Permanency in the News – Week of 08/01/16

Permanency Tip of the Week: Experiencing Grief and Loss Because of the Permanency Process

We experience grief and loss throughout our life.  This can be a particularly challenging experience for our youth in Foster Care because their entry into foster care was a profound loss and any Permanency outside of their birth family necessitates the additional loss of their chance at reunification.  When Permanency is outside of the birth family, this does not mean that the birth family should / needs to be cut out of their life.  If the birth family can be a healthy and supportive influence in the youth’s life, they should be provided this opportunity with our support and guidance.  Through all of this, open and ongoing conversations about the grief and loss process is critical for the youth and their caregivers.

Permanency Story of the Week:  “We’re Not Superheroes. We Like Being Parents!”

No empty nest for Amy and Richard Gill. With four adoptive sons, their house is full of fun and energy. “We love our life.”  Amy and Richard Gill were newlyweds in 2006 when they began fostering children, but with a difference. It was a second marriage for both of them, a new beginning…As the Gills began to get to know the brothers and anticipate their adoption, the family experienced tragedy. Amy’s youngest son by birth, Andrew, was killed in a fall in September 2011. While grieving, Amy and Richard continued with the adoption process. “It was the most life-affirming thing I could do, and what my son would have wanted me to do,” Amy remembers.

“What we lack in energy (we both power-nap), we make up with experience, a certain amount of wisdom, and confidence in our abilities,” Richard says.  “We love our life, and our sons bring us great joy,” Amy adds.

Current Permanency Related Articles:

Finding and Keeping Foster, Adoptive, and Kinship Homes

The New York Office of Children and Family Services developed Revitalizing Recruitment, a resource tool for child welfare professionals to guide them in developing and implementing best practices for recruiting foster/adoptive families and engaging parents and children before and after placement. The guide includes information on the challenges and opportunities in recruitment and retention and offers tools that can help revitalize recruitment within professionals’ jurisdictions.

Permanency Continuum Framework

The Quality Improvement Center for Adoption and Guardianship Support and Preservation (QIC-AG) created a framework to help guide its work with eight sites across the United States in developing evidence-based models to address the pre-permanency and post-permanency support and service needs of children in foster care. The framework aims to help families get ready for the transition to permanency by ensuring families are equipped with the tools they need to address issues that may arise during the permanency process, with the hope of preventing disruption or dissolution.

How One Mom’s Extraordinary Love Transforms the Short Lives of Hospice Babies

Cori Salchert calls the home she shares with her husband, Mark, a “house of hope.” A former perinatal bereavement nurse with eight biological children, Salchert began adopting what she calls “hospice babies” —babies with life-limiting or terminal diagnoses — in 2012. Salchert says these babies come from families who find it difficult to deal with the condition their child was born with. Many step away because they can’t bear to witness the end of their child’s life.

The first of the Salcherts’ hospice babies, Emmalynn, lived for 50 days before dying while cradled in Cori’s arms. Since then, the Salcherts and their children have made it their mission to care for as many babies that need it. The family first told their story to the Sheboygan Press earlier this month. Here, Cori Salchert tells TODAY’s Terri Peters about the road that led her to shelter these sick children in their final days.

Why Did International Adoption Suddenly End?
Priceonomics – From its historic peak in the mid-2000s, the number of international adoptions began to fall. It has been falling ever since. According to figures collected by the U.S. State Department, Americans adopted 5,647 children from other countries last year, the lowest figure since the early 1980s. That is a 75% decline in just over one decade.

A Parent’s Touch Actually Transforms A Baby’s Brain

A child wants to be held and touched from the very first day of life. And a parent’s affectionate touch goes a long way, from boosting a newborn’s healthy development to shaping the child’s brain later on, a new study suggests.  For many animals, touch is a strong communicator of emotions, a signal that bonds a parent to a child. To a newborn, a parent’s love may be as important as food, as the young monkeys in Harry Harlow’s famous experiments in the 1950s showed us when they clung to a soft dummy even if their milk came from somewhere else.

In Harry Harlow’s experiment, infant monkeys almost always chose to cuddle with the cloth figure, and made contact with the wire figure only when necessary.  Now, years after the famous monkey love experiments, researchers in Germany and Singapore used brain imaging to see whether receiving a lot of fond caresses affects the human brain in any measurable way… Researchers observed that brain activity across these networks was stronger for kids who received more tactile attention from their mothers.