Word: fosterers
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...married and a mother of two, SaBreena is close to her parents, but as her story shows, adopting a teen can pose all kinds of challenges for the parents and the child. Over the past few years, however, the number of 12- to 18-year-olds adopted out of foster care has risen sharply, from 6,000 in 2000 to 10,000 in 2004. That's thanks, in part, to financial incentives and intensive campaigns to persuade people to take in some of society's most unwanted children. Monthly foster-care subsidies, which used to stop after a child...
Child-welfare advocates applaud the trend. Young people who "age out" of foster care because they fail to get adopted by the time they turn 18 are especially at risk for homelessness, unemployment and incarceration. "When you grow up in foster care, you just don't get the skills it takes to develop a successful adulthood," says Brenda McCreight, author of Parenting Your Older Adopted Child...
Concerned parents like the Juarezes can provide the grounding these kids need, but it can be extremely difficult for some foster teens to make the transition into a permanent family. About a quarter of adolescent adoptions fail before they're finalized, vs. about 12% of adoptions overall. "You get the double whammy of teen rebellion combined with the challenge of asking the child to change their way of life, which for them is like changing their identity," says McCreight. To make such adoptions work "takes flexibility and families that are willing to give unconditional love and set limits and discipline...
More than half of all foster teens who get adopted are adopted by their foster parents. All states require prospective foster parents and those who adopt from the foster-care system to take a training program to prepare them for issues that range from coping with the horrors of sexual or physical abuse to the banalities of eating dinner as a family or observing curfews. But parents who have taken the courses say they are only somewhat useful. "Nothing prepares you for when the child comes into your home," says Shirley Williams, who adopted two teenagers last fall. Still...
UNLIKE SABREENA, DAN KNAPP NEVER RAN away or openly clashed with his adoptive mother. "He never gave me a problem. He just made me proud," says Jackie Knapp, 53, a single mom who is the education director at a Christian center in Elmira, N.Y. Placed in foster care at age 9 after his father died and his mother was unable to care for him on her own, Dan moved in with Jackie and her parents the next year. Now 24, he still remembers the meeting he attended in which his birth mother told the social worker that she was relinquishing...