Michigan wants to improve 'imperfect' post-adoption support for families

When parents sign the adoption paperwork, they’re supposed to give their child a forever home. They usually do — less than 2% of adoptions in Michigan are undone. But not every home is a happy one. Some children have been irreparably damaged or hardened by the trauma they’ve experienced. Some parents realize too late the toll bringing home a child could take on their time, finances, relationships and lifestyle.

Most of these parents struggle through these unforeseen hardships, turning to online communities and support groups for resources and connection — and therapists if they can afford one. But even those who worked with troubled and traumatized children before adopting said the state could do a better job of preparing families for what it really means to adopt out of foster care and making it easier to access help before problems become crises.

“There's a lot of options for support,” said Melissa Jenovai, president and CEO of Spaulding for Children , a not-for-profit child welfare agency based in Southfield. “But that does not mean that this is easy and not taxing. It's an imperfect system.”

Michigan is trying to improve the preparation it gives and support it provides to families who adopt out of the child welfare system — all while trying to recruit more prospective parents to open their hearts and homes to some of the state’s most vulnerable kids.

Updated training gives parents honest prep

Adoptive parents — and the experts and specialists who counsel them — say having a clearer picture of what adopting out of foster care looks like is the first step in preventing heartache and hastening healing.

“If I could front-load parents on what to expect, this wouldn't be such a shock,” said Kim Seidel , a therapist and author who trains foster and adoptive parents around the state. “It wouldn't be so devastating to them. … It wouldn't be so many broken placements and tears.”

Amanda Zimmerman remembered giggling over the training videos she watched before getting licensed as a foster parent nearly 10 years ago, when a previous curriculum was in place. They were silly, she found — overly exaggerated, and the concepts were just too foreign.

That training wasn’t effective for her. After floundering for years, Zimmerman learned most of what she knows now about being an adoptive mother to a special needs daughter by Googling and reading books such as Seidel’s. She didn’t even know about the Post Adoption Resource Centers — one of the state’s primary supports for adoptive parents — until a year ago.

“That's why a lot of kids end up out of the home, unfortunately, because parents do throw their hands up,” Zimmerman said. “They don't know where to go for help and resources.”

Now a foster care navigator for the state of Michigan, Zimmerman said the state’s 2-year-old GROW training does a much better job of giving prospective parents access to people who have been in their shoes and have real-world insight.

The curriculum has more of an emphasis on early childhood trauma and how it affects development, offers scores of videos and links and allows for group discussions with folks who have lived experience.

The previous training “was not working, and families felt like they didn’t have what they needed when they were starting to foster or adopt,” said Jenovai. “The fact that Michigan decided to … have a curriculum designed specifically for our state spoke to their commitment.”

Seidel agreed that the training included really good information about trauma. But she said it’s missing some of the guidance parents of traumatized children might need. Like, what do I do when my house has been destroyed?

She sees excited prospective foster parents posting online all the time and just itches to offer them a free coaching session. “I really wish we put more time into adoptive parents and foster parents so that they … know what's coming at them,” Seidel said. “It would stop so many just disruptions and multiple placements.”

Wendy’s Wonderful Kids

One way the state is trying to create more successful placements is by partnering with the Dave Thomas Foundation for Adoption , which runs a child-focused placement program called Wendy’s Wonderful Kids. The program currently supports Spaulding for Children to pay professional adoption recruiters who are dedicated to finding forever families for foster care kids, with a special concern for teenagers, sibling groups and others who have extra challenges in finding a permanent home.

Under this program, adoption recruiters such as Danelle Stiffler conduct extensive searches to find kinship placements while getting to know the 12 to 15 children on her caseload. She goes to their football games, makes scrapbooks with them, shoots hoops after school and sits in the audience at their dance recitals.

Once they trust her, they can open up about what their hopes, fears and dreams. Instead of helping a family find a child, she gets to know the child, then finds a family to fit.

The first Wendy's Wonderful Kids recruiter in Michigan started in 2005. One more was added in 2006, and two more the next year. But in 2020, 27 recruiters joined the ranks, and today 37 adoption recruiters work in partnership with the organization and the state.

A five-year national evaluation showed children referred to the program were three times more likely to be adopted. And its recruiters are committed to finding placements that stick — especially since a full third of the children the program places have already had a failed adoption, according to Rita Soronen , president and CEO of the foundation.

“The family wasn't prepared, or didn't understand, or didn't know what, perhaps, they were getting into,” Soronen said. “And for us that would be the biggest scandal: that we didn't adequately prepare the family.”

A $20 million opportunity

Michigan sees the struggle adoptive parents are facing, especially when it comes to serious behavioral health needs.

“We really sympathize with our parents,” said Demetrius Starling, senior deputy director for Michigan Department of Health and Human Services' Children’s Services Administration. “Our department really has been working tirelessly over the last couple of years to meet this urgent and increased need for specialized therapeutic behavioral health treatment for our children, including children who have been adopted and children in the foster care system who experience really, really great problems.”

Starling said there had been an influx of funding to recruit children’s mental health professionals and that the state is hoping to expand infant and toddler programming to support families with young children involved in the child welfare system.

Michigan continues to review how foster and adoption caseworkers are trained. Preservice training is currently nine weeks.

More: Pilot projects will help stop the overreporting of children of color to child welfare

More: Michigan's child welfare system makes progress toward shaking off federal oversight

The state put contracts out for bid to deepen the well of respite care providers, according to Lara Bouse, president and director of Fostering Forward Michigan . “It will take a lot of pressure off of them and make things a little bit easier for them to be able to just provide some of those natural breaks that are necessary that some families don't ever get,” she said.

And, with the announcement that Spaulding for Children was recently awarded a $20 million cooperative agreement to launch the National Center for Enhanced Post-Adoption Support, a state that has offered slowly improving assistance could be poised to serve as a national example.

The center will help build evidence-based post-permanency services in 25 jurisdictions in the U.S. It will help bridge the gap between what child welfare agencies provide and what families need, according to Jenovai.

Should Michigan become a project site, it will benefit from in-person intensive technical assistance with the goal of having a comprehensive post-adoption support system, including a training curriculum that is now used in more than 15 other states.

“Parents are saying that it's drastically improved their understanding and their feeling of preparation prior to fostering and adopting,” Jenovai said.

Whether or not Michigan participates, its child welfare leaders say they are committed to continually improving the experience of families who take kids out of the system and make them their own.

“A whole lot of us have begun working really hard to make sure that these adoptive parents have access to more than what adoptive parents used to have access to,” said Bouse. “Are we doing it real fast? No. Some of these things aren't real easy to implement and make happen. But is there growth and expansion happening? Yes.”

This is the last of three stories on parents who adopt out of Michigan's child welfare system. Read the others : Parents who adopt out of foster care lose support and services. Could Michigan do better? and: Adoptive parents often learn the hard way: it takes more than love to overcome trauma .

Jennifer Brookland covers child welfare for the Detroit Free Press. This story was produced with support from The Dart Center for Journalism and Trauma at Columbia University.

This article originally appeared on Detroit Free Press: Michigan wants to improve 'imperfect' post-adoption support for families