What is your experience adopting a teenager from foster care?
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Anonymous
| I have always wanted to adopt an older teen but I don't know anyone's experiences challenges and all. I would love to hear from you if you have adopted a teenager. |
Anonymous
| I fostered a tween and ultimately did not adopt. It was really hard. I think it would have been easier if a) I had more experience beforehand parenting kids that age and b) had more mental health support for the child and myself lined up. Everyone I know who adopted from foster care, regardless of the age at which the child was adopted, has dealt with IEPs and inpatient mental health care for the kids. And they all have needed counseling and antidepressants/antianxiety meds themselves. If you are not prepared for the police to be at your house or to spend time in an ER waiting to see if your kid will be admitted, you should not adopt. It is not guaranteed that you will experience these things but it is very likely. With that said, teens need parents and if you can do it well you will do a tremendous amount of good. |
Anonymous
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Why would you adopt?
You can let the kid keep the foster care status. That is a gift from the heavens when it comes to fafsa and financial aid for college. |
Anonymous
| I have done it. It is hard. Not impossible, but very hard. Developmentally, teenagers are supposed to be challenging everything about their adult caretakers---it is a normal developmental trajectory. So for a child who may have experienced no real "parenting" in terms of setting family values and expectations---they are at a developmental stage where they may not be receptive to that information. And because you missed the early child bonding years that often sustain parents through the challenges of teens--it is just that much harder. Add the issues described above re mental health challenges stemming from trauma or prenatal exposures and it is very, very difficult. |
Anonymous
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We adopted a child from the foster care system at age four. She is now 17. Different than your situation, I know.
The main point I would drive home is that, yes, there is a lot of trauma for these kids, but also: their biological/genetic imprint is extraordinarily strong. Just like it is for all of us. This is the part that nobody likes to talk about. We have to work 100x as hard with our child to keep her going down the wrong path as we do with the others. Twin studies and adoption studies have borne this out. It is extremely likely that a child will become very much like their biological parents and not so much like their adoptive parents, even if adopted from infancy, let alone toddlerhood or adolescence. You need to be ready for that. If you are, then you should do it. Any amount of love and protection you can give, any assault you can protect them from, any opportunity you can give is a gift to them. Don't expect anything in return. |
Anonymous
| *keep her from going down the wrong path |
Anonymous
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Most teens will not want to be adopted. Even if they were abused/neglected, they still love their parent and don't want to cut legal ties.
-Lawyer in the foster care system |
Anonymous
If there are still legal ties then the child is not available for adoption; that is, if parental rights have not been relinquished or terminated. |
Anonymous
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I did the courses and planned to foster a teen however by the end of the assessment, we had mutually decided (the case worker and I) that it wouldn't work.
They have a lot of rules that you have to follow. These are to protect you and the teen but it felt restrictive and unnatural in some ways. They also expected that I would be available at any time for the teen. For example if the school called in the middle of the day due to an issue - I would be expected to be able to be there. For appointments, visits, runnig away etc. You really need a SAHP. They told me it could be 8-10 times some weeks that I have to be available during working hours. They also told me that the majority of the teens currently awaiting placement had significant substance use issues and therefore theft and taking off at night / not coming home was to be expected. They said there would likely to be police and court involvement. Overall the commitment was just not feasible and they didn't think my work schedule would be conducive. There were four other families in the course who were also interested in teens and only one ended up making it through the approval process. The one family they accepted were kind of very simple people who just nodded and smiled and didn't ask questions and were very keen to please the assessors / instructors / case managers. |
Anonymous
Right so many kids in foster care are going to college. Most are kicked out of the program on their 18th birthday. |
Anonymous
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Echo the part about finances.
My HS boyfriend was a foster kid and had the same foster parents all through HS. Because they did not adopt him he was eligible for a lot of services and full financial aid in college. The only trade off is that cps will monitor you more — I remember issues like he absolutely couldn’t get arrested (even for stuff like civil disobedience) because that would trigger a cps inquiry that he didnt want to risk. My bf’s foster dad worked in the system (and had been basically a foster kid himself) and had handpicked my bf to be a kid that he thought he could help with a level of challenge that wouldn’t be too much for his family. My bf was very high IQ and came from parents that were very high IQ, and had a stable loving home when he was very young. (Neglect and abuse at very young ages has a different impact than it does at older ages and I think is harder to treat because it affects brain development.). His family did have a history of depression and probably bipolar but I think the foster dad felt like that was the sort of thing he could deal with. There was no history of real violence. Anyway, I don’t have a history of adopting teens so maybe my response is not at all helpful to you, but my experience (I also worked with kids in foster care for a brief period) is that you need to know what you’re capable of, and then find the right match for that. There are a lot of truly wonderful kids languishing in foster care but there are also some real nature/nurture issues that you need to be ready to deal with, including potentially increased genetic risk for mental health and addiction, which is the root cause for a lot of kids who end up in foster care. I think boys have a harder time finding homes because of the commonly held perception that hurt girls hurt themselves, whereas hurt boys hurt others. If you’ve never parented a teen before…..teens are tough! But fostering a teen who had a stable childhood from 0-5 might actually be in some ways easier than raising a teen who was severely neglected from 0-4 and whom you adopted at 5. |
Anonymous
Yes they are kicked out of the state program, but if they have no parents they will get full financial aid at basically any college. If a middle class parent adopts them they will get no or little aid—and presumably the adoptive parent hasn’t been saving up for 18 years like a birth parent might. |
Anonymous
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I have family in a Scandinavian country and the way that the foster care system deals with teenagers is that they basically are taught independent living.
So the goal is to not provide parenting as such but how to live, like do laundry, cook, clean the refrigerator, learn to drive, find employment, apply for aid and assistance. |
Anonymous
Because it gives a child a family and if you adopt an older child they get help with college, medicaid and a stipend. |
Anonymous
Thats not the point of the post. |