The Change Mariner

Unintended Consequences of State Adoption Cash Incentives

NYT

... States across the country, often in response to cash incentives offered by the federal government, have been under intense pressure in recent years to move children through their foster care systems and into permanent homes. Indeed, the number of annual adoptions nationally almost doubled from 1995 to 2001, and New Jersey adoptions more than doubled in an even shorter time, to 1,364 in 2002 from 621 in 1998.

But the effort to increase adoptions of the largely poor and minority children in the states' care has not been met with any surge of ideal families waiting to take them in. Instead, the already thin ranks of foster parents are being pushed to take up the slack, with states using federal money to subsidize the costs of formally adopting the children. The payments to parents willing to adopt can amount to hundreds of dollars a month per child. The Jacksons, with six adopted children and one foster child, received more than $30,000 in government payments last year.

The adoption of needy children is in many cases a good thing, and often the foster families they wind up with as adopted children are those they have lived with for years. But some state officials and child welfare experts say they worry that the current push is, in essence, transforming adoption into an extended form of foster care and a possible peril to children.

Once children are formally adopted, for instance, the state is no longer entitled to closely monitor their well-being. And having extended money to the foster parents willing to formally adopt — a greater amount is paid to the families who adopt medically fragile or psychologically troubled children — the risk exists that families take on more than they can handle, sometimes just for the additional money.

"Have we gone too far too fast?" asks Gary Stangler, executive director of Jim Casey Youth Opportunities Initiative, a private foundation in St. Louis focusing on getting children out of foster care. "I worry that with all the applause going to the increasing numbers of adoptions, that we are possibly putting these young people into families not equipped or prepared to handle them."

Experts are quick to caution that the case of the Jacksons of New Jersey may prove to be distinctly aberrant, and data concerning abuse or other problems experienced by children who have been adopted in recent years is still developing.

Posted by Norm M. Wada at October 28, 2003 10:59 PM | TrackBack
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