Second Time Foster Child

"Second Time Foster Child" links parents locked into a custody relinquishment nightmare with other historically oppressed peoples. Child welfare attorneys, judges, and child welfare professionals will gain understanding of the parents' perspective of a no-fault dependency case.

“Toni walks us through the experience of having foster children with undiagnosed mental illness . . . moving and heart-wrenching” (Marcia Stein, PHR, CA, author of Strained Relations). As an infant, Daniel entered the foster care system as a result of severe neglect, which manifested in violence and aggression later in his childhood after he was adopted by Jim and Toni Hoy. Desperate to get him into a residential treatment center and keep their other children safe, Jim and Toni were given two options by the state of Illinois: either keep him in a psychiatric hospital or be charged by the Department of Children and Family Services with child endangerment for failure to protect their other children. Mental health professionals recommended abandoning Daniel at the hospital after the state denied all viable sources of funding for his treatment. So Daniel re-entered the foster care system for no other reason than he was mentally ill. A year later, Daniel’s mother discovered that his treatment was covered by a funding source that he was awarded as part of his special needs adoption. How could they get the state government to understand the federal law and re-gain custody of their son? Second Time Foster Child is the story of parents who never gave up on their son, despite being prosecuted and persecuted in exchange for his medically necessary treatment. “Toni Hoy bares her soul in this courageous true story of her family’s journey to help and heal her severely traumatized adopted son.” —Michael Groomer, founder, and Beverly Hansen, executive director, Advocates for Children of Trauma

First published in 1997, this timely examination of allowances paid to foster carers demonstrates clear evidence that the nature of foster care is changing. The degree of difficulty in caring for the average child is greater than ever before making the tasks asked of carers more demanding and skilful. The fostering allowances were subject to five tests of adequacy. Evidence showed that allowances have maintained their value over time and were adequate to meet the normal costs of child rearing but not the extra or indirect costs of fostering. Moreover, a unique cross national study of payments uncovered that Britain has lower levels of allowance than more than half the 15 countries examined. This book contributes to the debate on the measurement of living standards. It uses budget standard methodology to estimate the cost of a child living a modest but adequate lifestyle in the 1990s.

KINSHIP FOSTER CARE: POLICY, PRACTICE, AND RESEARCH assembles the thinking and research of experts from several professional fields concerning what has become the fastest growing type of substitute care for children in state custody. The editors have contributed the initial and concluding chapters of the book and the lead chapter in each of its three sections.

Researchers, practitioners, journalists and politicians increasingly recognise that foster care throughout the world is in a state of crisis. There are more and more children needing care and, as residential alternatives dry up, more of these children are being assigned to foster families. This book reports the major findings of a two-year longitudinal study of 235 such children who entered the foster care system in Southern Australia between 1998 and 1999. As well as examining the changing policy context of children's services, the book documents the psychosocial outcomes for these children, their feedback on their experiences of care, and the views of their social workers and carers. In the process, the book examines some cherished beliefs about foster care policy and sheds new light on them. The research reveals that while most children do quite well in foster care up to the two-year point, there is a worrying amount of placement instability at a time when the concentration of emotionally troubled children in care is increasing throughout the western world. Although, surprisingly, placement instability does not appear to produce psychosocial impairment for a period of up to eight months in care, it has an extreme effect on children who are moved from placement to placement because no carer will tolerate their behaviour. These children are consigned to a life of distribution and emotional upheaval because of the lack of alternative forms of care. Another unexpected finding of the research is that increasing the rate of parental contact achieves little or nothing in relation to the likelihood of family reunification. As child welfare increasingly enters a world of research-based practice, Children in Foster Care provides some much needed hard evidence of how foster care policy and practice can be improved.

America's foster care system has a noble goal—to care for children that for various reasons can no longer be cared for by their families—but years of inattention and inadequate funding have left many foster youth in a precarious state. This resource provides a comprehensive and authoritative overview of the American foster care system. Areas of coverage include the scaffolding of foster care systems in the various states (each of which operate their own unique systems through their social service agencies); conditions under which children are taken out of their families of origin and placed in foster care; the experiences of both young children and older teens in foster homes; challenges for foster children who "age out" of the system; and proposals to reform and improve foster care across the nation. Geared for students, this book contains chapters devoted to the background and history of foster care in America; the systems's problems, controversies, and solutions; original essay contributions exploring various facets of the system; profiles of leading foster care activists and organizations; governmental data and excerpts of primary documents on the topic; and an annotated list of important books, scholarly journals, and nonprint sources for further research. It closes with a detailed chronology, glossary of terms, and subject index.