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so i'm going to go over some of the reasons why adoptions fail and then at the end of this video or later on in the video i'll give you some real life examples of situations where a child has not been adopted because of some of these reasons so let's go one two three let's go [Music] so there's two ways of things not working out one is a disrupted adoption and one is dissolved adoption so disrupted adoption is when a foster child is placed with you either they've already been with you in foster care or they've just been placed with you with the intent of the option you're writing out that six month waiting period at least that's in in this state you have to wait six months before you can adopt them after they've been actually moved into your home and so you're you're waiting for those six months and during those six months you're like oh huh and for whatever reason it doesn't work out and and that is called a disrupted adoption all right the the second thing is a dissolved adoption so if a child has already been placed with you maybe they've been with you for years and something happens and it's just not going to work like it's just it's killing your family or whatever that would actually be a dissolved adoption all right so we're going to look into the reasons why these happen let me first say there's been a few high profile cases of this happening where people have adopted and then it's fallen apart and we're really quick to judge the world is really quick to judge that and maybe rightfully so sometimes but but also you just don't know you don't know until you've walked a mile in the shoes so be really slow to judge a family that's gone through this as we go through some of the possible reasons why people dissolve or disrupt an adoption why adoptions fail you might get a better understanding adoption is a commitment it is however it's not supposed to be a commitment it's supposed to be a let's make sure this works it's the whole purpose it's like a six-month trial before that child is actually adopted legally by your family that said every time a child moves it does a little bit of damage to their ability to attach which it takes forever to repair i mean it can it can be uh something that they work through and and it gets healed over time but it's really hard and so we do want to minimize how often kids move i'm just saying if you take a child into your home you better be pretty sure you're going to adopt them because it's really hurting their chances of being adopted later by someone else this is a hard realization for a lot of us who are in the system right but we have to realize that if you take a child into your home you better be ready to take them like into an adoptive placement you better be ready to adopt them okay first off first reason honestly is misinformation so multiple times workers have intentionally left information out when they were placing a child with us and and this happens with a lot of my friends as well in in foster care adoption world that the workers think they know that this is a perfect fit for you or or they're desperate to find a fit for this child find a place for the child and so they leave stuff out that is one reason there's misinformation given by social workers all right number two child's behaviors we thought they'd be manageable and yet they're not okay so sometimes children's behaviors are so extreme that someone just says no we we thought this was doable but we can't number three the child's special needs were much more intense than we thought they were and that can mean several things it can mean that the child needs around-the-clock care and we didn't realize that it could mean that the child has two or three appointments every day and we didn't realize that it can mean a lot of things all right but one way or the other the special needs were much greater than we thought they were and that doesn't work with our family the child just isn't a good fit um this can mean several things this can mean that the child bullies the other children in the home it could mean that they hate the other children in the home and the other children in their home hate the child it could mean that you just don't feel any connection it's like you have a stranger living in your home even two months later very possible that i mean this is very likely and in fact in fact a lot of adoptions don't happen because of this reason it happens if they've done their due diligence they've searched for people for a while before a child moves into this adoption process however sometimes people show up and they at least have to be considered they've got to be heard out it doesn't mean that they'll be placed with that person necessarily but it definitely will delay the process but very likely if there's someone who's a relative even a somewhat distant relative then they're gonna have a good chance of getting that placement so even if they've been placed to be adopted with you right if you've already adopted they're yours that relative shows up it's kind of like tough luck you know and i say tough luck but hopefully if that relative really wants a connection with that child hopefully that's something that you can pursue with them because that would be really cool the adoption process could fail with a child is there's some changes in circumstances that no longer allow the family to be licensed as a foster adopted family and that could be that they have to move out of state for a job it could be actually a whole number of things unfortunately so this seems like a silly reason for a child to not be adopted but uh but those those kinds of changes really happen and really do affect adoptions the last reason why sometimes adoptions don't work out and this is when i almost didn't include but the last reason that i've seen happen several times again my mom was a social worker for 21 years uh director of an agency all that stuff and i've been around it i've been doing foster care now for quite a few years and been around it for a long time one of the things that actually does happen social worker leaves their job the new social worker comes in and wants to make some changes and a child is moved out of an adoptive placement it happens a lot social workers sometimes not knowing the full situation social workers sometimes just wanting to make changes for the sake of making changes and again most social workers are awesome and amazing and we've had such good luck we have we've had such a good experience with social workers but again i've seen this happen that quite quite a bit actually it's scary how often this has happened over the course of 30 years okay scary isn't it shouldn't even happen once and i'm looking at eight or nine times that i know of over the course of 30 years where a new social worker comes in this family's ready to adopt this child and the social worker's like no i don't think they're as good of a fit and often that child goes to another family and that family doesn't want to adopt the child as it you know it's like again every time a child is moved it hurts the child and it hurts their ability to attach so movement just for the sake of movement or just because a social worker has a personality conflict with the family really really really harms that child so those are some of the main reasons why these adoptions fail so now that we've covered some of the reasons why adoptions fail let's talk about some real life examples okay so we had a child with us who we had just found out had they'd been with us for a long time in foster care and we had just found out that it was likely headed towards adoption and i was so excited about that like this was my child like this was a good fit in our family this child uh so good and very excited and then that child had a behavior that towards another child that scared the social workers and the social workers decided that it wasn't safe for them to be in a family with another child or like you know it wasn't safe for that child to be in our family and so they were removed and that hurt big time but so you know behaviors matter sometimes behaviors have a huge impact now the other instance we've had was that a relatively young worker didn't have a lot of experience took the child out to eat several times played some board games with them read all this stuff in the child's file but was like that's not this child there's no way this child would be destructive and threatening and try to stab someone with a knife that's not them i'm just going to leave that out of everything i say we're going to pretend like that didn't happen because i don't believe it happened because he's such a polite child when we play board games together so so that's happened all right another another potential behavior we've had a child placed with us with the intent to adopt who was very aggressive and threatened to kill a number of people but kept trying to do that we'll just say and very very destructive very aggressive not all the time but out of nowhere suddenly we were we were dealing with a very aggressive child and the child was strong and so that was hard it was very difficult police called and all of that okay after a number of those times we had to decide for the safety of our family and for the other children in our family and also for all the kids that we could potentially have that it just wasn't going to be safe for that child to come and live with us you know if we've had foster kids with us who are violent they've had to go it i mean like not just violent isn't a punch again but like really violent if we have foster kids with us who are continually sneaking alcohol or drugs into the house and i mean continually like if if they're caught once get treatment fine we'll walk through them with that but if it's like a constant this is this keeps happening then then they have to go uh it's just not gonna work in our family setting so there's there's a number of possibilities as you're looking at adopting a child through foster care for why it may not work out and the way i'm gonna give the opposite of an example because this is one reason why i was thinking that things wouldn't work out with robert and and they obviously have and it's been beautiful and i'm so glad they did but early on the first couple years i didn't feel like there was an attachment from him i didn't feel like he was really doing that at all and i'm like man this was this is just not a good fit and i really questioned whether he should be adopted fortunately that didn't stop me and i went through the process and it it took a couple more years really for him to attach to me and we are we're very connected but it took a long time for that to happen and he'd been through so much and even though he hadn't been in a lot of other foster placements he'd been bounced around to different family members and all this stuff and so the attachment stuff was there and it was very real and so he did not want to attach to me so that took a while and and that's one reason why possibly it couldn't work out if people are thinking man this kid's just not connected like they're just not connecting to us and so to them i would say it takes a long time it really does think about what the child has been through how many people they've been bounced to or whatever their situation is it's really hard for a kid to trust enough to connect with you that you're going to be there permanently when someone else hasn't been or maybe a whole line of someone else's haven't been so for all the things i've seen where families have decided not to go through with adoptions or a family has adopted a child and then they've i can't even say it they've let go right they've ended that adoption for all the things that i've seen where that's happened more often i've seen families that have walked through the storm that have dealt with the behaviors that realize it's a long-term process a long-term issue i've seen families who they've realized their child needs some intense treatment for a while the child gets some severe help even sometimes going to like a residential treatment facility for a time so the family can be safe and the child can get the help they need i i've seen these things happen more often than i've seen families give up on a child who's in the adoptive process or who's been adopted i should say again in the adoptive process that six months before an adoption typically like a lot of families see that as a trial time and in a way i mean legally it's set up to be a trial time and so those fall apart a lot but again so often i've seen families walk through the storm with kids so often so let's leave it on that note shall we all right have a great one