I am putting this in Mpsims because I don’t think that its a general question and it doesn’t seem like an IMHO thing. If I am wrong could someone move it to the appropriate forum.
I would really like to hear about peoples experiences with fostercare and adoption, good or bad. How did you become foster parents or adoptive parents? Did you ahve to jump through hoops?
My parent adopted a seven year old boy when I was 14. He is and was great, when he first came we called him the human bullet because he never walked any where if he possibly help it - he ran!
He really became part of our family. However his birth Mum and step-dad were a real pain in the neck. THey didn’t give him up easily to Social Services. We have taken restraining orders out on them to stop them phoning us, changed our phone number twice and had to sopt his full dad from seeing him so often as he would give our current phone number to them because he didn’t see why he shouldn’t.
He had problems as he grew up, I’m not sure how much of it was due to being adopted and how much was general teenage behaviour. He always lives in his own world and that has caused a few problems, the latest was that two girls ran away from home, and there were requests on the TV etc for their return. THis happened over the weekend. On the Monday Mum asked him if he knew where they were as she thought that she recognised the girls. Apparently he had them sleeping in our (well-built) tree house and had been providing them with food and shelter. Luckily the police decided that he had been acting for the best **as far as he was concerned ** and had kept them off the street, so didn’t press charges. When aked why he hadn’t told anyone about this, his reply was “I promised not to”. Twit, he was 16 at the time.
He has recently gone back to live with his birthparent recently causing much heartbreak with Mum and Dad. His birth mum has emoitionally blackmailed him to stay with her (she has “taken” overdoses because he was with us for a weekend etc). Our life has been like a soap opera recently which is ridiculous. I think that he will eventually return to use for normality and has started to show signs of it last weekend. But I think that it will be a while yet. He has to live out his dream first, I think that he is still seeing that family with rose coloured spectacles.
For all that I know that Mum and Dad do not regret EVER adopting him. He is now whether he likes it or not part of our family and has been for the past 11 or so years. No that sounds wrong its whether his birth Mum likes it or not.
As I was young at the time I don’t remeber many of the details of the paperwork Mum and Dad went through. I do remember social workers visiting regularly asking all five of us questions.And it took about a year from when he first moved in with us (Mum and Dad fostered him while the adoption was going through) till he was adopted.
Yes it has been heartbreaking at times, going on holiday this year without him was hard but had to be done. But we are a family and he is our brother. I wouldn’t go back in time to stop Mum and Dad doing it in spite of everything.
That’s probably more detail than you wanted and I don’t know that I answered your question but that is my experience of adoption.
No actually that is exactly what I am looking for, thank you 
any story about fosterare and adoption is appreciated:)
Can I ask why you want to know about adopotion and fostering, are you thinking of adopting yourself?
I have two cousins who are adopted. The boy never had any problems with it. The girl went througha rebellious stage, a stage where she wanted to find her birth mother (her parents said if she wanted it when she was 18 they’d help her. Byt that time she didn’t.). She got married a few years ago. Her father’s business had gone under just before the wedding and all the country club plans they made went down the toilet. The whole family (aunts, uncles and cousins) helped out and she had a beautiful wedding. I think that was when she finally realized she was just as much a member of the family as every other member.
Both cousins were adopted as infants, if that makes any difference.
My brother-in-law’s family adopted a couple of their foster children. The last has turned out very wild - I think that the parents (adoptive, not birth) were too old and not in good enough health to really monitor the activities of a teenaged boy. He’s had some trouble with the law.
StG
thanks you all:) Yes I am interested in adoptin and fostering, and I want some real life stories, the ones i get out of books seem to be pretty one sided. And I only know a couple people who have actually done it
My son was adopted from South Korea as an infant. His best friend is a foster child.
There is a HUGE difference between adopting a baby and adopting or fostering an older child out of the foster care system. There is a HUGE difference between adoption within your race and raising a child who is of a different race (and which race can be huge!).
I’d be happy to talk about my son (big surprise, I’m a mom), but unless you are really interested in international interracial infant adoption it probably won’t do you much good.
How we did it? We didn’t have a lot of luck becoming parents in the traditional manner, so we looked into adoption. A little more than $15,000 later and 40 hours with a social worker (two people, about 20 hours a piece - but most of it was “group”) and a six month wait, and we had a baby. As for the hoops - I’ve discovered that some people who have gone through the same thing I have think its was HUGE!!! To me, it wasn’t a big deal. My subsequent pregnancy was much more intrusive.
yes, i am not interested in infant adoption, or international, but if you want post the info anyway because I am sure there are other people who would love to hear about it from a regular everyday person point of view.
People look at me cross eyed whenever i say i don’t want to adopt a baby, and would prefer an older child, goes with the territory i guess
iVillage’s parent soup has discussion boards about fostering, adoption, blended families, whole bunch of stuff: http://www.parentsoup.com/boards/
I went there when I thought they were going to force my aunt to change her placements (two really wonderful girls). If she hadn’t agreed to adopt them, we were going to try. With the fostering, (and probably with adoption too) there are a ton of people checking up on everything. Although with some of the stories you hear you wonder how the hell some things happen.
Sometimes you get good kids who behave and want to help, and sometimes you get the ones who just NEED alot of help. But they are ALL children, and ALL just really want something stable and some GENUINE love. For some of them that means teaching them how to love or trust or care for another person in the first place. You can’t go in with rose-colored glasses either. You may have to work through and undo hurts done previously to the child, and if they are still seeing their blood relatives, continue to undo such things.
Don’t let those who look at you funny about caring for an older child discourage you. All the years of childhood are a different kind of good in some way and its ridiculous the way some people consider children a ‘used model’ if they’re not still in diapers. :mad: Plus no matter what you do, once you become a parent, there will always be someone ready to look at you cross-eyed for something. :rolleyes:
I have an aunt and uncle who have two adopted children. They owned a large ranch (complete with oil wells) at the time and needed cheap labor. I know they care for and love their adopted children very much but I still think there was an ulterior motive behind it.
At least that was my interpretation of it. Both of the kids were pretty good growing up; however, one of the kids is now in jail for smuggling drugs over the mexican border. It then came out that when he was adopted (at 12 or 13) he had a minor drug problem that only worsened. His older brother (they aren’t blood related) was adopted much younger (around 7 I think) and never had the same sorts of problems.
I won’t look at you cross eyed - people have different motivations for adopting and different needs for having kids in the house.
I will suggest two things:
Know your own motivations. Social workers used to love people who wanted to “save” at risk children. Their is growing concensus that those placements don’t work out for the best and the better placement is with parents who want to love and partner with children.
Know what you are getting into and have realistic expectations. Particularly with older child adoption and fostering, there can be very deep wounds (physical, sexual, mental). Some are simply not healable no matter how much you want. This will vary a lot from child to child - one child who has been abused may bounce back - the next may never recover.
My sons best friend is doing great in his foster care placement - he entered at 3 and he is now 4 and there is a world of difference in the child. His foster parents hope to adopt him - which will be very good.
A friend of mine fostered a baby. I forget the ages now, but she got him when he six or eight weeks old and he was walking when he went to the birthmother’s family.
She’ll never do it again.
She knew, intellectually, that she’d have to give the baby back, but after teaching him how to walk and babytalk and all those things you do with an infant she found it very, very difficult to just hand him off to a “stranger”, and went so far as to tell social services to give her kids older than three from now on.
Well, my brother was adopted when he was almost three years old. The only thing about adopting an older child is that a lot of times they come in with attitudes set by their earlier surroundings. Fortunately, my brother was never abused in any way, but his foster parents (who he was with from when he was born until we adopted him) spoiled him absolutely rotten and didn’t discipline him in any way. Even now, at age 14, some of that willfulness still remains. Btw, the agency my parents adopted him through did at least two followup visits and we’re still on their mailing list. My cousin, who was adopted as a baby, hasn’t had any problems at all, but then he doesn’t know he was adopted (which I personally think is a bad idea – I think it’s better for adopted children to grow up knowing rather than feeling betrayed whenever someone gets around to telling them). I do think adoption is a very good idea. There are so many children who need a home.
My parents do foster care. I’ve been a foster sister for… about eight years now. We got into the system because I had a cousin whose parents got put in jail, and we were the next of kin, so we took her in. We had to jump through hoops - my parents had to take courses and continue to have to take classes in parenting and stuff to keep their certification with the state, I had to be fingerprinted and have a background check run on me when I turned 18 and continued to share a house with foster children, etc. We’ve taken care of kids of all ages, races, backgrounds, etc.
We don’t do it COMPLETELY out of the boundless generosity of our lovely little hearts. We DO get paid for it. It’s not GREAT pay - it’s not like we’re gonna get rich from these kids - but the pay the state gives us covers the cost of caring for the kids and provides for little extras that we couldn’t’ve had otherwise, like trips for the whole family to go to the Catskill Game Farm or the Great Escape theme park in Lake George.
After a while, when you’re doing short-term therapeutic care - taking in the kids, keeping them for a while, and then watching the state give them back to the same screw-up parents who had them taken away a few months ago for reasons varying from “is a crack dealer” to “we’re pretty sure he screwed his kids but they’re too little to testify to it in court so we can’t pin him on it”… you start to get burnt out. I don’t even get that emotionally attached to the kids any more. While they’re here, it’s nice, we’re a bigger family for a while, and they leave and I don’t miss them. If I fell in love with and cared for every single one of them like real family I’d just have an emotional meltdown by now.
Burnout isn’t a problem if you’re planning on taking children in for long-term placement with an eye towards adoption. However, that’s not worked out for us yet, so that’s MY experience as a kid on the outskirts of the system.
It would take a book to tell our experience with both foster care and adoption. Short version is that we had two sons of our own and then became foster parents. We had 7 foster children over the years and ended up adopting 3; our oldest daughter and twins (boy and girl).
Both girls had problems that resulted in rebellion when they were in their teens. The boy has had problems, such as wetting the bed and eating disorders, but not rebellion. All the problems came from the fact that they were not able to bond in the early years and a feeling of rejection. It was hard at times, but now that they have grown up all the problems are in the past and we would do it all over again. It still isn’t the best since we lost our oldest daughter, Marie, to cancer when she was in her mid-twenties.