources are spent supporting the nearly 25,000 youth who are “aging out” of the foster care system. Why? Because they leave our nation’s child welfare system alone and at risk for homelessness, unemployment, incarceration, teen parenting, and lives of poverty. The “Aging Out Crisis” is real. It is imperative that we dissolve the foster care pipeline to the next generation of poor and homeless Americans now. In order to do that we need a new approach – one that focuses on the unique needs of our youngest children in foster care.
FFTA 28th Annual Conference on Treatment Foster Care
July 20th – 23rd, 2014, Disney’s Coronado Springs Resort, Lake Buena Vista, Florida
Registration is now open for the Foster Family-based Treatment Association’s (FFTA) 28th Annual Conference on Treatment Foster Care. This year’s theme is Happily Ever After? Overcoming Barriers to Permanency & Well-being and will focus on identifying and overcoming obstacles that can interfere with the positive development of youth in out-of-home care. This conference will feature over 90 workshops highlighting the best practices being applied in the field.