In nearly all States, adoption records are sealed and withheld from public inspection after an adoption is finalised. This book discusses state laws that provide for access to both nonidentifying and identifying information from an adoption record by adoptive parents and adult adopted persons, while still protecting the interests of all parties. Furthermore, the book discusses postadoption contact agreements, which are are arrangements that allow contact between a childs adoptive family and members of the childs birth family or other persons with whom the child has an established relationship, such as a foster parent, after the childs adoption has been finalized. These arrangements, sometimes referred to as cooperative adoption or open adoption agreements, can range from informal, mutual understandings between the birth and adoptive families to written, formal contracts.

Under the Adoption Incentives program, (Section 473A of the Social Security Act) states earn federal bonuses when they increase adoptions of children who are in need of new permanent families. Funding authorised for this program has been extended twice since it was established, most recently in 2008. This book discusses background related to the Adoption Incentives program, including the longstanding Congressional interest in domestic adoption and the significant increases in adoptions from foster care that have occurred since the middle 1990s. It also discusses the current program, including the incentive structure.

Foster children, often being removed from neglectful or abusive homes, are one of the country's most vulnerable populations. With the often traumatic circumstances that define their early lives, it is no wonder studies show their tendency for more mental health conditions than other children. Facing these and other significant challenges surrounding foster care programs, state authorities, caseworkers, and parents, are given few options on appropriate treatments. These options often include prescribing heavy-duty psychotropic drugs such as antidepressants and, in some cases, even antipsychotics -- drugs which have little research available supporting their use in children. This book examines the practice of medicating America's foster children with a focus on the financial and societal costs.

Written for busy foster carers and adoptive parents, this book provides a concise introduction to Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD), and how to support a child with a diagnosis. It emphasises the common strengths children with ASD have, as well as offering strategies for any behavioural issues that are likely to arise, highlighting how these can be exacerbated by the care system and adoption process. The first part of the book looks at the different aspects of autism and the challenges it can pose for children and parents, providing strategies for managing difficulties at home and at school, using social stories, and reducing sensory input in a child's environment. The second part looks at issues that arise for fostered or adopted children, including placement transitions, contact, and explaining the past. It concludes with helping parents to think about self-care.

"Every child's way of being can open doors to wisdom, compassion, and human connection. We need only to listen." This is among the conclusions that the authors, one of whom is an experienced foster parent and the other a professor of developmental psychology, draw as a result of working with a diverse range of children and families. Inspired by their relationships with families in crisis, the authors began to rethink the traditional foster care models and developed an innovative practice that afforded birth parents the opportunity to reside, under supervision, with their children during evaluation and treatment. Drawing on over 20 years of work in foster care, along with current attachment research and theory, this book conveys the foster care experience with recommendations for improved models of care and intervention strategies. Engaging case studies depict the challenging nature of determining the best outcome for a child and of supporting the adult's journey as a parent. Written in a narrative style and supported by in-depth research, this book will aid social workers and foster care professionals to better understand families in crisis and to further develop their practice.

The true story of runaway child with a secret. A devastating discovery that changes everything.

Melissa is a sweet-natured girl with a disturbing habit of running away and mixing with the wrong crowd. After she’s picked up by the police, and with nowhere else to go, she is locked in a secure unit with young offenders. Social Services beg specialist foster carer Angela to take her in, but can she keep the testing twelve-year-old safe? And will Angela ever learn what, or who, drove Melissa to run and hide, sometimes in the dead of night?

The Girl in the Dark is the sixth book from well-loved foster carer and Sunday Times bestselling author Angela Hart. This is a true story that shares the tale of one of the many children she has fostered over the years. Angela's stories show the difference that quiet care, a watchful eye and sympathetic ear can make to children who have had more difficult upbringings than most.

Andy Pithouse and Alyson Rees use original research to identify key ingredients needed to help create successful foster placements and help prevent placement breakdown. Studying the lives and activities of 10 foster families who provide lasting and effective care, the authors explore the families' everyday worlds. They look at the negotiations, activities, settings, meanings, rituals and relationships which help to create their successful placements. The authors identify the main components which, according to the carers and the children, contribute to acceptance, belonging and stability in the family. The book examines the emotional and practical work involved in caring, and explores how it is received and reciprocated by fostered young people. With important insights into child and carer perspectives on fostering, this book is a source of invaluable information for foster carers, children's service professionals, and trainees and care staff who may be engaged with children who are looked after.

The first comprehensive book for children born through donor conception and their families
More than one million people have been born in the U.S. through donor sperm or eggs, including Wendy Kramer's son. Realizing the unique concerns of being or parenting a donor-conceived child, Kramer launched what would become the world's largest database for connecting donor-conceived people, the Donor Sibling Registry (DSR), which receives up to two million hits per month.
"Finding Our Families "provides additional support for this growing community. With compassion and insight, the authors draw on extensive research to address situations families face throughout a donor-conceived child's development, including the search for a biological parent or half-sibling, and how to forge a healthy self-image.

What constitutes a family? Tracing the dramatic evolution of Americans' answer to this question over the past century, "Kinship by Design" provides the fullest account to date of modern adoption's history.
Beginning in the early 1900s, when children were still transferred between households by a variety of unregulated private arrangements, Ellen Herman details efforts by the U.S. Children's Bureau and the Child Welfare League of America to establish adoption standards in law and practice. She goes on to trace Americans' shifting ideas about matching children with physically or intellectually similar parents, revealing how research in developmental science and technology shaped adoption as it navigated the nature-nurture debate.
Concluding with an insightful analysis of the revolution that ushered in special needs, transracial, and international adoptions, "Kinship by Design" ultimately situates the practice as both a different way to make a family and a universal story about love, loss, identity, and belonging. In doing so, this volume provides a new vantage point from which to view twentieth-century America, revealing as much about social welfare, statecraft, and science as it does about childhood, family, and private life.

Sharing the daily struggles of children and families residing in transitional situations (homelessness or because of risk of homelessness, being connected with the child welfare system, or being new immigrants in temporary housing), this text recommends strategies for delivering mental health and intensive case-management services that maintain family integrity and stability. Based on work undertaken at the Center for the Vulnerable Child in Oakland, California, which has provided mental health and intensive case management to children and families living in transition for more than two decades, this volume outlines culturally sensitive practices to engage families that feel disrespected by the assistance of helping professionals or betrayed by their forgotten promises. Chapters discuss the Center's staffers' attempt to trace the influence of power, privilege, and beliefs on their education and their approach to treatment. Many U.S. children living in impoverished transitional situations are of color and come from generations of poverty, and the professionals they encounter are white, middle-class, and college-educated. The Center's work to identify the influences or obstacles interfering with services for this target population is therefore critical to formulating more effective treatment, interaction, and care.

The Children Money Can Buy covers decades of dramatic societal change in foster care and adoption, including the pendulum swings regarding open adoption and attitudes toward birth parents, the gradual acceptance of gay and lesbian adoption, the proliferation of unregulated adoption facilitators in the U.S., ethical concerns related to international adoption, and the role money inevitably plays in the foster care and adoption systems. Special attention is given to the practice of "baby brokering" and the accompanying exorbitant finder's fees and financial incentives encouraging birth mothers to relinquish (or pretend that they are planning to relinquish) their babies that permeate much of U.S. infant adoption today. The Children Money Can Buy illuminates the worlds of foster care and adoption through the personal stories Moody witnessed and experienced in her many years working in the foster care and adoption systems. These compelling stories about real people and situations illustrate larger life lessons about the way our society values-and fails to value-parents and children. They explore the root of ethical problems which are not only financially driven but reflect society's basic belief that some children are more valuable than others. Finally, Moody makes a plea for change and gives suggestions about how the foster care and adoption systems could work together for the benefit of children and families.

Betsy de Thierry's best-selling Simple Guides tell you what you really need to know about child trauma and attachment. This five-book library covers: * Attachment disorders * Child trauma * Collective trauma * Complex trauma and dissociation * Shame Providing easy routes to understanding difficult and complex concepts, these books give you an understanding of what trauma is and most importantly, how to help children and young people who have experienced it.

One sunny day, Bomji the rabbit and his friend Spotty the cat meet something very scary while picking flowers in the woods. The friends manage to escape, but afterwards Bomji just doesn't feel safe anymore. His body feels a bit different and he starts to have bad dreams. His friend Spotty is worried about Bomji - how can her friend be helped? Luckily, wise Teacher Owl is there for them. This therapeutic picture book allows children and adults to talk about a frightening experience. The story is followed by helpful guidance for adults on how to help their child. It explores how your body and how you feel is affected by scary experiences, and explains how you can use your body to help to recover too.

This book explores a deeply personal aspect of globalization: the adoption of Asian children by white Americans. It is based on dozens of interviews with adoptive mothers and adoption social workers, nearly two hundred letters and essays written by Korean birth mothers who put their children up for adoption, and field work at an adoption agency in South Korea. It also includes analyses and explanations of U.S. and South Korean governments' social characteristics and policies regarding adoptions and how relations between nations have affected international adoption. The book focuses on whether the commonly held notion that adoptions are to serve children's welfare and their best interests has tended to render gendered aspects of international adoptions invisible. Factors such as gender inequality, social control of women's reproductive power, patriarchic family structure, and social beliefs concerning womanhood and motherhood that affect international adoptions are revealed in this book. The multiple ways in which adoptive, birth, and foster mothers experience gender oppression from their different social positions of class, race, and nationality are explored and the interdependencies and inequalities of the motherhoods of these three groups of women are brought to light.

In the first chapter of Foster Care: Global Issues, Challenges and Perspectives of the 21st Century, the authors explore modern research regarding children of foster parents around the world, including an overview of literature and the use of an online virtual platform to connect the fostering community. Experts from Canada, the United States, Ireland, Sweden, Australia, and the United Kingdom offered up their knowledge on children of foster parents as well as recommendations for the well-being of said children. Next, a study exploring the implementation of a kinship search program in a child welfare agency is presented in order to determine its benefits. The authors conclude that Kinship Researchers are generally perceived as respectful, helpful, beneficial, and valuable. Additionally, child welfare policy is examined. Later, the essential practice of traditional kinship foster care in Ghana is explored, including current legal provisions, public perception, potential challenges, and future recommendations. The authors also discuss the phenomenon of runaway youth in the foster care system. Due to the fact that children in the foster care system are twice as likely to display runaway indicators than those in the general population, this is a significant issue that warrants understanding. A description of running away in the foster care system is rendered, along with the ramifications that may occur for on-the-run youth. The next chapter deliberates on a study regarding children in out-of-home care in South Korea, comparing the service status of different placement types in terms of developmental outcomes of the children. The results indicate that children in foster care thought of their caregivers and environments more positively than those in institutional care over a period of two years. The following chapter discusses a variety of federal and state laws that address children who were abused and consequently served by the child welfare system. The authors use case studies of foster youth to demonstrate how the law has been used to secure the services, support, and resources needed to place foster youth on a pathway to a more positive future. The final chapter outlines an approach known as, Watch me Play! which encourages supported child-led play in acknowledgement of extensive training needs in the social care workforce. The authors also discuss the potential impact of exploratory and symbolic play to child development, attachment, and communication.

'I was made in Coffee Bay. Right there on the beach, in the sand.'

From the opening lines, we are drawn in and engrossed by this startling memoir of a singular childhood. Suzan is adopted as a newborn in the late 1960s into a seemingly loving and welcoming family living in Pietermaritzburg. But Suzan is set on a collision course with, most particularly, her adoptive mother, and society, from her very beginning. Suzan's relationship with her mother is fraught with drama, which veers over into a level of emotional abuse and needless cruelty that is shocking.

At the age of thirteen, Suzan is sent to a place of safety as a ward of the state, effectively 'orphaning' her. From there, she spirals out of control – fighting to survive in a world of other neglected, abandoned and abused children. She becomes a 'runner', escaping at every opportunity from her various places of confinement, grabbing her schooling in snatches, living on the edges of a drug and prostitution underworld, finding love wherever she can.

Suzan’s young life was the stuff of movies, but it is her writing, in a voice that is unforgettable and true, that transforms her memories into something magical rarely matched in South African literature. A new classic.

White Parents, Black Children looks at the difficult issue of race in transracial adoptions-particularly the adoption by white parents of children from different racial and ethnic groups. Despite the long history of troubled and fragile race relations in the United States, some people believe the United States may be entering a post-racial state where race no longer matters, citing evidence like the increasing number of transracial adoptions to make this point. However, White Parents, Black Children argues that racism remains a factor for many children of transracial adoptions. Black children raised in white homes are not exempt from racism, and white parents are often naive about the experiences their children encounter. This book aims to bring to light racial issues that are often difficult for families to talk about, focusing on the racial socialization white parents provide for their transracially adopted children about what it means to be black in contemporary American society. Blending the stories of adoptees and their parents with extensive research, the authors discuss trends in transracial adoptions, challenge the concept of 'colorblind' America, and offer suggestions to help adoptees develop a healthy sense of self.

International media regularly features horrific stories about Chinese orphanages, especially when debating international adoption and human rights. Much of the popular information is dated and ill-informed about the experiences of most orphans in China today, Chinese government policy, and improvements evident in parts of China. Informal kinship care is the most common support for the orphaned children. The state supports orphans and abandoned children whose parents and relatives cannot be found or contacted. The book explores concrete examples about the changing experiences and future directions of Chinese child welfare policy. It is about the support to disadvantaged children, including abandoned children in the care of the state, most of whom have disabilities; HIV affected children; and orphans in kinship care. It identifies how many orphans are in China, how they are supported, the extent to which their rights are met, and what efforts are made to improve their rights and welfare provision. When our research about Chinese orphans started in 2001, these children were almost entirely voiceless. Since then, the Chinese government has committed to improving child welfare. We argue that a mixed welfare system, in which state provision supplements family and community care, is an effective direction to improve support for orphaned children. Government needs to take responsibility to guarantee orphans' rights as children, and support family networks to provide care so that children can grow up in their own communities. The book contributes to academic and policy understanding of the steps that have been taken and are still required to achieve the goal of a child welfare system in China that meets the rights of orphans to live and thrive with other children in a family.

The fourth in a series of true short stories from foster carer Mia Marconi. Kira first came to foster carer Mia Marconi's home on respite care when she was three. She had suffered an unimaginable amount of abuse in her short life. Although she couldn't tie her shoe laces, she could smash a room to pieces; she fought against everything like a wild cat. At the age of five Kira moved permanently to live with Mia and her family, but by the time she was nine years old the whole family was at breaking point. Mia is the kind of person who won't give in and believes she can always change things for the better, but try as she might she can't change Kira. So after six years, with a very heavy heart, she is forced to question whether she can really help this lost and damaged child. Raw, shocking and honest, this short story will shed new light on the role of foster carers, revealing the kind of heartbreaking real life situations carers like Mia Marconi are confronted with every day.

Working with children in foster care is a demanding and rigorous aspect of social work practice. Difficult decisions in fast-moving and often complex situations have to be made, and for students and practitioners alike, there is a vast array of legislation, law and social policy to understand.

This book is written to help social workers and social work students get to grips with the complexity of foster care. The child is placed at the heart of the text and there are substantial chapters on law, policy frameworks and the overreaching theoretical and research evidence to support good practice. There is also a strong focus on practical skills such as empathy and relationship-based practice. This is an essential text for experienced social workers or those currently in training.

Foster care is a temporary living arrangement for children who cannot remain safely in their own homes. For nearly every child who enters foster care, a first goal of the child welfare agency is to ensure necessary services are identified, and provided, so that the child can quickly and safely return to his or her parents. Most children who leave foster care do so to be reunited with parents or other family members. For some children, however, this is not possible. In those cases, the child welfare agency must work to find a new permanent home for these children and this may be accomplished through adoption or legal guardianship. This book examines Title IV-E of the Social Security Act, which declares that states, territories, and tribes are entitled to claim partial federal reimbursement for the cost of providing foster care, adoption assistance, and kinship guardianship assistance to children who meet federal eligibility criteria. The Title IV-E program, provides support for monthly payments on behalf of eligible children, as well as funds for related case management activities, training, data collection, and other costs of program administration.