We came up with this as a resource for friends who are in the matching process right now. This was basically written by J- and edited by me.

Find out as much as possible about previous placements and disruptions, and in particular, try to have your social worker review all the material.  In our case, there had been so many changes in social workers for the girls (and mixed in was another foster family agency as well), that you should be able to put together a reasonable story about C-, rather than expecting disclosure to be a final and definitive information session.

Ultimately, we believe that we were dealing with the wrong person, and that there were other social workers and therapists who would have better served our understanding.  The social worker is only expected to do monthly visits, it is the therapists, teachers and foster parents that area actually participating in their life and will give you a picture of who the kid is.

In some cases, there are IEPs and other sorts of documentation, and the reasons that any services were requested or granted are huge clues to the kinds of difficulties you might face.  For instance, one document I recently viewed described a need for respite in a previous home based on the need for “24-hour supervision” of T-4.  This is a huge clue that she is unable to be left alone, that she has a disturbed sleep schedule.  Things like this might have helped us interpret the initial description of her as “really knows how to push her sister’s buttons.”  Ha ha, sounds funny, kind of cute, right?  But actually, she can reduce her sister (remember, her older sister by two and a half years) to tears in seconds, and does so with a vicious regularity.

Here are some very specific questions to ask, not necessarily of the social worker, but also of the foster mom if possible:

• “Please describe to me, in detail, the girl’s daily routine around waking, breakfast, bathing, toothbrushing, and going to sleep.”  These can be huge sites of conflict, and we are now familiar with many stories of foster children who have very serious night-time disturbances.  We did not know that we would spend between one and three hours (each!) of devoted time every night to get the girls to bed.
• “May I have a written report from her current and previous teachers on her levels of attention and grade-level achievements.”  We were told that T-7 was doing “very well” in school, when in fact she’s a basket case, has been well below grade level, and deeply objects to even minimal school work.
• “Please describe to me specific incidents of the described strongheadedness.”  How does she respond to frustration? Does she tantrum?  If so, how do the tantrums manifest, e.g., are they in public; how long do they last; do they involve breaking things, intermittent or incessant screaming, or physical violence toward others such as hitting, kicking, or biting?  “How well does she transition between different activities?”  Does she run and hide, in the house or out?  Does she refuse to comply?  Does she talk back?  “Does she sometime require either physical restraint or being picked up from place to place.”  If so, how does she respond to this?  “Strongheadedness” can be a code for oppositional, defiant, and control-seeking behavior, and has been a plentiful fount of simple unpleasantness for us, when it does not balloon into tantrums, as it often does.
• “What are some of the activities she has been involved with?  What kinds of games, if any, is she able to play?”  Has she taken care of family pets, been in an afterschool program, learned to kick or throw a ball, ride a bicycle, dress a doll, draw or paint?  Both my girls are developmentally behind in basic pre-school skills and imaginative play capacities.  They are catching up, but it helps to know just how “old” your new child “is.”  We thought we were getting a 4 and a 6 year old, but really when they moved in they were developmentally all over the place.  Mix that with regression (not unusual upon adoptive placement), and we found ourselves unable to generate age-appropriate behaviors from them.

And here are some comments on adoptions out of county:

• We underestimated the difficulty of the travel.  Even with family in Sacramento, visits are very difficult and trying.  We were driving out there twice each week: Tuesdays we drove there and back ourselves, and spent a few hours with the girls.  We were also driving there and back each weekend to pick up the girls and bring them back to our home.  That was three days a week of substantial driving (the trip was nearly two hours, could be more with traffic, and the visits are basically as far out in Sacramento County as you can get).  This meant getting dog care each time, disrupting our own eating and sleeping, and increased car maintenance at 600+ miles per week.  It also meant driving out to meet the social worker, do the disclosure meeting, driving again back and forth to pick up the girls’s possessions, bringing T-4 back for a medical appointment…  And now, any trip out there with the girls means nearly four hours for them in the car (more if they spend much of it screaming and we have to pull over!).  Will you have parent or relative visits?
• Accessing services via medi-Cal has been VERY complicated, and most of the complications had to do with agencies in Alameda that require Alameda residence status.  The Medi-Cal bureaucracy is huge and disparate, and what one agency pulled up on its computer was (and still is!) usually different from what another pulled up.  Our agency was initially very negligent on this score (”oh, they changed the rules and nobody understands it, and anyway, it’s your responsibility to take care of” — when we were thinking “uh huh, and you’ve been doing this for thirty years and have no idea what the fuck you are doing?”).  Eventually, they did some important work that helped us get T-4 initial school covered, but the period of working through this was perhaps the worst few weeks of my life.  Even so, I made a lot of mistakes, some of which I am still in the process of rectifying.
• This is a part of 2, perhaps, but D- indicated that C- was not presenting for any therapeutic services.  This is absurd.  Most “normal” kids need therapy; all foster kids do.  Get this set up in advance.
• Also, adopting out of county means more distance between us, our social worker (M-), and the reams of people who are involved in the case in Sacramento.  If C- is not post-.26 (legally free for adoption), then don’t believe what anyone tells you.  Our girls were initially offered up as “will be smooth sailing to .26,” and then at the disclosure meeting it was “well, the parents will fight it, but it doesn’t mean anything.”  While this could include delaying .26 termination resolution (taking it to “trial”), it also means that they appealed placement out of county, prevented transfer of educational rights, and asked for reinstatement of reunification services (the answer was “no,” thank goodness).

We spent most of our disclosure meeting discussing T-4’s medical history to make sure that she didn’t appear permanently unable to live independently.  This was a mistake.  We knew going in we were prepared to assist her in rectifying her long-term medical neglect, and though we have had to do a lot of work around her medical issues, it has never been especially onerous to us.  What we should have discussed were the behavioral issues that were being hidden from us or minimized.

I sometimes like to say: “well, the social worker didn’t lie about everything, as there were some half-truths mixed in!”

A book that has been great for me the last month or so is my last tip: Daniel Hughes, “Building the Bonds of Attachment,” 2nd ed.  I don’t know how much it would have helped me before the girls moved in, because I understand things now I never could have six months ago.  But it is also excellent reading, and D- is planning on re-reading it.  It is a narrative of the first 7 years of the life of Katie, who is a fictional composite of many foster children.   “Katie” is even more pronounced in her attachment insecurity than my girls, and manifests it in ways that are more destructive. But, “she” has taught me a ton about why my girls are unable to do some very simple things, and why their initial external “charm” serves to cover over a profoundly dis-integrated sense of self, inhibiting them from experiencing self-satisfaction, and implanting shame deep into their core personality.

I no longer believe that anyone who has experienced several placements at a young age will be entirely free of attachment issues, and that they will manifest as behavioral issues in one way or another.  As I said above, if C-has not been receiving therapeutic services, somebody hasn’t been paying attention, and if they haven’t paid attention to that, you need to know what else they have been missing.