What Really Makes A Good Adoptive Parent?

Presented by Ken Watson
NYS Citizens' Coalition for Children, Inc.
13th Annual Statewide Adoption Training Conference
Adoption 2002: Linking Promises to Possibilities
May 10, 2002 • Albany New York

Licensing laws usually define the basic requirements for adoptive parents. Those who are invested in helping adoption achieve its promise for the children involved, however, generally have further guidelines about what really makes good adoptive parents. There is wide variance in the length and detail of such protocols. A distillation of the best would include:

• The ability to protect and nurture a child

• A perception of children as people in the process of becoming more fully}y themselves, and a willingness to guide that process without jumping to conclusions about where it is headed or superimposing an alternate model

• The capacity to make lasting attachments and long time commitments

• An interest and investment in their own learning, and the capacity to change in response to new ideas or experiences

• An interest in learning about how children become available for adoption, and a sense of empathy towards the children's loss of their birth families and other traumatic experiences that the children may bring with them

• An ability to perceive the importance of birth families to adopted children - regardless of what the children experienced in them - and a capacity to accept those families

• Semi-porous family boundaries that pose no problems for the entry of in-laws and close friends, but are not so loose that anybody who visits is absorbed as a family member, yet permitted to fall out of the family when he or she chooses.

• The ability to view problems as challenges, and the capacity to have overcome any catastrophes they may have faced

• The availability of, and capacity to use, support from one or more people or groups to whom they can turn at moments of crisis

Some Red Flags that Say Stop! Not Worth the Risk to a Child

• Families from which protective services would remove a child for reasons of abuse or neglect if such a child were there now

• Families in which there is evidence of impulse control disorders, such as alcohol or drug abuse, compulsive gambling or spending, intermittent explosive behavior, etc.

• Families in which their minor children are currently being cared for out of the home for reasons that are not clearly educational, medical, or psychiatric

• Families who rigidly define themselves around a belief system (religious, political, behavioral, etc.) which demands every family member's full allegiance, which governs their everyday actions, and which is intolerant of any alternate view

Some Yellow Lights that Say Proceed with Caution

• Families in which there are marital difficulties in which disagreements remain unresolved because of denial or because of the upset that is caused by attempts at resolution

• Families in which a potential caretaker has been convicted of a violent crime or in which there has been a substantiated charge of child abuse

• Families in which the focus of energy seems fully devoted to a current crisis or an ongoing caretaking responsibility of one of its present members

• Families whose personal or religious beliefs about child rearing (such as refusing some kinds of medical care or sanctioning corporal punishment) while not illegal, run counter to community norms or the expectations of the birth parents

5/20/02