Foster child adoption
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Gregory Keck, PhD Attachment Therapist & Adoption Expert, explains how legislation, such as the Adoption of Safe Families Act, has helped to end the endless wait for foster kids to be adopted
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The children and adolescents who are adopted from foster care often spend many years there. On the very early end of their journey in foster care much of the time that they're in foster care is due to the fact that the court process is trying to terminate parental rights, and the rights of parents are very difficult to terminate and there have to be reunification efforts. And so, we have great belief, and I don't disagree with this but it complicates things, that the family should be preserved and I think when it can of course it should be, but there are many obvious cases where this family will never reunify successfully, but yet the kid lingers in foster care waiting for a permanent placement. We certainly are doing much better since 1997 when the Adoption of Safe Families Act passed and we're doing much more all across this country of going from foster care to adoption with the same family. So in reality many foster care families are planning to adopt the child as soon as they become legally available for adoption. So, let's say they have five homes but home number five they've been there three years, are not adopted because the legal process hasn't freed them yet, but they're in the same family that they're going to stay in and be adopted. That didn't used to happen. We used to never allow foster families to adopt, but foster to adopt today is almost the most frequently kind of foster placement there is. So we're doing a lot better, I think we could do better, and wherever there's an opportunity to do a foster to adopt placement I think agencies are now doing that.
Gregory Keck, PhD Attachment Therapist & Adoption Expert, explains how legislation, such as the Adoption of Safe Families Act, has helped to end the endless wait for foster kids to be adopted
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Gregory Keck, PhDFounder & Director, Attachment & Bonding Center of Ohio
Gregory C. Keck, Ph.D., is the founder and director of the Attachment & Bonding Center of Ohio. He is an internationally known psychologist and trainer who addresses the issues of trauma, adoption, and post-adoption challenges. He and his staff provide attachment therapy for adoptive families whose children have experienced serious early childhood maltreatment prior to adoption. In 2012, he received the National Association of Social Workers State of Ohio Lifetime Achievement Award. He is the parent of two sons who were adopted in adolescence.
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