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For people who are just discovering their infertility or who are thinking about their options, these audio portraits of women who have dealt with the issue, should be helpful. At minimum, you wil understand that you are not alone in your struggle.

Miriam Vieni, L.C.S.W.
www.nyhomestudy.com
www.nyhomestudy.com/miriam-vieni.htm
www.nyhomestudy.net
miriamvieni@optonline.net
(516) 333-4999
Fax (516) 876-8246

June 8, 2008
By LISA W. FODERARO

Eight months into New York City’s bold experiment of moving hundreds of troubled teenagers out of group homes and into foster care, the system is stretched so thin that many involved say they are having trouble making thoughtful matches between foster parents and their charges. Some child-welfare experts are worried they may soon be unable to recruit enough qualified foster parents, while others say the city has moved too slowly in putting support systems in place to help these older children flourish in private homes.

“It’s a good direction, but the problem is that we’re implementing the plan before the infrastructures are all in place,” said Bill Baccaglini, executive director of the New York Foundling, one of the largest of about three dozen private foster care agencies that contract with the city to find and monitor homes. “We run the risk of burning out our foster parents and losing them.”

Stephen McCall, a consultant who runs a support group for foster parents, said he fielded a frantic call in May from a New York City police officer he had helped persuade to foster her 19-year-old godson. She suspected he was smoking marijuana with friends in her home in Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn.
“She said, ‘I don’t know if I can do this,’ ” Mr. McCall said.

A 61-year-old psychotherapist said that a year ago, after raising four children of her own, she welcomed a 17-year-old boy into her home on the Upper West Side with the intention of adopting him. Speaking on the condition of anonymity because she wanted to shield her private life from her clients and protect the boy, she said that the teenager had been physically abused when he was younger, was “emotionally no older than 12 or 13″ and consistently lied to her. He moved out in March.

Even Mary Chancie, an experienced adoptive parent who recruits foster parents on behalf of the nonprofit agency You Gotta Believe, lasted only six months with two teenage boys she took in. One, age 13, had a behavior disorder and went to live with a sister; the other, 19, was “disrespectful to family members in the house,” Ms. Chancie said.

“He was a nice kid and we still have a relationship,” she said. “But he had challenges I wasn’t equipped to deal with at the time.”

Robert H. Gutheil, executive director of Episcopal Social Services, another private foster care agency that contracts with New York City, said his organization usually has 10 to 15 foster families awaiting children, but “typically, in the best case, only one to three of those would be willing to take a teenager.” With the city’s Administration for Children’s Services having promised to move 700 to 1,100 children out of so-called residential care - group homes and larger institutions - and into foster homes by June 2009, that may not be enough.

“It’s the right principle and policy, but principles and policies need to meet kids where they are on every single day,” said James F. Purcell, executive director of the Council of Family and Child Caring Agencies, an umbrella organization that represents foster care agencies. “And we need to pay constant attention to that - that we don’t let a policy direction that says ‘less residential’ become the reality if, in fact, that’s not what the kid needs.”

New York - which has long had a higher proportion of teenagers in institutional settings than other large cities, according to John B.
Mattingly, commissioner of the Administration for Children’s Services - is among several places nationwide prioritizing a push toward private foster homes. National studies show that in general, children in private homes have fewer problems as adults than those in group homes.

As the total number of children in the city’s care has dropped to 17,000 from 19,000 over the past four years, the proportion in institutions has also dipped, to 15 percent from 19 percent, according to figures provided by the children’s services agency. The average age of the foster care population is 10 ½, while those in institutional care average 16. Children in New York State can remain in foster care until age 21.

The city’s most recent initiative to reduce the current institutional population of about 2,500 to as few as 1,500 comes on top of similar efforts. In 2005, the city finished closing its own 250-bed network of group homes. And in 2004, Children’s Village, a private nonprofit agency that contracts with the city and houses 280 children in cottages on a 150-acre campus in Westchester County, decided to redouble its efforts to find homes for teenage residents rather than maintain its longstanding practice of keeping them until they turn 21.

Mr. Mattingly said the key is to place teenagers in private homes immediately on being removed from their families, because otherwise they often languish forgotten in institutions.

“The basic experience we have in the field, and research supports this, is that if you work at it, you can place teens at the very get-go in foster families,” Mr. Mattingly said. “Those foster families sometimes will need additional supports, not always, and the young people will do better and achieve permanency more quickly if placed at the outset with a family.”

But the challenges of placing teenagers only grow more complicated as the numbers dwindle, since those left behind tend to have more physical, behavioral, emotional, psychological or learning problems. Some were badly abused and further traumatized by bouncing from foster home to foster home.

“Good, solid, healthy teens have issues in the best of families,” said Mr.
Gutheil, of Episcopal Social Services. “But these are not run-of-the-mill, ‘I’m in a bad mood today’ adolescents. These are kids who have gone through some pretty rugged times. The notion that an adult is somehow going to take control of their lives is very difficult for them.”

To address these issues, the Administration for Children’s Services has created nearly 1,000 so-called therapeutic foster homes, which come with extra counseling services, as well as crisis-management support and more training for parents. The city has also relaxed its rules regarding kinship placement, allowing a godparent, coach or family friend to take in a child.

And foster care agencies have begun to tailor their recruiting pitches at churches and street fairs to play up the benefits of fostering a teenager, including the freedom from diaper changes and sleep deprivation. Among the most effective tools has been including a panel of teenagers who need homes in the 10-week training of prospective parents: Mr. Mattingly said that while perhaps 7 percent start out willing to take in teenagers, by the end,
25 percent raise their hands.

“One lady called after attending a panel and talked about one young man who she said had an amazing self-deprecating humor,” recalled Jeremy C.
Kohomban, the president and chief executive officer of Children’s Village.
“She ended up taking him.”

Andrew White, director of the Center for New York City Affairs at the New School and editor of Child Welfare Watch, a policy journal, said that some of the planned reductions of children in residential care would be achieved through attrition, as young people age out of the system at 21.

The current challenges were foreshadowed by the experience of Children’s Village, which found this year that over three years, only half of 69 charges age 13 to 20 settled successfully with families. The story of the other half is sprinkled in shorthand across an agency tracking spreadsheet.
Angel, 18: “Severe Psych Issues. AWOL from Hosp & now incarcerated.” David,
19: “Severe Psych issues: not ready.” Claude, 16: “Goal to be changed.”

“It’s not that residential has no place in the continuum, but it can’t be a permanent solution, and in the past it has become that,” Dr. Kohomban said.
“Organizationally, we have to be eternally optimistic that there’s always a family. All of us look at these kids and say, ‘There’s a family for you.’
When kids lose hope, they’re impossible to treat.”

Dr. Kohomban said that as hard as his staff tried, the cottages on his Dobbs Ferry campus, which house 12 to 14 boys each, could not replace the experience of a private home. “We take boys who have been arrested multiple times and get them into employment,” he said. “But the one thing we can’t do in residential care is we can’t create family. The dynamics of family life have to be experienced - the negotiating, the setting of limits, the good, the bad. I can’t create the values of being a brother or a son or responsible boyfriend.”

Richard Hucke, deputy director of foster home services for the Jewish Child Care Association, is one of many in the field who want the city to create more therapeutic foster homes, in which the parents also receive a much higher monthly payment, called a board fee, to help cover the expense of housing a foster child.

(According to the Administration for Children’s Services, the board rate for a child 12 or older is $662.70 a month, compared with $486.30 for a child under 6, and the $901.50 annual clothing allowance for a foster child of 16 is about quadruple that for a 4-year-old. Those with special needs get a board rate of $1,065 to $1,614.60 a month.)

Mr. Hucke said that his agency, another contractor, is hamstrung because the city gives it only enough money for 96 therapeutic homes, though it has trained more parents to run such homes. “I have therapeutic homes that are sitting empty,” he said.

In the meantime, his is one of many agencies that have become more aggressive and creative in recruiting new foster parents since the city’s focus shifted to placing teenagers. It offers a finder’s fee of $500 for each new household that current foster parents recruit, and is planning a cruise around Manhattan on Thursday to woo new foster parents and thank current ones.

On Friday morning, representatives of the Jewish Child Care Association set up a table brimming with brochures outside a mental health forum at Lincoln Medical and Mental Health Center in the Bronx in the hope of reaching out to potential parents with a grounding in some of the children’s challenges.

“Those are professionals, and those are the people we really want to target,” Mr. Hucke said.

Beverly Mills, a case manager for a city-run shelter for homeless families who stopped by, said she lives alone and has plenty of room. She said she would like to do her part to help disadvantaged young people, explaining that “sometimes when they’re not raised correctly, they come out here and do bad things.” But Ms. Mills, who has a 30-year-old son, drew a line at adolescents.

“I would take someone up to 11 or 12 because they’re still impressionable,”
she said. “You can still grab them and guide them so they can go through school and go through college.”

As a success story, Children’s Village points to Juan Molina, 17, who in another time and place would have simply been called an orphan. After a decade of searching, Juan found a family in the form of Henry Greene, a 71-year-old retiree who had already adopted eight boys, most of them teenagers at the time, now successfully launched into the world. They began spending time together last fall, and Juan moved into Mr. Greene’s apartment in the Parkchester section of the Bronx in March. Mr. Greene, Juan’s foster father now, has started the process of adoption.

Juan was 7 when he was taken from his father, who he said was an alcoholic, and his mother, who was sick with cancer. After bouncing around among foster families, he landed in Children’s Village at 11, though he said he ran away and lived with a friend in Brooklyn for a couple of years.

Until Mr. Greene entered his life, Juan had given up hope of being someone’s son. “Ever since my mom passed away, I never thought I’d find a family,” he said. Of Mr. Greene’s decision to adopt him, he added: “It was awesome. He cares about me and talks to me like a father. I feel like I finally got this.”

Copyright 2008 The New York Times Company

May 27, 2008
- Minority children in foster care are being ill-served by a federal law that plays down race and culture in adoptions, a report released on uesday said.

The report, based on an examination of the law’s impact over a decade, said that minority children adopted into white households face special challenges and that white parents need preparation and training for what might lie ahead.

But it found that social workers and state agencies fear litigation and stiff penalties under the law for even discussing race with adopting couples. As a result, families often do not get the counseling they need. It also found that states have ignored an aspect of the law that requires diligent recruitment of black parents.

The report recommends that the law - the Multiethnic Placement Act, which covers agencies receiving federal dollars and promotes a color-blind approach - be amended to permit agencies to consider race and culture as one of many factors when selecting parents for children from foster care.

The report was issued by the Evan B. Donaldson Adoption Institute, a nonprofit adoption advocacy and research organization based in New York. Several child welfare organizations - including the Child Welfare League of America, the Adoption Exchange Association, the National Association of Black Social Workers, Voice for Adoption and the Foster Care Alumni of America - have endorsed the report.

The report points out that transracial adoption itself does not produce psychological or other social problems in children, but that these children often face major challenges as the only person of color in an all-white environment, trying to cope with being different.

“The idea of being color-blind is great, and we’d all like to get there,” said Adam Pertman, executive director of the Adoption Institute. “But the reality is that we live in a very race-conscious society, and that needs to be addressed. We can’t simply pretend that the problem doesn’t exist and leave it up to the child to cope.”

Many transracial adoptees say they struggle to fit in among their own family members. Shannon Gibney, 33, a writer in Minneapolis who describes herself as biracial, was adopted by a white couple who tried their best by providing things like books by black authors.

“But having books and other things about blacks is no substitute for actual experience,” Ms. Gibney said. “When I had questions about even little things like how to wear my hair, there was no one around to help me with my questions.”

“This validates my experience,” Ms. Gibney added, when informed of the study. “I’m glad they recognize the fact that you just can’t say we’re all human or love will be enough.”

The report comes as the current federal law and polices governing consideration of race in adoption are being examined by the United States Commission on Civil Rights. It seems certain to add to the often heated debate among social workers and the public about the proper role of race in adoption, which has gone on since white couples began adopting minority children in larger numbers in the 1970s.

Christine M. Calpin, associate commissioner at the Administration for Children and Families at the Department of Health and Human Services, had not seen the report, but she said the law had helped minority children in foster care find permanent homes.

“I have not seen any research which suggests that federal law has not been beneficial to minority children,” Ms. Calpin said. “We have seen what happens when race is allowed to be a consideration. Children are waiting longer in foster care to be adopted.”

Congress passed the Multiethnic Placement Act in 1994 after several white couples said they had not been provided the opportunity to adopt minority children. The law prohibits delaying or denying a child’s foster care or adoptive placement on the basis of race or nationality.

The original law did allow race to be used as one of many criteria for evaluating parents for adoption. But two years later, after white couples said they were still being denied the opportunity to adopt minority children, Congress passed an amendment that said race could not be used as
a criterion.

Supporters of the current law say it has led to an increase in transracial adoptions and a decrease in the amount of time minority children spend in foster care before being adopted.

An examination by The New York Times of the 2000 census - the first in which information on adoptions was collected - showed that just over 16,000 white households included adopted black children. Data from the Department of Health and Human Services shows that the adoption of black children by white couples has gone up each year since 1998, to 26 percent in 2004 from 14 percent.

Those who support transracial adoptions counter that race-matching or trying to find parents from the child’s ethnic group can delay adoptions of minority children and that the practice should not be resurrected.

“The research simply argues against the broad notion that transracial adoption doesn’t work out for children,” said Rita Simon, a sociologist at American University who has written several books on transracial adoption and helped get the Mulitethnic Placement Act passed.

Ms. Simon said her 20 years of research did not show that white parents lack the ability to properly prepare children to deal with discrimination.

The new report takes issue with research that says the Multiethnic Placement Act is responsible for the increased number of minority children adopted from foster care. Minority children are still disproportionally represented in foster care. Black children, for example, make up 15 percent of all children, but they represent almost a third of children in foster care.

The report also points out that although the time a child spends in foster care has declined, black children still wait an average of nine months longer than white children before they are adopted. The report also cites one study that found that only 5 percent of white parents who express some illingness to adopt a black child in foster care actually did so.

According to the report, some of the delay could be related to relatives’ deciding to adopt, and some to the lack of enforcement of a part of the law that requires states to vigorously recruit black adoptive parents. But states are not penalized if they fail to do so.

But states can and do face stiff penalties for violating federal law by using race to deny white parents the right to adopt nonwhite children.

In 2003, social workers in Ohio were accused of discriminating against a white couple by requiring them to prepare a plan to address the child’s cultural needs and to evaluate the racial demographics of their neighborhood. The state paid $1.8 million in fines.

In 2005, a social service agency in South Carolina was fined $107,000 after workers used a database to match children to prospective adoptive parents,which the federal government said overemphasized race. These two examples have led litigation-jittery agencies to ignore race completely in placements, the report said.

Jae Ran Kim, a social worker in Minnesota and a transracial adoptee herself, said social service agencies felt damned if they do and damned if they don’t.

“If you talk to parents about racial and cultural issues they are likely to face,” Ms. Kim said, “you risk violating the law, and if you try to recruit families through minority organizations, even that can look like you are using race.”

She added: “The law does need to reflect that fact that race is an issue in our society, and prospective white parents need to realize that this goes beyond whether you can love your child or even whether you live in a diverse neighborhood. This is about what is in the best interest of the child, not the parent.”

copyright NYTimes.

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/27/us/27adopt.html?_r=1&partner=rssnyt&emc=rss&oref=slogin

By DAN FROSCH

Faced with a tightening of federal regulations governing foreign adoptions, and suffering from a downturn in business, international adoption agencies in the United States are finding themselves in financial straits and closing their doors in unprecedented numbers, experts say.

At least 15 percent of agencies that specialize in international adoptions have recently shut down, are expected to do so this year or will probably merge with other agencies to survive, according to the National Council for Adoption, an advocacy and education group in Virginia.

In some cases, the closings have come without warning, leaving people without the thousands of dollars in fees they paid to an agency or the child they had thought would finally be theirs.

They have also led to lawsuits and criminal investigations, as some struggling agencies have apparently turned to more desperate business practices to stay afloat.

“I don’t think anyone thought we’d see the number of closings that we have,” the adoption council’s vice president of training and agency services, Chuck Johnson, said. “We’ve heard of agencies still collecting fees from families and then announcing they’re going out of business the next week.”

For couples like Susan and Jim Paulson of Lafayette, Colo., what began as an aching desire to have another child turned quickly into a nightmare.

In 2006, with their son Quinn, 2, dying from a degenerative neurological disorder, the Paulsons decided to adopt a third child. Their first-born, a boy, now 6, would be lonely without his brother, they reasoned. And so would they.

After contacting Lisa Novak, the director, along with her husband, of the Claar Foundation, a Boulder adoption agency, the Paulsons paid roughly $11,000 in processing fees and waited for the arrival of a baby girl from Nepal.

But after the adoption collapsed amid political turmoil in Nepal last May, the Paulsons said they asked for some of their money back but never received a response from Ms. Novak. She was arrested on March 26 on charges of defrauding families of tens of thousands of dollars by promising adoptions but never completing them.

“It was devastating,” Ms. Paulson said. “We really trusted them.”

Ms. Novak’s lawyer, Lance Goff, said that there was no merit to the charges, and that the Paulsons knew the risks of adopting in Nepal and could have continued working with Claar to adopt a child in another country. Under their contract, he said, the Paulsons were not entitled to their money back.

“No adoption agency can guarantee a couple a child,” Mr. Goff said, adding that what agencies did was help couples “put together the paperwork so they can adopt, and there’s no evidence that the Claar Foundation breached that obligation to its clients.”

Mr. Goff added that prospective parents “need to have the fortitude and the flexibility to roll with the punches if they are committed to getting a child.”

The story of the Paulsons, and that of other people the Claar agency is accused of swindling, exemplifies a trend in a field that until recently operated largely free of federal regulation.

International adoptions in the United States fell to 19,613 children in the last fiscal year, from 22,884 in 2004, with one factor being red tape in countries like Russia and China making it more difficult for people to adopt there.

On April 25, the Vietnamese government announced it would stop processing new adoption applications from Americans after July 1, following a report by the United States Embassy in Hanoi that accused the adoption system there of widespread corruption. The Vietnamese government has denied the charges.

And in Guatemala, the government has placed a temporary one-month hold on pending adoptions as each case is reviewed because the system there has been plagued with corruption.

The Hague Convention on Intercountry Adoption, which went into effect in the United States on April 1, is also having an impact.

The convention requires that to become accredited, international adoption agencies must comply with uniform standards that include training for prospective parents, establishing staff qualifications and transparent bookkeeping. But the standards apply only to agencies that bring children to the United States from countries that agreed to abide by the convention, more than 70 in all.

“From what I’ve seen, it looks like some of those agencies have looked at the Hague standards and simply can’t meet them,” Kemy Monahan, who coordinates adoption compliance with the Hague Convention for the State Department, said of many of the agencies that have gone out of business recently.

Ms. Monahan and Mr. Johnson said they thought that the Hague regulations, intended to safeguard adoptions better, would eventually weed out agencies that operated on the fringes of the law.

That seems to be happening already in some places.

In Michigan, a district court judge recently barred the operators of Waiting Angels Adoption Services from participating in adoptions for nearly three years. The state attorney general’s office has also asked the judge to order the operators to refund $327,000 to prospective parents who paid the agency to facilitate adoptions of children from Guatemala that never took place, said a spokesman for the office, Matt Frendewey.

In Santa Barbara, Calif., the director of the Adoption International Program, Orson Mozes, was charged on April 1 with 62 felony counts of theft by false pretenses. Mr. Mozes, who has since disappeared, is
accused of taking more than $1 million from families who paid to adopt
children from Eastern Europe, adoptions that rarely happened, according
to an arrest affidavit.

Reece and Amanda Heinrich of Holt, Mich., said they were out more than $14,000 after an adoption arranged through Waiting Angels fell apart.The Heinrichs, who are unable to have children of their own, fell in love with a baby boy from Guatemala after the agency showed them pictures and a video of him.

They named the baby Jamyson, but after waiting more than a year, the Heinrichs said, Waiting Angels told them there were complications with the birth mother and that Jamyson was no longer available for adoption. They were refused a refund, they said.

The couple have since adopted twins through a domestic agency, but the experience has left scars.

“I’d honestly rather get stabbed in the stomach than have to go through that again,” Mr. Heinrich said. “We were relying on somebody to help us create a family, and then to have our hearts ripped out. I considered Jamyson my son.”

In Colorado, on the heels of the police investigation into the Claar Foundation, the state Department of Human Services found, in a report released May 1, that 10 of 22 local international adoption agencies whose financial records they examined were losing money. As a result, Colorado will tighten its licensing standards to require that agencies maintain two months’ worth of operating costs in reserves and prohibit them from charging an entire adoption fee up front, said Liz McDonough, a department spokeswoman.

The Paulsons and others have filed lawsuits against Claar and its directors. This year, the Paulsons won a $5,000 judgment in small claims court from Ms. Novak, but Ms. Paulson said she had not received any money.

Mr. Goff, Ms. Novak’s lawyer, said Claar had no revenue because it was no longer operating. Ms. Novak is scheduled to appear in Boulder County Court on May 19.

The Paulsons said their experience had left them too traumatized and without enough money to try adopting again. The quilt they bought for a new daughter has been stashed away in a closet, a list of potential names discarded.

Worst of all, Quinn Paulson died on Feb. 5.

His older brother “kept asking when his new sister was coming home, that she would be able to play with him all the time,” Ms. Paulson said. “It feels really unfair.”

Copyright 2008 The New York Times Company.

Article Tools Sponsored By
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Published: May 6, 2008

GUATEMALA CITY (AP) — Guatemala’s attorney general on Monday said 2,286 pending foreign adoptions have been placed on hold for at least a month while officials review related paperwork.

The decision was prompted by a request from lawmakers to review adoptions on a case-by-case basis, top prosecutor Baudilio Portillo said.

Additional DNA testing could be required to ensure that babies are being given up by their birthmothers and not handed over by intermediaries, said adoptions council chief Elizabeth de Larios. Her council was created in January to overhaul an adoptions system plagued by fraud and corruption.

Guatemala has been the No. 2 source of adoptive babies to U.S. parents after China, as prospective parents paid notaries as much as US$30,000 (euro19,400) to handle the process from start to finish.

Vietnam, where growing numbers of Americans have turned to adopt children, last week announced it will stop processing new adoption applications from U.S. citizens in July, following allegations of baby-selling, corruption and fraud.

A U.S. Embassy report in Hanoi outlined rampant abuses, including hospitals selling infants whose mothers could not pay their bills, brokers scouring villages for babies and a grandmother who gave away her grandchild without telling the child’s mother.

Vietnam’s International Adoption Agency has called those allegations groundless.

Copyright NYTIMES, originally appeared at
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/world/AP-Guatemala-Adoptions.html?oref=slogin

Guatemala: The State Department indicates that they are in close contact with the Government of Guatemala and that Guatemala is working to set up a Hague-compliant system. They are now processing some domestic adoptions under the new system. There is no information as to when they will be ready to process international adoptions. However, cases that were in progress before the moratorium went into effect, have continued.

Miriam Vieni, L.C.S.W.
www.nyhomestudy.com
www.nyhomestudy.com/miriam-vieni.htm
www.nyhomestudy.net
miriamvieni@optonline.net
(516) 333-4999
Fax (516) 876-8246