In our foster parent training, we learned that all kids in foster care are special needs. By virtue of whatever circumstances removed them from their family and brought them into “the system” puts them into a more vulnerable position in our society. CPS first looks for a relative or friend to take the child so that he/she is not completely removed from their community and the move is less traumatic, but in many cases (including kids that would come to our home), they are often cut off from everything that they know.
That being said, some children are more difficult to place than others because of their special needs may be even more special. I have heard these cases described as “hard-to-place” children. Actually, before the middle of last century, many kids were expected to live the rest of their lives in institutions. When I was quite young, I saw a television movie hosted by Henry Winkler (at the time I could call him nothing but The Fonz) about a family, the Debolts, that was campaigning to change all that by growing their family with many special needs kids and starting a non-profit in order to facilitate the placements. So, by the end of the last century, the future of special needs kids looked very different.
Special needs pioneers changed adoption culture dramatically. Their vision of family defied the claim that adoptive kinship had to be invisible in order to be authentic, insisting instead on the purposeful and open inclusion of difference. This value, in turn, reflected an even broader shift in conceptions of national belonging and citizenship in the United States after World War II. Special needs adoptions symbolized the civil rights revolution within the adoption world. Their accomplishment was not only to offer more different kinds of families to more different kinds of children, but to openly welcome multiculturalism and multiracialism within the family well as within the history, demography, and politics of the country at large.
The sector of private (non-profit) agencies doing adoptive and foster placements was booming. Families were compensated at higher rates because they supposedly had better training. The agencies, themselves are also paid a high rate because they are responsible (along with the county worker) to monitor the children in the home.
This created a self-reinforcing cycle that it became more appealing to foster through an agency since 1) you get more staff support and 2) you get more monthly income. Additionally, working with agencies has been generally perceived as an easier and clearer road to adoption than working directly with the county.
Because of this, a scarcity of parents working directly with counties has emerged. Placements have become more expensive because a higher percentage are happening through agencies and social services have been forced to cut costs elsewhere and reduce their own staff.
Unfortunately, in all of this, the kids are the victims. Money is being spent to outsource when outsourcing is not necessary and is duplicating services being offered in-house. This is a case where most policies of the welfare system make sense on a policy level, but when translated to the actual life of a child, there best interests are not always what unfolds.
Children sometimes moved from foster care to adoption. Because termination of parental rights was a lengthy process, most of these were (and are) special needs adoptions. Foster children were invariably older and had complex loyalties to natal and foster kin. Their histories of separation and trauma were associated with behavioral and health problems. These characteristics made them undesirable to many would-be parents, and that made their adoptions difficult and expensive to arrange. After midcentury, agencies invested scarce time and money recruiting parents for hard-to-place children. By the 1960s, a few turned in frustration to controversial solutions like transracial adoptions.
A secondary ramification has been a gap in race and class between adoptive parents and foster parents, and I assert between agency parents and county parents.
Race as well as class marked the growing gap between foster care and adoption. During the postwar civil rights era, poor children of color, formerly denied many services, comprised more of the foster care caseload. Foster parents were somewhat better off economically than the children in their care, but they too were increasingly drawn from minority racial and ethnic communities. Foster parents were licensed and compensated by the state for the work they did, however meagerly, and had fewer legal protections than adoptive or birth parents. By definition, foster parents were not autonomous. They were expected to provide havens of safety and love for children at risk, but they were also responsible for keeping children in contact with relatives and agency workers. Adopters, on the other hand, were more affluent. They paid for the services they received, overwhelmingly preferred babies and young children whose racial identities matched their own, and were legally entitled to manage their families without supervision after court decrees were issued. Adoption spelled permanence, but the price of that permanence was the social obliteration of natal ties.
My experience is clearly VERY limited, but this supports what I witnessed in the orientations that I attended. At the county orientation, the room was primarily filled with people of color, immigrants and families of children in foster care that were trying to help them. In the two agency orientations that I attended, families were of varying races, but primarily white and almost exclusively middle and upper middle class.
