Foster Care Adoption
and Behavior

Children Adopted From the Foster Care System

A child who is newly adopted from the foster care system at age 6 will have some of the same school issues as a 6-year-old adopted as an infant. He will be dealing with the grief and loss that all children living away from their birthparents deal with.

He may also have some other difficulties. If he experienced abuse or neglect and more than one caretaker, he may not have received the emotional nurturing he required at a younger age.

Interruptions in attachment, early deprivations, cultural differences, and moves can cause a child to act younger than he is.

He may not be able to learn as fast as children his own age; and yet, if he is physically the same size as his classmates, he will be expected to perform at the same level as everyone else.

These negative experiences may also cause a child to have low self-esteem, problems with authority, difficulties in getting along with other children, depression, or antisocial behavior, such as lying, stealing, or disrupting class.

A parent of a child adopted from the foster care system almost has to discuss the child's adoption with school personnel, so that they will understand these background factors and be able to plan useful interventions together with the adoptive family.

To enlist their support, you should share relevant information about your child's background; however, you should be cautious in how much detail you provide, and to whom. There is no need to talk about the specifics of the abuse, for instance, or to reveal who the perpetrator was.

The level of detail provided to a therapist or counselor is different from that provided to a teacher. The teacher needs to know just enough history so that he or she can understand some of the reasons for the child's current functioning in the classroom.

When you share this information, you should tell the teacher that you expect the information to be treated as a professional confidence. It is not to be shared freely with anyone who does not have a need to know.

If you think your child will need services not normally provided in the regular classroom, you need to advocate for those services.

Unlike past adults in his life who were not trustworthy and who did not work as a team on his behalf, you and school personnel must work together. Your child needs to get the message: "You are important. We can make this work."

It also might be necessary for your family to seek other postadoption services along with the school-provided educational services, such as psychotherapy or association with other adoptive families in an adoptive parent support group.

For more information on this, see the Information Gateway factsheet "Postadoption Services: A Factsheet for Families".

This material was obtain from Child Welfare Information Gateway

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