Adoption crisis

the long version

Every year more than one million parents seek to adopt a child, but by 1995 almost one million children will be in foster homes, detention centers or on the street. These children are suffering because we have inadequate and outdated adoption and foster care systems that fail to bring together parents and children. Although there is no shortage of children to adopt, the vast majority are special-needs children, scarred from years of unattachment and drifting from one foster home to another. News programs and adoption services attempt to place these children through heartstring-tugging placement programs that gloss over these special needs and ignore the important issue of compatibility, which is necessary for long-term placement and a healthy home environment for both parents and children. Adoption Crisis goes beyond the sentiment and feel-good myths that surround the adoption industry to expose the desperate problems that besiege the adoption and foster care systems and create a cyclical morass of bureaucracy, inefficiency, suffering, pain and sorrow. Carole A. McKelvey and Dr. JoEllen Stevens have arrived at their own solutions to the problems that paralyze the system, issuing a call to action that includes redistributing the funds in the system to support a more humane method of placement. Their program allows parents and children the greatest possibility of long-term success through postadoption support systems and assures that the all-important issue of compatibility is addressed before an adoption takes place.