Can You Adopt a Baby From Foster Care? - Weekend Wisdom

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Welcome to weaken wisdom by creating a family. Creating a family is a national support and training nonprofit for foster adoptive and kinship families. This segment is part of the creating a family podcast. We run a long form podcast that drops during a Wednesday. Each Sunday morning, we dropped this segment we can wisdom. It's a short segment, answering a question that we have received. You can submit your own questions by sending it to info at creating a family.or just put weekend wisdom question in the subject line. Today we're going to be talking about a question we get frequently which is can you adopt a baby from foster care? Let's say that you are thinking about moving to adoption and you found out it's expensive to adopt a baby. So you think gosh, maybe I'll just adopt a baby from foster care. Can I do that? Well, the short answer is yes, you can adopt a baby from foster care. But there are a lot of buts to add to that simple statement. So first, you need to know that the goal of foster care is to help families get their kids back. The goal is most definitely not to find babies for adoptive families. However, many children whose parental rights have already been terminated or will soon be terminated, or waiting for a family to adopt them. And these are truly great kids who have ended up in the foster care system through no fault of their own. But they're almost never babies or even toddlers or preschoolers unless they're part of a larger sibling group. So they tend to be over the age of 678 school age type kids all the way there are lots of tweens and teens who needs families too. That begs the question. So what happens with the babies because we know that babies are taken into foster care, that happens not infrequently. So the babies that are taken into foster care are usually placed with a grandparent or some other extended family member. If a safe extended family member is unavailable, then they're placed in a non relative foster home, if the baby's parents are not able to do the things necessary for regaining custody of the baby. And if there is no one in the baby's extended family who can become the permanent home for that baby, then most often, the foster parents who are where the baby is living with are given the option of adopting the child with a baby. So it is possible to adopt a baby from foster care, but you would usually have to first be the foster parent for that child. And that sounds easy. But the reality is that if you only want to be open to having placements of babies that made that can happen, but most of the babies that are placed with you will eventually end up going back to their parents, or to a grandparent or some other extended family member and you have to be prepared, and accept that the baby that's placed with you is really not yours and may never be and that your role is to be a soft, loving, landing place for that child until they can go home. However, if you're willing to stick with it, there are definitely babies that become available for adoption through foster care. And indeed, the cost for adopting from foster care is free or very low cost. So I hope that answer is a very common question we get. And before you go, I want to tell you about the training and support curriculum that creating a family has. It is a participatory interactive training. And it is, of course for foster adoptive and kinship families. And as I said, it can be used for either support group curriculum, or it can be used as a training curriculum, either one. It's intended to make it easy to run high quality trainings, our support groups, so everything you need is right there in that curriculum. There's 25 curriculum in our library. Each one comes with a video, a facilitator guide, a handout, an additional resource guide. And if you need it, we have certificates of attendance. And it's all right there. You start the video, we have wonderful experts who are talking on topics directly relevant to these families. And then the video pauses and you discuss what's in that section, you move to the next section. So there's lots of community building, and interaction. It's just a terrific resource. You can find it at the creating a family.org website, hover over the word and horizontal menu training and click on curriculum. Thanks for listening to this week's weekend wisdom. If you liked it, please tell a friend to subscribe to creating a family.org podcast

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