• Democratic Institutions and Politics
• International Relations, Science and Security
• Markets and Methods
• Management and Leadership
• Social Policy

Julie Wilson on Adoption Policy

Creating policies and structures that can ensure orphans and children at risk a safe and permanent home is an issue that challenges governments across the globe, as last year’s tsunami disaster illustrated in the starkest of terms. In the U.S., the Adoption and Safe Families Act of 1997 (ASFA) codified the right of children in foster care to achieve a safe and permanent home. Since its passage, there has been a 79 percent increase in the number of children adopted from foster care. Surprisingly, the vast majority of these adoptions were by foster parents or relatives of the children in care. Julie Wilson’s research examines the complexities around foster care and adoption in the U.S.

Julie Wilson is a senior lecturer in social policy, director of the Malcolm Wiener Center for Social Policy, and associate academic dean for the Kennedy School of Government.

Q: What are the factors contributing to the increase in the numbers of children adopted from foster care?

Wilson: The immediate factors impacting this were the change in the Adoption and Safe Families Act and the incentives put out for states to increase the number of children adopted from foster care. Basically, the Adoption and Safe Families Act put an increased emphasis on permanency and established timelines so that children couldn’t languish in foster care for years and years and that would ensure that certain specific actions had to take place in a timely fashion. This put an increased emphasis on states to find homes for these children.

A second thing that has had an impact, and has been much more gradual over time, is the change in family structure. We see a lot of couples who started their families later in life and others who already have children, but want more, due to a second marriage or other circumstances. Many couples are also looking toward adoption as a solution to problems with infertility.

Q: Drawing upon your research, can you explain why so few children in foster care in the U.S. are adopted by general applicants?

Wilson: There are a number of reasons for this. First of all children who are in foster care are normally children who have experienced abuse or neglect at the hands of their parents and have been removed from their homes. The mission of state child protective service agencies is to remove these children from harm to make sure children are safe. What that means is that a number of these children may have behavioral problems or other issues that they may be working through so they can be in many cases quite challenging. And I think, while this is not true of all of these children, it is certainly the reputation these children have. In addition, they’re older by the time they’re ready for adoption and many couples want to adopt an infant or a very young child. It is harder to find couples who are interested in adopting adolescents for example. So this is a group of children that are a little older and have higher probability of being more troubled than the typical child. The result is that this is a pool of children needing really special homes.

I think the second thing — and this came out of our research — is that the process of adopting children from state agencies is rather difficult. It takes quite a long time. The process begins with someone having thought about adopting, expressing interest, and calling the state social service agency or some type of adoption agency. Then they have to complete a series of forms, go through background checks, go through training, undergo a home study. If they pass these hurdles they wait until the state, or the agencies with which it contracts, place a child with them.

What we found was that the initial call to state agencies — we were looking at Miami, San Jose and Boston — was often handled rather perfunctorily. In the case of Boston, which had just been through a series of layoffs and budget cuts and where staff were often fluid, it was sometimes hard to get responses. We found that families who had come to some personal decisions about being ready to adopt wanted someone on the other end of the line to be warm, comforting and helpful. Often they did not encounter that. Instead they were told that the children they could adopt were often older and often had troubled pasts. They ended up feeling like they and the state person on the phone were talking past one another, and the families interested in adopting felt that they were not being treated compassionately at that point. And we believe many of them grew discouraged and just did not pursue it any further.

Once they got into the system and started completing the forms and going through the training, we found for the most part that they thought the training was excellent, very helpful. They were concerned by the emphasis in these trainings on the difficulty of these children and one of our suggestions for the state is not so much de-emphasizing that but increasingly emphasizing strategies for dealing with these children — buddy systems, for example.

I think the home study — where a social worker spends time with prospective adoptive families at home — was, for most people we interviewed, a positive experience. The challenging part came at the very end, with the jockeying around of having a child placed. The families expressed some anxiety about “if they offered a child to us that we thought we really couldn’t handle, could we say no? And if we say ‘no,’ does that mean they will never try to offer another child to us?” In some states there are adoption parties and other ways of being proactive but potential adoptive parents expressed anxiety about how pro-active they should be. Finally, some children have a goal of adoption, but the courts have not completed the termination of parental rights. These are called legal risk children. Potential adoptive parents in these situations may be asked to become foster parents first. Many couples don’t want to go that route. They don’t want to adopt a child if there is any risk at all that the child’s natural parents will reclaim the child.

On the part of the state, the state is emphasizing that it is not trying to find the perfect child for a family; it is trying to find the best possible family for each child. So they are looking at it from the perspective of the child and take the time to assess the potential fit.

Q: Why do so many families in the U.S. find it easier to adopt children internationally rather than from within the U.S.?

Wilson: Many families prefer to adopt internationally because they can get infants or very young children. It is expensive, so I am not sure I would say it is easier, but primarily it is the idea of raising a child from a young age, opposed to a child who has been in foster care, that makes international adoptions attractive to many families.

Q: What can be learned from the ways in which other countries handle issues of foster care and adoptions? What models stand out?

Wilson: This is something I am just beginning to explore. I think it is very important right now to pay attention to the international protocols being developed around adopting children from countries that have experienced natural disasters and war. It is very important for us to help and support the efforts to ensue that only true orphans are released for adoption — not children who have become separated from their parents. We need to give countries enough time to figure out if there are family members who want to and do care for these children. I think that is really important for us to support.

In terms of models, one of the models I am quite intrigued with and would like to find out about — and maybe one of the people who hears this will know more and contact me — is in southern Africa. Where entire generations are losing many people to AIDS, the burden of caring for grandchildren has become too great for many of the grandparents. There are some new models emerging that attempt to keep these children with their extended family network, but to have them in a residential place within the community so that the grandparents can be with their grandchildren, but do not have the full-time responsibility of caring for a large number of grandchildren.

I think this is a really interesting model. If we experimented with some of this — we have a large residential placement population in this country, a lot of children in foster care — this could be a very interesting model to keep families together. While it is not right for every situation, it might work in many.

Reporters:

Please contact 617-495-1115 to arrange an interview with Julie Wilson.