BCIFV home > Newsletter > 1997 Archives > Fall 1997 articles

Interview
Brad Watson, Executive Director with the Society of Special Needs Adoptive Parents (SNAP)

By Barb Sherman

As executive director of Special Needs Adoptive Parents do you have any new projects that you wish to highlight or issues that you wish to discuss?

The Society’s main goal is educational information for families who adopt special needs kids and for the professional community that works with those families. We have pretty consistently stuck to that mandate, but over the last couple of years the main focus of our attention is reform of adoption legislation and adoption practice in the province. The families who adopt high need kids are more likely to get the kind of support they need, but there are certainly other interests in adoption legislation. So we have been very heavily involved in the process of developing and lobbying for legislative change, regulation development, and policy development and implementation.

The Adoption Act has been proclaimed and is now in place and people are starting to access the provisions under the act. Can we discuss some of the main components of the act that are affecting change right now, and any kind of trends you have noticed?

The new act is really an exciting thing to have been a part of and see in place in our province. The new Adoption Act came into effect on November 4, 1996 and it has been widely hailed as the most progressive piece of adoption legislation in North America. In fact, the Society For Children And Youth in BC is doing a study which examines 140 pieces of legislation to see how they rate against the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child. The new Adoption Act, I understand, is number one out of 140 pieces of legislation examined.

There are three areas where the new act really impacts on special needs families/families with high need kids. The first is a new post-adoption support program which is a called the Post-adoption Assistance Program, which replaces an older program called Assisted Adoption. The second is probably the eligibility criteria and the third is the open records provision which allows adult adoptees and birth parents to have much greater access to their own information. Adoptees will be able to find non-identifying, identifying, and contact information for their birth parents much more readily than they have ever been able to do in the past. There is a provision in the act for both adoptees and birth parents to put vetoes in for those adoptions completed under the old act, but for any adoptions under the new act, there is no such provision. The information is open and I think that is going to make a significant difference to people in maintaining the kind of kinship and history ties that are often very important. It is an interesting conundrum that when a non-adopted person wants to know their family history, it is considered interesting and appropriate. If it’s an adopted person seeking this same information, people see it as a sort of special pathology. Many adoptees profoundly want to know their history and make that connection.

In terms of the eligibility criteria, the only criteria now in place to adopt is that you have to be 19 or over and a resident of BC. Someone who has been acting as a surrogate grandparent is now able to adopt the child. It also opens the door for single parents and gay and lesbian couples adopting. It is now possible for one person in a couple to adopt their partner’s children from a previous relationship. Under the old rules, a birth parent had to relinquish custody of his or her child and then adopt the child with their new partner, because the act of the other person adopting the child actually terminated their parental right in the child.

The greatest impact from the legislation on the families that adopt high needs kids is the change from the Assisted Adoption program to the Post-adoption Assistance plan. This is the first adoption assistance plan in North America that explicitly states that the purpose of the plan is to assist families with high needs kids, and specifically, to meet the unique demands of raising those children. Previously, assisted adoption programs, were only to secure an adoption when placement was difficult. They tended to be very secretive because such programs were not to be proposed unless a placement without payment was not possible.

The new act now recognizes that people who adopt special needs children are taking on extraordinary demands, and may need support. Now we can openly say, “Here are some of the supports we can offer you if you need them”. People are more aware of what they are getting in to and know what kind of support will be available from the government right from the very beginning. Under the new program, they can even come back to us for support with problems they suspect are connected to the pre-adoption history of the child. Under the previous program that wasn’t possible. In fact it is still not possible for the people who didn’t get agreements under the old program, which is something we are continuing to lobby about. Under the old program, if you didn’t establish an agreement at the beginning, you could never get one. The new program is not retroactive, and only applies to government adoptions, not licensed adoptions.

Those children would presumably enter the system perhaps in another way anyway, so they might as well be admitted into the program.

Yes, I think you’ve touched on one of the key arguments. It is also just logically inconsistent to say there is a family support program but only for those families who made those demands as of November 1996. I think that this will change, but it is going to take some time. In the meantime, for new adoptions, it is certainly an improvement. The Post-adoption Assistance program really encourages communication between the social worker and the adoptive parents concerning the needs of the child. Adopting a special needs child can be quite expensive: renovations, equipment, medical costs, therapy costs, counselling costs, respite costs, etc... Under the new program, parents have access to all services that the Ministry for Children and Families operates.

There is one area where the change may impact negatively on families that have assisted adoption agreements. There were two provisions under the old adoption act in regards to payments. One was for maintenance and the other was for specific costs. One hundred and twenty-six contracts in the province include this maintenance component, which is a regular monthly payment to the family. It is intended for the basic care needs of the child: food, clothing and shelter and that sort of thing. Unfortunately, there was some question as to what it was actually used for. As a result, maintenance is much more restrictive under the new Post-adoption Assistance plan. Most of that budget is slated to move over to specific services. There is a possibility that some of those 126 kids might be negatively impacted by that change, so the government has committed to examine each contract individually to determine the impact of the new provisions on the child. Although there is still maintenance available under the new plan, it is much more limited.

What percentage of children are properly identified as special needs?

That is a really hard question to answer, because often the experience of people has been that a condition such as Fetal Alcohol Syndrome (FAS) is not diagnosed at birth or at the time of adoption. It is something that emerges rather, years down the road after people may have been struggling for quite some time with behavioural and learning difficulties with their child. Often it was not known, it just wasn’t picked up at the time of the adoption. I’m hoping it will happen less and less over time because there is a lot more recognition of FAS and its effects on behaviour. I think the assessment process is becoming more effective, but will still can’t expect one hundred percent accuracy at the time of birth or adoption. Some adoptive parents felt they were never told and therefore didn’t know what they were getting into. The social workers will often say that the information was given, but that it may not have been understood.

Or they didn’t know what it all meant?

Exactly. These kids are facing difficult hurdles. If a child is born with a neurological disorder, as with FAS, the brain is wired differently. It is not immediately obvious and you may not understand the impact it’s going to have on the child’s behavioural and social development. I think it is fundamentally unfair for people to go into an adoption situation without the fullest possible degree of information available. Nobody can be prescient and nobody can provide information that is not known, but if there is information it needs to be relayed in an effective way. Although some people may be scared off, we believe that is better than getting into something they are unprepared to cope with. It is written into the policy more clearly now that the placing social worker is supposed to gather a complete and accurate file of information about the child and the child’s social and medical history and provide it to the potential adoptive family.

I’m wondering about licensed adoptions that you said don’t fall under The PAA Program. They are licensed through the province under...

Private adoptions were a largely unregulated, ungoverned field in BC under the previous act. Under the new act there are only three ways you can adopt. You can either adopt through the Ministry of Children and Families adoption services or you can adopt through a licensed agency. There is also provision for recognition of aboriginal custom adoptions and there is also a provision for direct placement which is where a birth mom can say, “I want this person to adopt my child.” There still has to be some involvement either by the ministry or a licensed agency to do a check with the family. The licensed agencies charge fees for their services, but the government is also implementing fees for some of their services. The most important service I think that will not be available through a licensed agency is the Post-adoption Assistance. This is significant because licensed agencies have already said that if it is a special needs placement they will most likely refer the case to the ministry. If they do it that way then the adoption would come under the PAA program. What concerns me is those adoptions that nobody knows is a special needs placement until a few years later, and that, as I say is a common story.

It is our position that at least the domestic adoptions done by licensed agencies should fall under the PAA program. Until they do, I would say that it is really scary territory for anyone adopting through a licensed agency because in the end there is no protection. There is no way that a licensed agency can possibly provide a similar type of service to what the government can provide through the PAA program.

The public should be aware that if given a choice they should try and go through government agencies.

Well I wouldn’t recommend it quite that way. I think that what I would say is that they have to be aware that if they go through the government route, the Post-adoption Assistance Program is available. I think the most important thing is that people know what they are getting into. If this doesn’t change, three or four years down the road licensed agencies are going to be faced with a significant problem when those families that have adopted through them start coming back asking, “What can you do for me,” and they have nothing to offer.

We have reprinted a copy of an article written by Dr. Segal about therapeutic foster parents. Do you work with therapeutic foster parents?

Certainly foster parents use our resources, use our library and come to our workshops. We have done some work in conjunction with Dr. Segal. We have been involved in an International Foster Care Association conference held in Vancouver. So our resources are certainly open to foster parents and we do have a connection with them but it’s not our primary focus.

Is there a communication protocol between adoptive parents and therapeutic foster parents when there is a difficulty with an adoption?

The role of the foster parent in transition has never been really clearly delineated. Many of them really don’t want to see the child go. They are committed to the care of the child and so it can be a really problematic transition for them. And they may have quite legitimate concerns about where the child is going to be placed. The openness provisions of the new adoption legislation is going to encourage better communication. I expect over time to see more of a continuum of connection and information sharing. Foster parents, I think, will be regarded as part of the kinship history of the child so that they would be included as significant people that the child needs to know about in the future. I’m hoping there will be more of a commitment to maintaining and transmitting, to the adoptive parents, the information and knowledge that foster parents bring to the raising of that child. In the past foster care had quite often been regarded as warehousing until something more appropriate came along. There is a lot more recognition now of the importance of the roles that foster parents play. I really hope for a continuously growing sensitivity.

Are there any reflections you have on the new Ministry for Children and Families? Is there anything that you hope to happen that is either being talked about or that you are advocating for but hasn’t been mentioned yet?

This is really difficult and very tricky too because the transition to the new Ministry is so incomplete even though the Deputy Minister is now talking about the transition being over. I have some concern that this new highly regionalized structure will preclude the kind of co-ordinated information sharing that is required for an adoption service to run effectively. I fear that it will end up that a region looks after the kids in their region and only looking for placements in that region. It is ideal to place a child close to home, but it also means that other resources are not considered and the very best option may not therefore be available. Adoption is a very small part of what the new Ministry does and it was a small part of what the Ministry of Social Services did as it’s predecessor. Their big focus is child protection. Adoptions are only numbered in the hundreds while there are thousands of kids in care, so we have to be aware of that. How that gets played out is in the allocation of resources such as the numbers of social workers assigned to adoptions.

There are a few regions where the Regional Operating Officers have come together and decided to share their resources around adoption in order to cover a multi-regional territory, but most regions now will just have to go it on their own.