Adoption Push Helps Many but Has Critics

Ed and Judy Shrader got everything most parents don’t want when adopting a child. They got boys and girls of different colors and races. They got boys and girls whose parents they would hardly know. They got boys and girls who stewed in alcohol, drugs, or both, in their mothers’ wombs.

Five times now, the Shraders have gotten these things. And five times they have been thrilled and blessed by the results.

Skeptics of the nation’s public adoption system might become believers if they met this family. Witness the Shraders’ most recent trip to Children’s Court in Monterey Park. It was there, this spring, that the seven Shraders became nine, with the addition of two more children from Los Angeles County’s overwhelmed child welfare system.

Into Judge John L. Henning’s courtroom they trooped. First, two white, forty-something parents; next their two birth children, a teenager and 21-year-old, then three adopted children--one white, one black, one biracial. All resplendent in patent leather and lace. Last, two beautiful girls, a toddler and a preschooler, clambered atop the long table where lawyers normally argue.

Before Henning joined the little girls legally to the Shrader clan, he asked if anyone had anything to add. Fifteen-year-old Teddy, the Shraders’ birth son, raised his hand. “I’m just really excited,” he offered earnestly, “that I have two new sisters to love.”

The Shraders of Pasadena--transcending challenges from racial diversity to prenatal substance exposure--could be the poster family for America’s great adoption crusade.

Like no time in memory, officials from the White House to the state house in Sacramento to Los Angeles County’s child welfare agency are pushing to create new families, with children from the nation’s swelling foster care ranks. New laws attempt to break down barriers of race, to free children more quickly from problem parents and to offer financial support to those who plunge into the sometimes daunting bureaucratic world of foster care adoption.

For at least the past two decades, social workers, lawyers and judges have adhered to the notion that keeping families intact is a paramount factor in decisions about where troubled children should live. Now these operators of the public adoption system are facing a new paradigm of, as one social worker said, “adoption, adoption, adoption.”

A little more than a year into the effort, there are signs that the adoption push has become overzealous, with children rushed into questionable homes while old programs to strengthen birth families are forsaken.

But there also are signs of success. Like the Shraders, many new families have been created and record numbers of children freed for adoption in Los Angeles County, promising an escape from the often unhappy, unstable merry-go-round of foster care.

To be sure, the Shraders have special skills that made them uniquely qualified to welcome children who were exposed to drugs and alcohol in their mothers’ wombs.

Judy, 46, is a critical-care nurse, whose hours are flexible. Ed, also 46, is a psychotherapist who runs clinical programs at a school for emotionally disturbed children.

When one of her newest girls came into their five-bedroom Pasadena home still suffering heroin withdrawals, Judy had enough expertise that a doctor let her set the doses of phenobarbital that helped wean the child from the narcotic. When another child exhibits signs of hyperactivity, Ed can lend the expert, calming touch that is needed.

Often it is the serene, balding father who smooths over rough emotions for the Shrader children. It is his feisty, dark-haired wife who leads the fight for her children’s rights--to special medical care, tutoring and other benefits.

“You have to be very creative and know how to work the system to get the things you need for your kids,” says Judy, who gave birth to Tiffany, now 21, and Teddy before the couple began to adopt.

The Shraders had another advantage with their foster adoptions: They brought all the children home when they were a month old or less, so that any environmental setbacks were minimized.

But Ed Shrader believes that, with the proper approach, many families could flourish rearing drug-exposed youngsters.

“There is a big investment of time. I think you need to be creative,” said Shrader. “You also have to have faith that the behavioral issues can be worked out. . . . But there is a lot of resiliency there.”

A Goal to Double Adoptions

President Clinton set the tone for a new era in foster care adoptions last year when he announced the Adoptions 2002 initiative, urging that public adoptions be doubled to 40,000.

Experts agree that something must be done to stem the flood of children into foster homes. In Los Angeles County, the number of children in “out of home” care jumped 55% in the last seven years, from 32,600 to 50,500. Nationally, federal foster care payments leaped nearly five times to $3.8 billion annually in the last decade.

But adoptions from foster care have been stagnant, at about 20,000 a year nationally, for the last decade. In the last five years through 1997, meanwhile, adoptions of Chinese, Russian and other foreign children by Americans more than doubled to 13,620 a year.

To jump-start adoptions of America’s abused and neglected children, both the federal and state governments have passed several new laws.

The federal government has outlawed discrimination in adoptive placements on the basis of race; it has offered a $6,000 one-time tax credit for foster care adoptions. Clinton’s initiative offers “bounties” of up to $6,000 per child to states that increase the number of adoptions they complete.

Tougher Rules for Birth Parents

The state, meanwhile, shortened the time that birth parents have to reform poor behavior and win back their children. From a standard 18-month reunification period, frequently extended, parents now have one year to rehabilitate themselves; just 6 months if their child is under 3. Another law permits juvenile court judges to cut off parents’ reunification attempts immediately under a dozen severe circumstances--including child abandonment and chronic abuse. And Los Angeles County now pledges that the financial payments children received in foster care will continue to be passed on to parents who adopt them.

Using these laws as a battering ram, the county’s Department of Children and Family Services is getting more children adopted. It projects 1,800 adoptions this year, up from a little more than 1,000 in recent years.

And the county’s children’s services chief, Peter Digre, vows soon to complete 3,000 adoptions a year. “It’s clear to me it will keep going in that direction,” he said.

But many of Digre’s workers and some outside experts worry that the push for adoptions has come too fast, driven too much by a desire to win the federal bonus money. Too little attention is sometimes paid to the delicate procedure of terminating one family to create another. They believe some foster children might do better to remain with a relative, for instance, who takes on guardianship status, without fully terminating birth parents’ visitation rights.

“This race to adoption is as bad as warehousing kids in foster care,” said Barbara Flicker, former head of the university consortium that trains Los Angeles social workers. “We have these [social workers] who are wonderfully trained and they just need to have their caseloads cut and to be given a chance to do their work.”

Indeed, nearly all of the 300 Los Angeles County adoption workers are over their recommended caseloads. One worker described how he spends four days a week filling out forms and only one visiting children and their families. Because turnover is high, decisions that will make or break families are often made by rookie workers. Many observers say the single most important improvement to public adoptions would be giving social workers fewer cases.

Recent funding hikes may make that possible, but front line workers in the foster care system must also be persuaded that a greater push for adoption is warranted.

Many social workers, lawyers and judges insist that the preferred solution for most troubled children still is to return them to rehabilitated parents. (Even with recent legal changes, less than 14% of the 50,000 children taken from parents in Los Angeles County are currently on track for adoption.)

“What is happening in Los Angeles and elsewhere is a real dramatic change in the whole nature of this work,” said Jorja Prover, a professor of social welfare at UCLA. “There is supposed to be a lot less nice hand holding [of birth parents] and a lot more saying let’s get down to the business of adoption.”

Even when social workers have agreed to fast-track children into new families, as they did more than 1,000 times in 1997, judges rejected the attempts about half the time, according to the children’s agency’s statistics.

Some of the critics said that a wave of cases not really suited for adoption is choking the bureaucracy and is upsetting families and children.

Last spring, a particularly suspect case arrived at the Adoptions Division headquarters in a Wilshire district high rise. A 65-year-old grandmother was recommended to adopt five grandchildren, ages 1 to 12, from her schizophrenic daughter, even though one acquaintance would later describe the grandmother as obviously “too old and overwhelmed.”

An adoptions worker immediately expressed concern over a chaotic atmosphere, where the children were yelled at, spanked with a belt and shrank in fear from their grandmother, records show. But, despite pleas by the social worker that the agency consider moving the children out, superiors declined to visit the children or to complete the exhaustive review that Digre requires to move cases off the adoption track.

Within days of the warnings this June, the youngest child, a 15-month-old girl, drowned in a bathtub where she was playing without adult supervision. The social workers’ bosses in the children’s agency insist that there were no clear warnings the child was in danger.

In another case, Commissioner Stanley Genser of the Children’s Court said he blocked an attempt by the agency to send a severely brain damaged child to an adoptive home out of state, because the child was thriving with a California foster family.

“Would this child even appreciate the concept that he was being moved to a more permanent home somewhere else? And why was he being moved away from his birth parents, who were visiting regularly?” Genser asked.

Inevitably, relatives of foster children have become embroiled in the controversy over which children are adoptable. Nearly 57% of the 50,000 Los Angeles County children removed from parents live with aunts, uncles, grandmothers and other kin. If the county is to hike the number of children adopted, it must get some of the relatives to adopt.

But some experts are concerned that relatives often suffer the same problems as the birth parents who were forced to give up the children. “If grandma already screwed up with her daughter, do you now want to trust her to adopt her grandchild?” said one member of the county Commission on Children and Families.

And even able relatives can be hesitant to adopt. Their principal objection is often emotional--they don’t want to give up on an addicted daughter or sister they believe can return to motherhood.

Despite such feelings, some relatives said they have been threatened by social workers under pressure to complete more adoptions: Either adopt or face the possibility that a grandchild, niece or nephew will be removed to another home more agreeable to adoption.

“They said if I didn’t go through with adoptions I could lose the children at any time, especially because one is a baby,” said one grandmother from the South Bay, who cares for six of her daughter’s children, ages 3 to 15. “That’s ridiculous since the whole idea was that I could keep all the kids together.”

Perceptions Slow to Change

For those who don’t already know children in the county’s care, the view of public adoption also can be daunting. Recent reforms have not erased a perception that public adoptions can be slow and intractable.

One West Los Angeles couple, who asked not to be identified, returned to the Edmund Edelman Children’s Court in Monterey Park half a dozen times before a judge finally terminated a birth mother’s parental rights to her 3-year-old daughter.

The birth mother, a onetime addict, had spent just 15 hours visiting her daughter over three years and the girl was clearly thriving in the home of the adoptive parents.

“After all this time, this woman emerges and says she loves her daughter,” protested the prospective adoptive mother. “We are the ones who have stayed up with [the girl] when she was sick and changed her and cuddled with her. She’s our little girl in every way but legally. . . . It’s a painful, painful charade, what the system put us through.”

Would-Be Parents Face Obstacles

But such due process, however painful, is standard in foster care adoptions. And navigating the bureaucracy is just one concern for prospective adoptive parents. Among the other issues facing adoption applicants:

* The child’s age. Of the 6,942 children deemed eligible for adoption from Los Angeles County recently, 630 were 1-year-old or younger, 4,700 were 2 to 8 years old and the rest older still. The county encourages those who want an infant, not exposed to drugs or alcohol, to apply elsewhere.

* Prenatal substance exposure. Authorities estimate that 80% of the children eligible for adoption in Los Angeles were exposed to illegal drugs or alcohol in their mothers’ wombs. Such exposures can cause long-term behavioral disorders and other problems, but experts now are more optimistic that the children can develop normally.

* Race. More than 43% of the children eligible for adoption from the county are African American; 34% are Latino and 21% are white. Some families don’t want to adopt a child of another race or ethnic group. Others say they would, but believe that law and county practice prevent them from doing so.

The federal Multi-Ethnic Placement Act of 1995 was meant to prevent discrimination. It also requires that minority parents have an opportunity to adopt.

Some social workers say privately that they still believe same-race adoptions are preferable. In fact, the county this year paid $300,000 to a white couple whose adoption of two black children was hampered by a hostile social worker.

Despite those concerns, however, Digre said the county finalized 270 trans-racial or trans-ethnic adoptions in the first five months of this year.

And one expert called it a fallacy that scores of minority children would be adopted were it not for continuing discrimination in the child welfare system. Zena Ogles-by Jr., executive director of the Los Angeles-based Institute for Black Parenting, said many parents, of all races, will adopt black infants.

“But there is this assumption that all these white families would rush in and take all these older and handicapped black kids,” said Oglesby, who sits on several local and national adoption advisory panels. “That has not happened and will not happen.”

Advocates for public adoption say the hurdles have become exaggerated in the minds of would-be parents. They urge thorough research and a fair comparison with alternatives.

Typically, Los Angeles County waives all its nominal fees. Private adoptions, in contrast, can run $15,000 to $25,000 and have pitfalls of their own.

For instance, birth mothers in private adoptions sometimes refuse, at the last minute, to give up their newborn babies. Overseas adoptions run in roughly the same price range and are eased, typically, because birth parents are out of the picture. But foreign children aren’t free of problems; witness the revelation that many Russian orphans suffer from fetal alcohol syndrome.

“It’s naive to think that kids from overseas are always going to be untainted or somehow pure,” said Joe Kroll, director of the North American Council on Adoptable Children.

Judy Shrader agrees. She often invites people into her home, crammed full of photos and toys, to see that foster care adoptions can work.

“I want them to see how it goes and how normal and sweet these kids are,” Shrader said. “I feel very guilty, when I get a perfect little baby, that others aren’t looking in that direction.”

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New Laws on Foster Care Adoptions

In the last three years, several new laws have sought to speed the flow of abused and neglected foster children into adoptive homes. The following California laws and pending legislation are meant to increase foster care adoptions:

* Concurrent planning. Law allows social workers to seek potential adoptive homes for children at the same time they work to try to return them to the homes of their birth parents. Previously, courts ruled that such double planning demonstrated that efforts to reunify children and birth parents were insincere. (Signed by governor, 1996)

* Kinship adoption. Law allows children to be adopted by relatives without cutting off the legal rights of birth parents, as previously required. Now birth parents can give up custody of their children and still negotiate visitation or the right to oversee a child’s schooling. (Signed by governor, 1997)

* More social workers. New state budget will allow hiring of 20% more social workers statewide, at a cost of $40 million, to move adoption and other foster care cases to fruition more quickly. (Signed by governor in August)

* Guardianship. A proposal to make it easier for relatives to take legal guardianship of foster children. It eliminates the need to terminate a parent’s rights and improves access to public child care funding. Could remove thousands of children from child welfare rolls. (Pending in Senate Appropriations Committee)

* Foster parent adoptions. A bill that would make it easier for foster parents to adopt children in their care by eliminating duplicative paperwork--including criminal, medical, financial and other clearances--already completed when they became foster parents. (Pending before the state Senate)

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L.A. County Foster Care Adoptions

1989: 270

1990: 617

1991: 669

1992: 1,088

1993: 1,385

1994: 1,027

1995: 1,046

1996: 914

1997: 1,062

1998*: 1,800

* Child welfare officials call this a “conservative” projection. As of July 31, there were 765 completed adoptions.

Source: Los Angeles County Department of Children and Family Services.