Jenny: How is Foster Care Adoption Different Than Infant Adoption

Discover how foster care and adoption differ, especially when it comes to a child’s path toward reunification or permanency. This short video explains why stability, connection, and supporting a child’s best outcome matter so much for both foster families and the children they love.

Transcript below:

The way that foster care can be different than adoption is, when children come into your home through foster care, we very rarely to just basically never have any idea which direction a court case is going to go. And so, when kids come into foster care, reunification is the goal, and so as foster parents we are also involved in biological parents’ lives, but it may be in a role that’s different.

These children may return home to their biological families, and then we may be the ones that are kind of on the outside of being support to these children in their future lives. They may not necessarily disappear out of our homes after they’ve been reunified, but reunification is the goal.

However, sometimes court cases go differently than we hope or expect, and occasionally children in foster care become available for adoption. And when that happens what we’re really hoping to see is that those children don’t have to be moved.

Those children are hopefully being adopted by the family that’s been raising them the entire time. And so, while a court case can last about a year, those children have formed bonds, they’ve become family to the foster parents and foster family, and best-case scenario is that that foster family will be adopting that child.

They’ll join that, and that’s their permanency, and they never have to go anywhere.