Adopting/Foster to Adopt Age Range

[redandblue]

Hello Adoption & Fostering Board,

I briefly did an updated intro yesterday.  I was curious about something for those who are or have done adoption through a CAS or foster to adopt. The question often comes up about the age of the child we will be adopting.  We are still feeling open and all over the place with this decision. I know we have time and I am hoping that our training will help us to clearly identify our comfort level with this, but how did you make your decisions around this? I have a 15 yr old DS at home, so I know definitely under that age. I go back and forth between perhaps younger school aged children and more of an infant. Whenever I get asked and find myself trying to think through this, I can't help but feel selfish or guilty in some way. Like 'ordering' from a menu.  We know that there are so many children who are looking for their forever homes, but I know I can't take them all.  We have talked about feeling like we will know what's right when it happens, but I know we will have to give some ranges in order for a match to happen. Has anyone else felt this?  How did you make your decisions?   

[gnomesweetgnome]

The decision is a little easier for us. We already adopted DS, and we are planning to do foster care/foster-adopt soon. Our range will be his age (currently 18m, but who knows once we get licensed) or younger.

There are a lot of foster families available for younger children, but far fewer who are interested/capable of fostering/adopting older children, children with special needs, or sibling groups. So if you are interested or feel drawn to any of those situations, there is a huge need. You may want to get in touch with other foster parents or people who have adopted from the foster system. They will have a lot of good advice and experiences you can learn from while you try to make these decisions. Having frank, open, honest talks with your licensing social worker(s) will also benefit you. GL!

[theholmanherd]

We are hoping for infants, but we will foster up to age 7. We also requested no severe behavioral issues. We're first time parents, and don't feel confident enough for a challenge up front.

[redandblue]

gnomesweetgnome that makes sense about wanting to foster another child your DS age. Two toddlers would be busy! I know that there is always a huge need for older children, sibling groups or children with special needs. I work in early childhood education, specifically with children with special needs. I honestly don't know if we would be able to parent children with significant special needs, due to how much support I know that they would require. I honestly feel guilt over saying that out loud, but we are both working parents and cannot afford not to both work full time. I wish that we lived I a bigger house because I could definitely see us being open to a sibling group. We only have one bedroom available, so we would have to consider the logistics of that.

theholmanherd that makes sense about younger age children and being first time parents, being concerned about significant behavioural issues. It is really tricky to know.

We just got home from our second training class and were told that we will be contacted sometime over the week to begin our home study! I'm excited and nervous at the same time! I thought we would be waiting months for the home study to begin. We do know that we still have some work to do around the house for safety inspection, so feeling some pressure with that. And I guess I need to start telling my employers. Eek! Exciting!

[roxy]

The program that we are adopting from are foster children that that are already legally ready to be adopted. Meaning that TPR has already happened. So that automatically moved up the age of the child to be a little older. Which is just fine for us since neither my H or I were really excited about infant-toddler ages. My H is an elementary school teacher and is he the most comfortable with kiddos in the 6-12 range. I would adopt older teens, but my H is not there yet.

Currently we are only approved for one child as our house is the size of a postage stamp. If all goes well, we will be moving to a larger home in a few years and would adopt a sibling group. Eventually we would like to be in the position of adopting a couple of teens 16-18, but that is WAY down the line.


That's awesome that you are getting to start the study sooner than you thought. Try not to get too worried about the inspection. We had our kitchen partially demoed for a remodel when our SW came over. Good luck!!

[redandblue]

roxy that's awesome that you have been approved. What are your next steps? I would love to move to a bigger place and have a crazy house filled with children, but that is not my reality either (yet). The infant/toddler years is something that we have also discussed. Like I did that 15 years ago, are we really prepared to enter in to that stage again? I'm not sure. It is such a scary excitement I am feeling right now! I just spoke with our SW to schedule the dates for the home study. First appointment will be February 10! She is hoping to have it completed by the end of March! I did mention that we are concerned about some of the home inspection stuff and need to go over with her what we need to worry about and what we don't.

Glad to have the support of the ladies here to help through this.

[Captain Serious]

You can't feel guilty. The thing about fostering/adopting older children is that it comes with so many other complicating factors than having children biologically. Sure, we get to state preferences about age or types of medical situations, but we are committing to parenting children who have suffered trauma, and who we will love through all their effects of that.

I know this sounds cold and calculating and like a trade-off, but it is the only way to ensure that families raising children who have experienced losses of this type don't get overwhelmed. I once heard an estimate that for every year a child was in care/the system, it will take 1.5 months to fully attach and bond to a new family, and if they experienced more losses or changes of placements, it will add onto that time. While every child and situation is different and in reality no formula could ever capture the reality, my experience has proven this rough estimate to be a decent predictor of approximately how long it will take for a child to feel safe most of the time in a new home. What this means is that, typically, older kids in the system--or at least kids who have been in the system for a long time--will have a much more difficult transition to a new family. The unfortunate reality is that these kids typically are much harder to welcome into a home, create a lot of friction between family members, and sometimes lead to dire situations for families--which is why they are much harder to place in permanent families.

In theory, I'm sure many of us would all love to welcome home children who are hard to place. In reality, we have to carefully look at our existing families and decide what limits we can push and what we need to protect.

Adopting from Peru offered us two choices: wait for years for the Peruvian authorities to match us, or pick from the list of waiting children. The hardest thing for me was balancing my family's happiness with the ability to welcome home a "hard-to-place child." I kept having to remind myself that we started down the adoption path because we wanted to grow and enrich our family and increase our happiness, and that if we got into a situation that was beyond our means to successfully parent, we not only would be decreasing our family's happiness, but we would be doing the child a disservice, too. In the end, we carefully considered each situation and found the ones we felt prepared to successfully parent.

It's also important to note that both our children ended up having needs beyond what we initially expected. You have to be prepared for that possibility, as children in the system often haven't had strong advocates who could help identify issues and special needs. If we had stretched our limits too far initially, I'm not sure we would have been as capable to adjust to their needs and provide them with all the supports we have, and I'm not sure our family life would be as secure as it remains.

[redandblue]

Jan 30, 2015 13:49:37 GMT -5 Captain Serious said:

You can't feel guilty. The thing about fostering/adopting older children is that it comes with so many other complicating factors than having children biologically. Sure, we get to state preferences about age or types of medical situations, but we are committing to parenting children who have suffered trauma, and who we will love through all their affects of that.

I know this sounds cold and calculating and like a trade-off, but it is the only way to ensure that families raising children who have experienced losses of this type don't get overwhelmed. I once heard an estimate that for every year a child was in care/the system, it will take 1.5 months to fully attach and bond to a new family, and if they experienced more losses or changes of placements, it will add onto that time. While every child and situation is different and in reality no formula could ever capture the reality, my experience has proven this rough estimate to be a decent predictor of approximately how long it will take for a child to feel safe most of the time in a new home. What this means is that, typically, older kids in the system--or at least kids who have been in the system for a long time--will have a much more difficult transition to a new family. The unfortunate reality is that these kids typically are much harder to welcome into a home, create a lot of friction between family members, and sometimes lead to dire situations for families--which is why they are much harder to place in permanent families.

In theory, I'm sure many of us would all love to welcome home children who are hard to place. In reality, we have to carefully look at our existing families and decide what limits we can push and what we need to protect.

Adopting from Peru offered us two choices: wait for years for the Peruvian authorities to match us, or pick from the list of waiting children. The hardest thing for me was balancing my family's happiness with the ability to welcome home a "hard-to-place child." I kept having to remind myself that we started down the adoption path because we wanted to grow and enrich our family and increase our happiness, and that if we got into a situation that was beyond our means to successfully parent, we not only would be decreasing our family's happiness, but we would be doing the child a disservice, too. In the end, we carefully considered each situation and found the ones we felt prepared to successfully parent.

It's also important to note that both our children ended up having needs beyond what we initially expected. You have to be prepared for that possibility, as children in the system often haven't had strong advocates who could help identify issues and special needs. If we had stretched our limits too far initially, I'm not sure we would have been as capable to adjust to their needs and provide them with all the supports we have, and I'm not sure our family life would be as secure as it remains.

Captain Serious thank you for your reply.  Seriously it has resonated with me these last few days.  I appreciate the way you stated that in theory we want to take in and help anyone or everyone, but we do need to look at our family.  Thank you for sharing how you reminded yourself why you were going through this journey.  That is exactly were we are at.  We are wanting to enrich our family and grow our happiness.  If we stretch ourselves too thin, then we won't be doing this.  We do recognize that there will be challenges (typical parenting challengese coupled with the challenges of parenting a child who has had potentially traumatic experiences and loss) and that life as we know will change.  And there will be absolutely no way to predict what this will look like or what other challenges may come our way (no so different as any parent could experience.  Last year DS has some medical issues and it resulted in him being diagnosed with a kidney disease.  No way to predict that, or a child with ADHD or ASD).  Our course this past week gave a similar statistic about how long it can take to rebuild attachment and help a child feel comfortable.  They used a general rule of every year having experience disfunctional attachment relationships will take two years with healthy attachment experiences to heal.  Thank you so much for sharing.