Adoption

Waiting for Parents: Canadian Kids Need Homes

By Judy Grove

Adoption today is full of myths that damage the placement chances of Canadian children waiting to be adopted. Here are three of the most common myths:

Myth #1: Canada has no children available for adoption.

In fact, there are thousands of them. Healthy newborns are rare, but children who are older or who for other reasons are considered to have special needs, can be adopted within months. More than 20,000 Canadian children have had parental rights terminated by the courts and are waiting for a "forever" family.

Myth #2: People only want to adopt infants.

Thirty-one percent of the families listed with the Canada's Waiting Children program will consider adopting a child as old as eight. Some will accept children up to age 16. Just ten percent will only consider children under two.

Myth #3: Only infertile couples adopt.

In the Adoption Council of Ontario's recent study of families attending Adoption Resource Exchanges, 39% had biological children, and some had as many as five. These semi-annual events, held across the province, feature older, special-needs children.

What is the Canada's Waiting Children program?

The Adoption Council of Canada started the Canada's Waiting Children program in 1997 to debunk myths like these and to recruit homes for waiting children. The program was made possible by an initial grant from the Dave Thomas Foundation for Adoption in Dublin, Ohio. Dave Thomas, famous for starring in commercials for his Wendy's Restaurants, was himself adopted. The Foundation has provided grants totalling US $92,000, as well as radio and TV public service announcements that air across Canada. Wendy's Restaurants of Canada have raised over CDN $200,000 to support the program, and they all display Adoption Awareness Month posters featuring our toll-free information line.

Prospective parents may be a married or common-law couple, or a single man or woman. Some are childless, while others already have children in the home, or children who have grown up and left home. When would-be parents contact us, we mail them an information package that includes photos and profiles of waiting children, general adoption information, and an invoice for $10 to defray our expenses. Also included is a Family Information Form—the application to be registered with the program. When they return their completed form, we enter them in our family database. If they have expressed interest in a particular child, this information is sent to the child's agency. The child's worker is responsible for contacting either the family or their social worker if they are already in the adoption process.

Families registered with Canada's Waiting Children receive updates to the children's profiles about every three to four months. We also post the photos and profiles on our Web site.

Families can print and complete the Family Information Form from the Web site and mail it to us. We then e-mail them a password to access the photos and profiles. Since 1997, we have sent out more than 7,000 information packages and have registered over 750 families.

The point of all this is of course to bring more families into the adoption process. I find it baffling that child welfare organizations recognize the need to recruit foster families for children, but often don't see the need to recruit adoptive families for these same children. They seem to think that enough adoptive families will just walk in the door, despite the high number of waiting children and the fact that many have been waiting for years. The lack of interest in recruiting adoptive parents is all the more frustrating when you consider that placing a child for adoption usually frees up a foster family and saves money—the very things child welfare agencies say they don't have enough of.

Who are Canada's Waiting Children?

The children described in our information packages are in the care of child welfare agencies in one of seven provinces. They may be living with a foster family, or in a group home or small institution. Since the Canada's Waiting Children program began, agencies have referred over 300 youngsters and teens to the program. Obviously, they represent only a small percentage of all the adoptable children in Canada.

More boys than girls are referred to Canada's Waiting Children. Half are Caucasian, one-quarter are Aboriginal, and the rest are other visible minorities or have a mixed racial background.

The children are all considered to have special needs, but we define "special needs" very broadly. We believe any child in care potentially has special needs, although those needs may not be mmediately apparent. Many have had life experiences that have hampered their physical, emotional or intellectual growth. Some children have ongoing medical conditions or disabilities such as a heart defect or hearing impairment. In 27% of all the children referred to us, prenatal exposure to alcohol or drugs is known or suspected.

Some children are hard to place simply because it's best to keep them together with a brother or sister—sibling groups of up to four children are common—or because of their age.

Most waiting children are between four and ten years old, but they range in age from newborns to the mid-teens. So far, the oldest one in the program was fifteen when referred. Our youngest referrals have been unborn children diagnosed with medical conditions: three with Down Syndrome, and a fourth with spina bifida.

What happens when a child enters the program?

When a child is referred to the Canada's Waiting Children program, we first check our family database to see if anyone registered with us has indicated a willingness to adopt similar children. We send the child's photo and profile to them, and add it to the information packages for future mailings. Then we wait to see if any prospective adoptive parents will respond, letting us know they're interested in adopting the child. Not surprisingly, we receive many responses for some children and very few or none for others.

Sometimes, one response is all it takes. Only one family esponded to the fifteen-year-old boy mentioned earlier, but they were a good match for him and did in fact adopt him. A ten-year-old was listed with us after his agency had tried for more than three years to find him a family. Within two months of his entering our program, a family responded. After he was placed with them, two other families called to say they were interested in him. In the case of both boys, the families that adopted them had never before shown an interest in adopting. The boys might still be waiting if we had not been willing to register the families before they had their "home study" done by a social worker.

A subsidy is available for some children but unfortunately not for most. Even though most provinces have subsidy legislation on the books, some choose not to use it. Alberta has the most comprehensive subsidy legislation in Canada. In other provinces, it is the child's home agency that decides whether or not to provide a subsidy. The decision not to offer a subsidy can mean that the child will never have a permanent home. It can also cost the agency more in the long run since adoption placements with subsidies are usually more cost-effective than long-term foster care.

So far, we have played a role in placing over 120 children. Here are a few more of those who have found homes with the help of the Canada's Waiting Children program:

• A five-year-old girl and her six-year-old brother, of Métis background from Manitoba, were placed within three months with a Métis family in Newfoundland.
• An East Indian toddler was matched with a family of the same racial background within two weeks of his referral.
• A sibling set of four girls, ranging in age from five to eleven, was placed in less than six months.
• A two-year-old Afro-Canadian boy from Nova Scotia found a new family in British Columbia.

Experience shows that for every two children in our program who find homes, one more child not in the program will be placed with a family who became interested in adopting after seeing our children's profiles. But we can't track such things, so we will never know how many children have actually been adopted because of our efforts.

What are the real barriers?

When looking at barriers to adoption, people often emphasize the characteristics of the waiting child. However, two separate surveys on barriers (both distributed by the Adoption Council of Canada) indicate that the greatest barriers to placement are worker attitudes and systemic problems in Canada's public adoption system. Frequently cited barriers include:

• Agencies are under-staffed.
• There are no financial incentives for agencies to move children out of foster care.
• The legislative process to terminate parental rights is often too slow.
• Potential adoptive families are too often deterred by an unnecessarily lengthy process.

The responses were interesting because both surveys had very similar results despite the fact that the respondents represented different groups. For the most part, respondents to the first questionnaire described themselves as parents or prospective parents, while 72% of respondents to the second questionnaire described themselves as adoption professionals.

This second group of 122 respondents said not enough families were available, yet they went on to rate systemic factors as the main reason not enough families were recruited. Ninety-six percent of them agreed that more children in Canada should be adopted, but 52% said there were agencies and child welfare workers that did not believe in adoption. One respondent, when asked about the use of child-specific recruitment projects such as Canada's Waiting Children or the Alberta Government's Wednesday's Child program, said they weren't a good idea because the workers couldn't handle the response. So much for the "not enough families" excuse!

What's it like to raise special-needs children?

As the adoptive mother of six children who came to our family with a variety of special needs, I know the delights of seeing a child grow and develop. Margaret, Sascha, Carl, Peter, Edie and Terry—each brought his or her own unique challenges and rewards to the family. When Peter arrived at our home as a five and a-half-year-old, he couldn?t put three words together. Yet, by the time he was seven, he had improved so much that one day I actually had to tell him not to talk so much. That was a good day, and we had many others.

My husband and I firmly believe we have learned more through special-needs adoption than we ever would have otherwise. Our biological children, Ellen and Joe, have also learned from the experience and are wiser, more tolerant people because of it. In case you're wondering how they felt about growing up with adopted siblings, I'll just add that it was their idea to adopt Carl, our last child. Ellen and Joe, who were then 13 and 11, met four-year-old Carl at a party and announced to us that, since he was a foster child, we should adopt him.

Carl is now 23, and shares an apartment with Margaret and Sascha in the same building where my husband and I live. All three have Down Syndrome and manage very well, with the help of a part-time support worker.

Hope for Canada's thousands of waiting children has come from many sources recently—not only from the success of our program but also that of Alberta's Wednesday's Child, as well as from increased recruitment and adoption activity in British Columbia, positive changes to Ontario's Child and Family Services Act, and a proposed Adopt Ontario program. These are steps in the right direction, but if we hope someday to be able to say that every Canadian child has a home, there is still much work to be done.