Open adoption information events

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Open Adoption FAQs

What is open adoption?

For children whom the court has ruled cannot safely return home, open adoption provides security and belonging for life. The adopted child becomes a legal member of the adoptive family through a formal court process, whilst still maintaining contact with their birth family which helps them to form a healthy sense of identity.

Why is open adoption best for children?

Open adoption gives children who cannot live with their birth parents the opportunity for a secure future and a family for life. Having “openness” around their adoption means children know who they are and where they come from through birth family connection. This openness, knowledge, and understanding help adopted children to form a healthy sense of identity and belonging, which is essential for their emotional, intellectual, and physical development. Open adoption also means the child is no longer part of the foster care system.

How often will a child have contact with their birth family?

The frequency of contact is decided by the court and depends on the age of the child and their relationship with their birth families. Contact usually includes face-to-face visits, letters, telephone and video calls, emails, photos, and cards.

Will I have to pay any fees to adopt a child?

No. There are no legal expenses, assessment expenses, or administration costs for carers wanting to become an adoptive parent. Our in-house legal team manages the adoption process from start to finish.

Will I receive an allowance after adopting a child?

Depending on your financial situation, ongoing carer allowance and financial support may be available subject to Australian government policy.

Is open adoption suitable for every children in foster care?

No, every child’s family circumstances are different and so not all children in foster care are suitable for adoption. We also acknowledge that adoption is culturally inappropriate for Aboriginal and Torres Strait children.

Are there currently children in foster care waiting to be adopted?

Yes. We currently have children aged 5-12 and groups of two or more siblings in temporary care arrangements who desperately want and need a forever family.

What geographical areas does your adoption program cover?

We accept applications from prospective adoptive parents in the Sydney metropolitan area, Illawarra and Shoalhaven, and Hunter and Central Coast areas.

Enquire about our adoption process

Australia: Features of national adoption | RefNews

Rethinking contemporary and historical adoption experiences will help thousands of children in foster care, says a new report from Australian experts.

Australia is known as the Land of the Lucky, but the almost 40,000 children in orphanages waiting for a permanent home with loving parents and the many spouses who want to adopt a child are hardly lucky.

Adoptions in Australia have declined by a staggering 9 over the past 40 years7%: with almost 10,000 adoptions in 1971-72 to just 339 in 2012-13, with almost a third of them made overseas. Other countries also experienced a decline in adoptions, albeit not much compared to Australia.

Are we really taking better care of children in need? Or is the fact that a large number of them are in shelters a sign that we have preferred ideological and bureaucratic concerns to their interests? A new report from the Australian Women's Forum "Adoption Rethink" shows that the latter is closer to the truth.

The report examines the decline in adoptions from various perspectives, including the current rise in legal abortions, feminist theory and media coverage. It tracks how this practice, once seen as a natural and obvious solution to the needs of children who are unable to be raised by their own parents, has fallen out of favor in recent decades, and how it affects the growing number of children being raised outside the family.

Closed adoptions, stolen generations

At the forefront of this recent story are women who abandoned their children at birth in a time when single mothers were viewed with disapproval. Sometimes these women were under pressure to give up babies without knowing the adoptive parents or expecting to ever see their child again. These women speak of their grief and the wound they have received. Already grown children, who were adopted / adopted under the same “closed” regime, also complained about their painful “quest” to find their biological parents, their full identity. Studies conducted among such people revealed a high level of mental disorders in them.

Historical errors that lead us to speak of the Stolen Generations (separating Aboriginal children from their families), lost innocents (the "export" of 7,000 children from the UK in the early 20th century) and Lost Australians (hundreds of thousands of Australians who spent their childhoods in orphanages) have also contributed to the bleak notion of adoption over the past ten years.

At the same time, the population of children who could benefit from adoption has also changed. Early 19In the 1970s, at least half of the adoptions involved the children of young unmarried women. They, themselves almost children, were encouraged, even forced to give away a child they could not raise alone, and instead encouraged to strive to complete their education, find a job and get married. Now those norms have changed with benefits, abortions and birth control pills.

Is another lost generation on the way?

Today's picture is very different from the past. Most children in Australia (and similar countries) in need of foster parents have been taken from their biological parents due to physical, sexual or emotional abuse, neglect, and placed in foster homes. The number of these children has doubled over the past decade, however, despite this, it takes an average of four years to adopt a child into a foster family.

At a time when dramas about foreign adoptions fill the pages of magazines and newspapers, the uncertain future of these children is a growing scandal that calls for urgent action.

Rethinking Adoption reports that of 39,621 children in foster care in mid-2012, two out of three were in a state of permanent family-to-family transfer for two or more years, with an increasing number of children continually returning to the system . “Thus, children in foster care live in a state of more frequent change and instability, which leads to more complex needs and behaviors.”

Becky Hope, in her book All In a Day's Work, cited in the report, emphasizes the critical importance of stable, loving care during the earliest periods of a child's life:

who do not get their basic needs met in reciprocal, loving care, and who are forced to scramble through life on their own, suffer visible devastating effects of brain development even before they are a year old.

It has also been found that children who experience severe lack of parental attention as infants and are placed in long-term foster care before six months of age are able to generally make more progress than if they are adopted after six months.

Children need stability to form secure attachments, but guardianship, no matter how well it is done, is temporary in nature. While there has been an increase in permanent guardianship cases in Australia (and similar instruments elsewhere), a recent study in Queensland found that such arrangements "do not provide enough stability for children". On the one hand, the rights of guardians can be challenged by the family of origin, on the other hand, they do not give children the same sense of belonging to the family, unlike adoption.

Gregory Pike, director of the Center for Bioethics and Culture in Adelaide, also comments on this situation in the report “Rethinking Adoption”: adoptions. The cost to society and government of caring for these children and treating the traumatic consequences of their situation is enormous.

Adoption: open and closed

(Ed. With a closed adoption, the adoptive family can keep the fact that the child is not a parent, with an open adoption is not a priority)

In Australia in 2011-12, 95% of local adoptions were open - this is a continuing upward trend that has covered 80% of adoptions since 1998.

Although some adoptions did not really take into account the needs of the birth mothers (fathers were usually not in this picture at all) and the child, in the age of open adoptions, every effort is made to respect the rights and feelings of all participants in the “adoption triangle” . In any case, it is the adoptive parents who now suffer their own stigma for being on a side with a dark history, which has negatively impacted a significant number of people.

There is a tendency to exaggerate this influence.

Dr. Pike reviewed local and international reports on adoption outcomes for biological mothers, adopted children and parents, including those who belonged to the "closed" age. The literature provides a much more detailed picture than is evident from media reports of people who have gone through negative or unhappy experiences.

Undoubtedly, some mothers who were forced to give up children suffered, but “a significant amount of uncertainty exists about how common these outcomes were and how they relate to the characteristics of adoption and its process,” Pike says. There is evidence that finding and reuniting with a child has a healing effect.

Looking at the problems of adopted children, he found the following: Although adopted children represent the largest proportion of patients with mental disorders, the actual proportion of "adoptees" in a society with such problems is very small. Foster children face significant challenges in addition to those typically experienced by children in early childhood and adolescence, however, there is evidence that foster children have incredible resilience and there is official evidence of their ability to "catch up" on various occasions. For some adopted children, their experiences prior to adoption were often difficult and sometimes traumatic, and these experiences were associated with later outcomes. When compared with their peers who remained in the shelters, the "adoptees" had better physical and mental health and better circumstances in education and socialization. The key issues for adopted children were attachment, self-determination, search and recovery.

Little research has been done on foster parents and their problems.

Intercountry adoption

Despite the bad reputation and availability of reproductive technology, it appears that many couples would be happy to adopt if given the option. Frustrated by the barriers to adoption in Australia, they often turn to orphanages in developing countries. Here again they have to wait up to five years.

Obviously, special care must be taken to ensure that the adoption of a child in another country and culture serves his best interests. Pike says: “In the case of all adoptions, and according to the Hague Convention on Adoption, cross-country adoption should be used only in cases where the biological parents (parent) or relatives do not have the ability or desire to properly care for the child. Only if there are no suitable facilities available to provide ongoing care in the State where the child was born, should ethical inter-country adoption be considered in the best interests of the child. ”

Tony Abbot's government in Australia has taken steps to expedite these adoptions by creating a new national agency that will be operational by mid-2015 to negotiate adoptions with most countries.

However, each country has its own special obligations to its children, and those under the care of the state deserve a new plan. Barnados Australia, a leading non-governmental agency for the protection of child survivors of abuse, urges Abbott to set a goal for open adoptions in every state.

So why delay?

According to a report by Martin Nary, UK Government Adoption Adviser, important factors include: take him to meetings with his parent or parents while the court decides the future of the child. This represents a shocking mistake with devastating consequences for children and society that will last for decades."

- Parents are given priority: the needs of the parents, not the rights of the children, are the priority.

-Loss of sense of urgency when a child is placed in care.

-Social workers: the need for a balance of social workers who have maturity (not necessarily skill level) and experience in the care and development of children and young workers who may be qualified. Everyone needs to be trained in a real child protection situation and taught to understand the priorities of the child, the need to act immediately, and so on.

Pike also noted that ideology plays a key role: there are a number of references in Australian sources to an anti-adoptive mentality in some educational institutions "and perhaps among professionals who are key intermediaries", such as employees of government welfare departments. A 2005 government report on foreign adoption noted that attitudes in these departments ranged from "indifference to hostility".

Feminist ideas about patriarchy and its "dominant prescriptions" are also included. Combined with revelations about previous scandals and forced adoptions, this has shaped public opinion that children should not be separated from their parents.

This is basically a reasonable principle: the child must be with the parents and reasonable steps must be taken to ensure that they can stay together. However, when a child is neglected or abused, despite the help of relatives and the intervention of the authorities, there must come a time when the best interests of the child dictate the need for his removal from the family. At this point, undoubtedly, efforts should be focused on providing the child with a loving, stable and permanent family.

Presumably, the principles of open adoption should apply if there is safety for the child and permission from the adoptive parents. Biological parents cannot be completely written off.

However, this should not be done with adoption either. As Pike says in the conclusion, “There is something about most adoptions that helps them end well. Despite all the complexities and shortcomings of the human experience, the mistakes of the past and the failures of the present, adoption remains a realistic and workable solution. ”

Author: Carolyn Moynihan

Source: MercatorNet

Tags: australiaWithout orphansadoption

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