Adoption and Foster kids

The rules around adopting him would, most likely, depend on the state in which you live. You should be able to find information about child welfare services in your state on the web easily enough. Also, though, since you think your son's friend lives with a foster family, you should speak to the foster parents. As foster parents, they will most likely know a bit about the process.

My wife and I are thinking of adopting, and you would be doing a wonderful thing, particularly for an older child as it's hard to find adoptive parents for older kids. My wife's family did fostering when she was growing up, and her brother is adopted, and she had great experiences with that. Frankly, there's so many kids out there who need help, I wish adoption was looked at more often by people.

I would imagine it would take counseling for everyone involved. Did your wife think it was hard on her at all ?

The guy before me gives good advice.

Without knowing his situation the first thing you will need to find out is if he is adoptable. With many kids who are in foster care they are not available for adoption because their own parents rights have not been terminated. Social Services have family reunification for their first goal and have to work to achieve that (which ranges from good efforts if it is a realistic possibility to jumping through hoops if it is not). If the child is older the social services will not terminate parental rights, both because the availability of adoptive parents is poor and because the parents are paying child support towards some of the costs of foster care. So you need to find out what his legal status is first--this might not be easy because the foster parents are probably precluded from sharing this with you because of privacy rights. They may not even be allowed to tell you he is a foster child.

The one thing I would advise is make sure that you are 100% committed prior to pursuing this. I knew a couple who moved to adopt an older girl. She had a lot of behavioral problems (pretty common for somebody who is in the system) that they thought they could just "love" out of her. It didn't work and they were naive to think that, but they ended up dumping her back into the foster care system. It just screwed up the girl worse. Your kid seems like a great kid to you but it is likely that whatever has placed him in foster care comes with some unique challenges. Don't be naive about that.

I dont know anything about it, but wow, its really impressive that you thought about doing this.

Good luck!

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Mr. Obvious wrote:

The one thing I would advise is make sure that you are 100% committed prior to pursuing this. I knew a couple who moved to adopt an older girl. She had a lot of behavioral problems (pretty common for somebody who is in the system) that they thought they could just "love" out of her. It didn't work and they were naive to think that, but they ended up dumping her back into the foster care system. It just screwed up the girl worse. Your kid seems like a great kid to you but it is likely that whatever has placed him in foster care comes with some unique challenges. Don't be naive about that.

Also consider how this is going to affect your own son. Adopting another child is a situation that can be good for everyone, but you're going to have to handle your son's feelings with care.

When you adopt a child, he's YOUR SON. You have to love him 100%. One of the worst things you could do is adopt him and then make him feel like an outsider, like he owes you special gratitude that your own son doesn't, and like he's not a real part of your family.

But on the other hand, your son shouldn't feel that he's being marginalized or replaced. He needs to realize that the family dynamic will change and that he'll need to make compromises. He needs to be completely committed to having a new brother too.

And despite your best efforts, no matter how fair and understanding everyone tries to be, these feelings probably will surface. The boys may fight and say damaging things, and some of those things may be things they really need to express and deal with. If you're prepared for these conflicts and everyone in your family is committed to having a new, teenaged child in the family, than it will be worthwhile, but don't take it on until you've really considered all the problems you could be dealing with.