Adoption Assistance Negotiations Could Use Some Empathy

Adoptive Parents as Partners in Negotiating Adoption Assistance

Father Gregory Boyle, S.J. is one of my heroes. Father Boyle or “G” is the founder of Homeboy Industries in Los Angeles, the largest gang intervention program in the United States. Unlike other rehabilitation and workforce development models, Homeboy Industries welcomes gang members as kin, with full acceptance of their inherent worth as God’s beloved. In his first book, Tatoos on the Heart, Boyle recognizes the trauma and shame that gang members bring with them to Homeboy. “Here is what we seek,” he writes, “a compassion that can stand in awe at what the poor have to carry rather than stand in judgment at how they carry it.”

The story of Homeboy (and Homegirl) Industries reminds me of why I have found working with adoptive parents over the decades to be so compelling. Family after family I encounter embrace the pain their children carry with them. Their devotion to healing their children’s traumas through the kinship of a lifelong family has always been awe inspiring to me. I am also fortunate to have accidently acquired nauseatingly detailed information about adoption assistance that turns out to be useful to adoptive families.

My primary goal, all these years, has been to help adoptive parents become effective advocates for their children by providing enough useful information to navigate the confusing path to adoption assistance. Given my obsessive drive to see effective outcomes, however, I have sometimes been consumed with abstract policy issues at the expense of the human dimension.

I am aware, of course, of the stress families experience in applying for and negotiating adoption assistance. But, from time to time, I need to be jarred into a recognition of what individual parents and their children are really going through. By the time adoptive parents are desperate enough to contact me, (a scary thought, indeed), they may be wrestling with an enervating sense of isolation. Peers, friends and relatives may not comprehend why they can’t get their child under control, which may give rise to whispers about their parenting skills.

Although county agencies and parents share the goal of thoroughly integrating a hurt children into permanent families, the practice of negotiating adoption assistance in Ohio relegates adoptive parents into the role of mere applicants rather than partners. It would be irresponsibly naive of me to ignore how funding concerns quickly reduce the negotiation of adoption assistance into an adversarial process. Money will always matter. It is remarkable, nonetheless, how the very people the agency has entrusted to become forever parents could have so little credibility with the agency in discussing the support they need.

By the time adoption proceedings are initiated, a majority of prospective adoptive parents have provided years of care as their child’s foster parents, grandparents, aunts or uncles. They are hardly strangers to the custodial agency and neither is the child they plan to adopt. Despite this degree of familiarity, empathy is largely missing from the negotiation of adoption assistance in Ohio. There is a general failure to recognize that advocating for financial support is, at best, is a necessary, but painful responsibility embraced by adoptive parents. But, bearing one’s soul for the sake of their child’s well-being can feel downright degrading when it is not particularly welcome.

Negotiation practice in Ohio does place much emphasis on understanding the particular challenges facing adoptive parents and their children. On the contrary, the attempts by parents to help the agency understand their situation are too often greeted with skepticism.

So, when adoptive parents contact me for suggestions about how to proceed in negotiating adoption assistance, they are not just looking for policy information or suggestions on how to proceed. They are also seeking a sense of legitimacy, some assurance that they are not greedy, unreasonable or out of touch with reality in their difficult quest for an adequate amount of post adoption support. Simply put, they want to be taken seriously. They want to be afforded the respect of partners in establishing permanent families, rather than applicants for a defined benefit.

Incorporating empathy into negotiation procedures would not settle all disagreements about the proper amount of adoption assistance, although it might bring the parties closer together. A partnership model would also reduce the mistrust and conflict which has been so rampant for such a long time.

A Final Note - I realize that the three paths to permanency for children placed in the child welfare system; reunification with birth parents, kinship care and adoption are somewhat in tension with one another, at least in the following respect. With the child’s future so much at stake, there is always the question of whether each possible path receives a sufficient amount of public investment. Considering the specific circumstances, do birth parents, for example, have access to the support services they need to be reunited with their children? Are the merits of relative placements given due consideration and support? Is adoption chosen as the best permanency option after a conscientious consideration of the other two alternatives.

I bring this up to put my experience with adoptive families in its proper context. I am certainly not qualified to judge ultimate child placement decisions. My efforts to inform people about adoption assistance are confined to the period after adoption placement decisions have already been made.

Adoption assistance was established as a public investment in families for special needs children. The overwhelming majority of adoptive parents I have encountered over decades are people with a special calling. On behalf of that calling, parents must participate in the unpleasant, but essential, task of requesting financial support on behalf of their special needs children. It is way past time for the negotiation process to recognize the parents as full partners in crafting post adoption support plans.