An innovative initiative by former Minnesota Supreme Court Justice Helen Meyer helps to support parents who have been accused of abusing their children. According to Myer, repairing the relationship between the parent and child is worth the effort and resources if it prevents the child from having to be placed in out-of-home care or adopted. [...]
Two weeks ago the City Limits newspaper published a series by Rachel Blustain on what she termed, "broken adoptions" - that is, adoption dissolutions. Photo by Marc Fader for City Limits. The numbers of how many adoptions fail is a tough statistic to obtain, in part because many adoption dissolutions occur years afer an adoption [...]
Last week a local news organization, The City Pages, published a feature article about a contested adoption case that the Minnesota Supreme Court is reviewing. As with many of these cases, this story highlights systems issues in child welfare, the tension between biological family and foster families, racial differences, interjurisdictional placements between states and the [...]
A same-sex couple in Alabama lost an appeal to allow the non-biological parent to adopt her partner's child last Friday. The couple, who were married in California in 2008, currently lives in Alabama which does not recognize same-sex marriage and does not allow the adoption because, according to the court, the woman "is not the [...]
On July 9th, 2012, the American Bar Association published a story about fraud in adoption subsidies. According to the report, hundreds of millions of the $2.5 billion paid in adoption subsidies may have been collected by adoptive parents who do not support their adopted children. The likely scenario, according to this report, is that an [...]
FOX Carolina 21 The ACLU is assisting six families in North Carolina in filing a federal lawsuit against the state for discrimination. North Carolina currently prohibits a partner from adopting his or her partner's biological or adopted child. This law affects both same-sex and unmarried heterosexual couples. Until 2010, North Carolina recognized second parent adoptions. [...]
One of the long-held myths about adoption has been that children become confused about the concept of having more than one set of parents. This became one of the rationales used to amend birth certificates identifying adoptive parents as birth parents once an adoption finalization has occurred in the United States, and to justify closed [...]
I've mentioned before what a wonderful resource the Child Welfare Information Gateway Library subscriptions are to professionals, researchers and families.I subscribe to a number of their "Libraries" - adoption, permanency, prevention, well being, etc. Each month the CWIG gathers the newest research articles, practice guides and policy updates on a number of child welfare topics, [...]