Special Needs Adoption

This edited volume contains contributions from leading researchers, policy makers, practitioners, and advocates in adoption policy and practice. Topics covered include adoption advocacy, race and adoption, placement of older and disabled children, adoption disruption, adoptive parent recruitment, and policy related to federal adoption subsidy support.

This volume reports the results of a large-scale survey of families who adopted children with "special needs": older children, minority children, handicapped children, or sibling groups. It assesses perceptions of social work services, parent-child relationships, family functioning, child behavior, school performance, and other aspects of adoptive family life. Rosenthal and Groze compare outcomes for different types of adoptions, including adoptions of children of different ages, adoptions by minority families, transracial adoptions, single-parent adoptions, adoptions by less educated and less wealthy families, adoptions by foster parents, adoptions of children with handicaps, and sibling group adoptions.

Adopting and Advocating for the Special Needs Child bridges the gap between the desire to help a waiting child and the reality of America's special needs adoption system. It is designed to be used by adoption professionals and adoptive parents, to help them get started, keep going, and locate whatever additional information and support they need. The authors are adoption professionals, long-time support volunteers, child advocates, and mothers of a total of 23 children, 14 of them adopted children with special needs.

Parents, child advocates, and family attorneys need to understand how to put the federal adoption assistance law to work for their children and clients in order to create adoptions, keep them intact and healthy, and encourage future special needs adoptive placements as well. This guide through the state adoption bureaucracies shows how to navigate the adoption assistance process, negotiate an adoption assistance contract, and plan effective administrative hearings and adoption subsidy appeals.

Joanne Finnegan shares her personal experience and that of several families she interviewed who, like herself, explored options other than raising their child with a disability. Parents express with candor the overwhelming pain they felt when receiving "the news," the frustration when searching for options, the "no-win" feeling of decision making, the resolve with a final decision, and finally, life after the decision. Parent quotes also address issues such as spiritual dilemmas and interactions with friends, family, their other children, and medical professionals. Words of advice for new parents include how to build support systems and gather information, how to search for an adoptive family, and arranging the details of communication between adoptive and birth parents. Interviews with adoptive parents, poetry, and extensive resource lists complete the book.