Widening Cracks | Dr. Toni Heineman - A Home Within

Two articles crossed my desk recently that underscore the vulnerability of children in the foster care system. Individually, they each warrant attention; taken together they should prompt us to action. Preliminary research coming out of Purdue University suggests that adoptive mothers are vulnerable to depression following adoption. The fatigue, worry, and isolation that contribute to post-partum depression may also be contributing factors to depression in the wake of adoption.

From Rise magazine comes a report of a twenty-year study of the number of childhood deaths resulting from abuse and neglect annually in Sacramento, California that demonstrates a direct correlation between decreases in preventive services and increases in death rates.

One of the goals of the child welfare system is to provide permanency for children. When children cannot be reunified with their biological parents, adoption offers foster children the chance to have a ?forever family.? But adoption is a complex process for both parents and children.

Creating a family is not easy, under even the most ideal circumstances. Parents and infants must get to know each other?they must learn to send and receive cues and to respond sensitively. Parents must reconcile their conscious and unconscious expectations with the baby who is actually before them?whether they have a girl when they had hoped for a boy, or whether they have an active baby when the baby of their dreams had been easy-going and mellow.

Add to this the emotional complexities contributed by infants and children who have been separated from their parents and are very likely to be wary of new relationships because of the maltreatment they suffered. And, just like biological parents, adoptive parents must relinquish their fantasies about the child or children with whom they would create a ?forever family? in order to fully embrace those who have actually been placed in their care.

New parents need a lot of support. They need help with the additional work that children bring. They need emotional support as they try to manage the inevitable anxieties and responsibilities of parenthood. Common sense would tell us that parents adopting from the foster care system would need even more support because of the inherent vulnerability of the child they are bringing into their lives.

While parents adopting from the foster care system can certainly benefit from the support of family and friends, professional help is often called for. They need to have the counsel of social workers and specialists who understand and can help them meet the emotional needs of children who have been traumatized and subjected to multiple losses. Yet, these are exactly the kinds of services that are cut when budgets decline.

When we think about preventive services we, understandably, think first of programs that will keep children with their biological parents and out of the foster care system. However, it is also important to attend to programs that will ensure that when children are adopted from the system that their parents have the support they need to keep their promise of creating a ?forever family.?

Toni Vaughn Heineman, DMH, is the founder and Executive Director of A Home Within. She is Clinical Professor at the University of California, San Francisco, in Psychiatry and has been in private practice in San Francisco, working with adults, children, and families for over 30 years. Dr. Heineman consults with individuals and organizations. She is the author of several articles focused on psychotherapy with children and has made numerous presentations to lay and professional audiences about the mental health issues facing children and parents. She authored An Abused Child: Psychodynamic Understanding and Treatment and co-edited Building A Home Within: Meeting the Emotional Needs of Children and Youth in Foster Care. She has been awarded a Leadership Fellowship from Zero to Three, a Draper Richards Social Entrepreneur Fellowship, a Social Entrepreneur Award from the Manhattan Institute, the national Jefferson Award for outstanding public service, and the 2008 Civic Ventures Purpose Prize, given to social entrepreneurs over the age of 60.

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