US: National Adoption Month, 2023 (Press release)

Executive Office of the President – November 03, 2023

A Proclamation: Children are the kite strings that hold our Nation’s ambitions aloft, and every one of them deserves to grow up in a safe and loving home. This National Adoption Month, we celebrate all the families made whole through adoption and recommit to ensuring that every child can build a life of happiness and well-being. Today, more than a hundred thousand children are awaiting adoption in our Nation’s foster care system, hoping for the love, connection, and a lasting foundation that a permanent family can provide. To help more families cover the cost of adoption, I have urged the Congress to make the adoption tax credit fully refundable so that every adoptive family benefit, regardless of income, and can focus on building supportive lives together. I have proposed making legal guardians eligible as well so that loving grandparents, aunts, uncles, and others can care for children and keep extended families together. I have also expanded the Military Parental Leave Program, allowing service members to spend more time with their families after a child is born, adopted, or placed with them through long-term foster care. At the same time, my Administration is working to remove barriers that make it harder for LGBTQI+ families to adopt, including by providing State child welfare agencies with training and funds to better support and place LGBTQI+ youth in safe and compassionate environments.

https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2023/11/03/2023-24483/national-adoption-month-2023

NY: In New York, More Data Needed to Help Students in Foster Care, Experts Say
Imprint – October 24, 2023
For New Yorker Anthony Robinson, certain experiences stand out about attending school while in foster care, beginning at age 10 – illustrating how he felt unseen and unsupported. Among them is being put in classes a grade level behind where he had been previously and quickly becoming bored. That led to the desire to just cut out. “If I felt like the material wasn’t significant, or I knew it, I would just leave,” said Robinson, now 27 and a coordinator of educational and vocational resources for a foster care nonprofit serving New York City foster youth. He said his peers shared numerous challenges common to life in the child welfare system: seemingly ever-shifting schools and caregivers, traveling long distances from far-off foster homes and trying to stay focused when family connections feel scary and tenuous. Foster youth also experience higher rates of suspension, absenteeism and school instability, and lower math and test scores than their peers who live at home. “You can miss out on school if people aren’t checking up on you.” Advocates for foster youth like Robinson and child welfare scholars agree: Problems that aren’t measured and defined are difficult to fix. Yet while periodic reviews show foster youth struggle far more than their peers to succeed in school, consistent, specific and reliable data on their performance in school does not exist.
https://imprintnews.org/education/in-new-york-more-data-needed-to-help-students-in-foster-care-experts-say/245538

US: When Foster Parents Don’t Want to Give Back the Baby
ProPublica – October 16, 2023
It has become harder and harder to adopt a child, especially an infant, in the United States. Adoptions from abroad plummeted from 23,000 in 2004 to 1,500 last year, largely owing to stricter policies in Asia and elsewhere, and to a 2008 Hague Convention treaty designed to encourage adoptions within the country of origin and to reduce child trafficking. Domestically, as the stigma of single motherhood continues to wane, fewer young moms are voluntarily giving up their babies, and private adoption has, as a result, turned into an expensive waiting game. Fostering to adopt is now Plan C, but it, too, can be a long process, because the law requires that nearly all birth parents be given a chance before their rights are terminated. Intervening has emerged as a way for aspiring adopters to move things along and have more of a say in whether the birth family should be reunified.
https://www.propublica.org/article/foster-care-intervention-adoption-colorado

US: New Research Shows High Desire Among Black Americans To Become Foster Parents, But Distrust And Discrimination Prevents Them
Black Enterprise – October 21, 2023
Black Americans have a disproportionate desire to become foster parents, but have been reluctant to try due to continuous racial discrimination in the foster care system, according to new research conducted by Kidsave International and Gallup. The results, collected from March 22 to April 11 of this year, that one in three Black Americans have “thought a lot” about fostering a child, which is 10% higher than the average of other racial groups. 25% of Black adults have even seriously considered adopting a child from foster care or getting involved in a program to work with foster kids.
https://www.blackenterprise.com/study-25-percent-black-americans-consider-adopting/

US: It’s time to grant full citizenship to adoptees born outside of U.S. (Opinion) (May require subscription)
Enquirer – October 23, 2023
Since the end of World War II, the United States has welcomed over 500,000 individuals who were adopted from abroad as children and brought to the U.S. by American parents. But astonishingly, despite being raised by American parents with U.S citizenship, we weren’t automatically granted citizenship. My parents adopted me in the late 80s when international adoption procedures were wildly inconsistent and largely unsupervised. Luckily, my parents were assigned to someone who walked them through the citizenship labyrinth. But many weren’t so lucky. Agencies weren’t responsible for educating parents about the naturalization process. It wasn’t unheard of for parents to assume their children were automatically citizens − a reasonable assumption considering many European countries and Australia granted automatic citizenship upon their adoption finalization. Regrettably, the lack of regulatory oversight left adoptees vulnerable and unprotected.
https://www.cincinnati.com/story/opinion/contributors/2023/10/23/its-time-to-grant-full-citizenship-to-adoptees-born-abroad-opinion/71225511007/

US: Five Key Takeaways From Our Investigation on Foster Kids in Private Psychiatric Hospitals (Commentary)
Mother Jones – October 19, 2023
Universal Health Services, the country’s largest psychiatric hospital chain, claims on its website to provide compassionate care with a “relentless focus on quality” to thousands of patients each year. And it does well by investors, too: The publicly traded, Fortune 500 company brought in $13.4 billion last year. But a yearlong Mother Jones investigation tells a different story, shedding light on a large, profitable, and often-overlooked patient base: foster kids. To UHS and its competitors, foster kids are “a gold mine,” says Ron Davidson, a psychologist who spent two decades investigating psychiatric facilities.
Also: Inside the Psychiatric Hospitals Where Foster Kids Are a “Gold Mine” (Commentary) (Includes video): https://www.motherjones.com/crime-justice/2023/10/foster-kids-psychiatric-hospitals-universal-health-services-uhs-alaska-cps/
Also: “They Would Throw Me Into a Cage and Treat Me Like an Animal” (Includes video): https://www.motherjones.com/crime-justice/2023/10/universal-health-services-uhs-foster-kids-investigation-photoessay/
https://www.motherjones.com/crime-justice/2023/10/universal-health-services-foster-kids-uhs-investigation-takeaways/

US: Powerful, Not Powerless: Barriers to Foster Youth Well-Being
Psychology Today – October 20, 2023
Approximately 60 percent of the over 425,000 children in the United States foster care system will experience mental health struggles, including depression, anxiety, post-traumatic stress disorder, and other behavioral problems. Community stressors, such as chronic trauma, poverty, and lack of social support, compound these psychological struggles.
https://www.psychologytoday.com/za/blog/race-gender-and-popular-culture/202310/powerful-not-powerless-barriers-to-foster-youth-well

US: Mental Health After Foster Care (Opinion)
Imprint – October 16, 2023
My memories are a mosaic, a blend of both the bitter and the sweet. The searing pain of a hot iron pressed against my arm was punishment for attempting to protect my foster mother from abuse. Then there are the brighter moments: the moon rocks in the Smithsonian, riding my first horse, my first climb. These fragments coexist, a testament to the depths of my past. Buried beneath the pain lies a stolen childhood, nearly erased by a repressed mind. It wasn’t until I turned 27 that I decided to confront this past and seek therapy. Therapy isn’t as easy to come across these days as mental health support is in short supply and direly needed for individuals who have experienced any kind of child welfare involvement. Congress has an opportunity to expand this support with the upcoming reauthorization of Title IV-B of the Social Security Act, and should act swiftly to ensure kids who have been in foster care have the opportunity to thrive after such trauma.
https://imprintnews.org/opinion/mental-health-after-foster-care/245361

US: When Foster Parents Don’t Want to Give Back the Baby (May require subscription)
New Yorker & ProPublica – October 16, 2023
Carter’s drug exposure and his parents’ weeks-long absence had triggered a call to child-protective services, and then a neglect case against Alicia and Fred in the juvenile court of Washington County, where they lived. To get their son back, the judge informed them, they’d need to take a series of steps laid out by the county’s human-services department: pass random urinalysis drug tests, with missed ones considered positives; secure stable housing and employment; and make it to regular supervised visits with Carter. By the summer of 2020, Alicia and Fred had met every one of the judge’s requirements, and then some. They’d tested negative on more than thirty consecutive drug screens between them, including hair-follicle tests that indicated how long they’d been clean. They had continued to visit Carter weekly through the first months of the pandemic, when a “visit” meant trying to entertain an infant over Zoom. As the couple hit six months sober, the county’s Department of Human Services added, and the judge approved, one more element to their treatment plan: an expert evaluation of how well they interacted with Carter. If they cleared this last hurdle, Alicia and Fred understood, the system would let them reclaim their son. Alicia worried in advance about whether she could be silly with her baby while under scrutiny, and with everything to lose. She would have been more anxious had she known the truth: that she and Fred weren’t just demonstrating their fitness to care for Carter-they were competing for him. His foster parents, hoping to adopt him, had just weeks earlier embraced an increasingly popular legal strategy, known as foster-parent intervening, that significantly improved their odds of winning the child.
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2023/10/23/foster-family-biological-parents-adoption-intervenors