Spring Break
Abstract:
In an effort to make known the needs of the community, the College of Arts and Sciences and the School of Social Work hosted the Sixth Annual Midwest Foster Care and Adoption Association Conference last week.
This year's conference focused on "Integrate, Innovate, Collaborate," bringing together all the people involved in a child's life: therapists, counselors, teachers, social workers, foster and adoptive parents and others....
Alumna
posted 10/22/08 @ 10:14 AM CST
This article caught my attention.
As I read it, I wondered, "whatever happened to orphanages," and, "are they truly a worse option than 'foster care'?"
It seems to me that, in orphanages, the residents have stability of place, people, and "foster siblings" with similar circumstances, with whom they can build lifelong relationships. Moreover, the State has less difficulty maintaing track of one home housing several children than of several homes housing one child each. I have heard of foster children being "booted" from house to house to house, family to family to family, not being able to form or maintain a relationship with any of them.
If a child forms a lifelong relationship with people running an orphanage, it is doubtful that those people would "feed them to the dogs" at age 18 the way foster families and the state evidently do.
I know of one family who attempted to adopt a couple of pre-teen brothers who had been in foster care all their lives. The couple had to recind the adoption because those boys turned their lives upside down. They became afraid for their lives and for the life and well-being of their adopted daughter, whom they adopted as an infant. Those boys evidently became anti-social (pathological?) as a result of their unstable and possibly merciless early years.
They are grown now. I have to wonder where they are spending their adult years. Prison? The grave?
Could orphanages be any worse?