Word: child
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...even when adoptive parents come forward, the foster-care and adoptive system can keep the children tantalizingly out of reach. Designed to be a short-term arrangement ending in either adoption or the child's return to a competent parent, foster care has become a kind of indeterminate sentence. Only about half of all foster children return home; many of the rest are suspended in a legal limbo by parents who make little effort to regain their children but refuse to relinquish them fully. Although federal law mandates that a child whose mother shows no inclination to plan...
...legally possible. "Parents don't have to go to Korea or South America if they ! want to adopt an infant," says adoption-services director Ferrer. "Get a home study done, which takes six weeks, register with an agency as a pre- adoptive foster parent, and you will get a child a few weeks later...
...consequence of this policy has been that black children, who make up about 40% of the foster-child population, tend to spend much longer waiting for adoption than whites. Recently agencies have been quietly permitting more black children to go to white adoptive homes. They have also been mobilizing to recruit more potential black parents...
Parents who adopt special-needs children speak of the rewards as often as the difficulties. Says Sam Borodin of Philadelphia, who with his wife has adopted three girls with Down syndrome: "They have given us joy and love back tenfold." But there are times when caring for a child with special needs can be too hard a test. In Texas a group of seven couples has brought a lawsuit against the state adoption agency, charging that they should have been told that their adopted children had been abused. As the children approached adolescence, they began to behave in a bizarre...
...child-rearing problems encountered by the Texas couples are not typical, but no one denies that parents who take on special-needs kids must enter the relationship with their eyes open. The minimum requirements are a level head and a spacious heart. Susan Edelstein, a clinical social worker at the University of California, Los Angeles, who is supervising a study of children exposed to drugs, has a list of the mental and spiritual resources that the parents of such children should have. It could apply to anyone who takes on a special-needs kid. "You've got to be optimistic...