No Winners, Only Losers ? Monkey Soup

Today, let?s discuss how broken our foster care system is for a moment.

First a few facts about chilren in foster care.

On any given day there can be up to 400,000 children in care.??On average,?kids are in foster care for two years.? The average age of a child in foster care is nine-years-old.? More than 60,000 kids living in foster care have had their biological parental rights terminated, and are waiting to be adopted.? Eleven percent of kids will age out of foster care.

I have a friend who is currently attempting to adopt a child via inter-state adoption, by?foster care.? For more than a year, she and her family?have been put through the wringer.? For more than a year, the two states that she is working with to bring her son home, her home state and a neighboring state,?have basically played?the blame game with each other.? Neither side seems to know what the other side is doing, or at times what their own side is doing.

They have had visits with the child.? He calls, when the foster parents he lives with, allow him to call.? They Skype when possible.

She recently discovered that her agency, is closing its doors in the next few months.

They tried to have an at home visit over the Christmas holiday, but neither state could get their acts together about who was ?responsible? for her son while in his hopeful adoptive family?s care.? So instead he spent yet another Christmas in foster care.

I know that she is almost to the point of giving up.?

I know that she is questioning everything at this point.?

It is so unbelievably sad, that these two states cannot get their act together long enough to put things together so that this child can have a permanent family.

When we started the process to become a licensed foster/adopt family, we frequently sent inquiries on children whose photos/bio?s we had seen on our state?s Heart Gallery.? (Almost all states have a sight?similar to?this, and there are other national websites that you can see other foster children who are waiting for permanent families.)? Early on, we didn?t get very many responses from our own state.? So my husband and I started looking at the states that surround us.? We figured that if we needed to make a few hour car ride to visit and see our future child that it was just part of the journey to making our family grow.

Every single time we reached out to a neighboring state, we were either told that they would not work with our state, or that they had too many home studies to review for that particular case.? There were more than a few times that emails or phone calls that I made inquiring about a child or a sibling group just went unanswered completely.? So frustrating.

I know that there were several issues with our foster placement, D, with issues between states.? Shortly after D and his sisters were put in care, their mother moved back to the state that they had all originally been from.? Ultimately, it ended up that he was part Native American, the family?s?tribe intervened, and they just had the kid?s grandmother come down here and pick them up.? From the time that the tribe came forward to when they ultimately went home was a few weeks.? After six months of the two states bickering back and forth.

Now, Mea was in?our same state, just a different county and they still did some things differently than our county did.? The blessing in most everything with Mea?s case is that we had almost no contact with our own county and almost entirely dealt with the county where Mea was born, it was almost all done via email and phone.? I don?t know what would have happened had both counties been involved.? Seems like it would have been a mess.

There are so many children in our country that need a family.? Not only do they need a family, they deserve a family.? There are many families who have a loving home for these children, and most importantly children in need of a family.? I believe that for the most part the states are the ones making it difficult for the families.? Making them jump through hoops, losing paperwork.? Playing the blame game.? Not wanting to place children outside of their state because of money.??Whether it is money that the state?receives for placing the child, or the state where the placement will end up?not wanting to pay the?adoption subsidy and/or provide medical care for potential special needs.? None of these things are for the greater good of the children.?

None.

Now, I am not a social worker.? I am just a mom.? I have been out of the foster care system for almost five years, but I do know this?.

I think all?children deserve to have a family who can care for them properly and who will love them unconditionally.? There has to be a way to streamline this process so that it works the same in all fifty states.? So that the same paperwork is filed, so that background checks, and home studies are processed in the same way across all fifty states.? So that cases like my friend?s can work.? So that children who?are currently wards of the states can be adopted by families in a way that doesn?t cause them distress, and cause more emotional problems for them.? My?friends family is not the only one suffering here.? Somewhere out there, there is a little?boy who wants to go home to?his Momma who loves him and calls him her son.???

Something needs to be done.


Source: http://makingmonkeysoup.com/2013/01/08/nowinnersonlylosers/

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