Eliminating Barriers to the Adoption of Children from Foster Care

For children in foster care who cannot be reunified with their families of origin, there is no question that adoption is preferable to “aging out”. Moreover, every dollar spent on adoption for a child from foster care yields three dollars in benefits. Yet, 27,854 youth aged out of foster care in FY2010, and, for each child who was adopted during the year, two children with a goal of adoption continued to wait in foster care. Research shows that there are more than enough families interested in adopting children from foster care, but that only one in 28 people who contacts a child welfare agency actually adopts a child. Today there are more than 100,000 children waiting in foster care in large part because of barriers in the adoption system that could be eliminated through changes in policy and practice. Barriers to adoption from foster care identified by participants in the Executive Session include: • financial disincentives for creating interstate adoptions; • lack of standardized information about families seeking to adopt and about children waiting to be adopted; • insufficient post-adoption support compared to support for youth aging out; and • absence of a robust model for creating adoptions, including effective recruitment of adoptive families; appropriate caseloads, training, and supervision for workers; and significant youth involvement. Congress is best-positioned to create incentives to improve and standardize adoption practice within each state and to facilitate adoptions across state lines. To increase the number of adoptions, Congress should: 1. Reward both sending and receiving states for creating interstate adoptions. 2. Establish national standards for home studies and for descriptions of waiting children. 3. Eliminate long-term foster care as a goal. 4. Emphasize funding for post-adoption services. 5. Encourage development of a robust, comprehensive practice model of adoptions from foster care

The Context and Meaning of Family Strengthening in Indian America

This paper analyzes the challenges of family strengthening in Indian Country and discusses strategies for effective intervention

Finishing the euchromatic sequence of the human genome

The sequence of the human genome encodes the genetic instructions for human physiology, as well as rich information about human evolution. In 2001, the International Human Genome Sequencing Consortium reported a draft sequence of the euchromatic portion of the human genome. Since then, the international collaboration has worked to convert this draft into a genome sequence with high accuracy and nearly complete coverage. Here, we report the result of this finishing process. The current genome sequence (Build 35) contains 2.85 billion nucleotides interrupted by only 341 gaps. It covers ∼99% of the euchromatic genome and is accurate to an error rate of ∼1 event per 100,000 bases. Many of the remaining euchromatic gaps are associated with segmental duplications and will require focused work with new methods. The near-complete sequence, the first for a vertebrate, greatly improves the precision of biological analyses of the human genome including studies of gene number, birth and death. Notably, the human enome seems to encode only 20,000-25,000 protein-coding genes. The genome sequence reported here should serve as a firm foundation for biomedical research in the decades ahead

Listening to Parents: Overcoming Barriers to the Adoption of Children from Foster Care

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 post-ASFA adoptions were by foster parents or relatives of the children in care. Why so few children are adopted by general applicants is an important question, particularly for the 131,000 waiting for permanent homes. We examined this question using federal data (AFCARS), a state survey, and case record reviews and interviews with parents and agency staff in three sites. We found a steep attrition rate as prospective families go from initial call to adoption, and identified two particularly crucial points in the process. The first is the prospective parents’ initial call to an agency. This information call can be an intensely emotional experience for the prospective adoptive parent, but agencies, faced with the challenge of balancing recruitment with screening, do not handle it as well as they might. The second is the placement process. In part his is a result of the inherent conflict between parents looking for the “right child” to complete their family and agencies looking for the “right home” for each child. But we also found great confusion about how the placement decision is made and what role the prospective adoptive parents should play in it. Among our recommendations are an early focus on recruitment rather than screening; documentation of the adoption process and qualifications for adopting; and, a separation of screening from training wherever possible. We also recommend a changing the way initial calls are handled and development of a buddy system paring prospective adoptive parents with experienced adoptive parents, and establishment of a process for soliciting, and incorporating feedback from prospective parents. If we want to find homes for waiting children, it is absolutely critical that child welfare agencies develop ways of listening to prospective parents throughout the adoption process and responding to their needs and concerns.