Adoption Through A Child's Eyes Summary

For my next article, I will be exploring what adoption means to the children and the stages that they go through as they get older. The article, Adoption Through a Child’s Eyes, looks into how children understand adoption and how being adopted affects them. This particular article is making the assumption that the child in question was adopted as a toddler or preschool age, someone who didn’t know their birth parents or experience foster care and that the child knows that they are adopted. The first stage that the children go through is repeating their adoption story without truly understanding what being adopted means. At the age of five and seven, children start to learn how babies are made and may get confused on who actually birthed them.

In this article it goes to explain a way that adopting parents can get pre placement education sessions. In some states, the Child Protection Services (CPS) requires families to take these training to help strengthen families and increase their strength and skills on how to be an adoptive family. PRIDE stands for Parent Resources for Information, Development, and Education, it is meant to be a resource for future families. They are taught about abuse and neglect but also what is expected of them as an adopting family. Above I have talked about how families are advised to take these courses and here is an example of one they might want to take. It is broken up into nine different sessions that are about three hours each. Here a social worker could help teach one of these sessions. They could also help families register for the courses and be there to answer any questions they might have after a session. A challenge can arise from parents being unable to get the required hours in for their preplacement training or not understanding why they need to go to these trainings.

This is helping in the empowerment model because if they are holding a session they are giving information in the form of a teacher or they could act as an advocate and giving the clients the resource they need. This article ties into the social work goals by linking clients with needed resources

They offer many different services for families and children but I will focus on their adoption and foster care services. The Child and Family Services is an urban agency that is located to help the people in the city of buffalo -its outlying communities. They are a not-for-profit agency that works with a population that 60 % are at or below the poverty line. They are accredited by the Council on Accreditation Services for Families and Children, Inc. and they are a member agency of the United Way. The services they provide are assigning a caseworker to each foster care and adopting families. They also provide trainings and services for families. The website only gives a general overview of the services they provide, they do give an informational meeting about adopting about once a month, where they can go into more detail about how they provide and proceed with their services. Their services are fit within the goals of social work by providing clients with needed resources and improving the social service delivery network. These services also reinforce the empowerment model by coordinating program development and acts as a negotiator between the clients and