Featured Commodity: How can adoption fit into a social worker'south personal life without overlapping with his or her professional career?

By Jennifer Michael and Madeleine Goldstein

Last fall, Tara Moser bumped into another social worker at a hospital health fair. An babe adoption specialist at a private agency, the social worker told Moser she had more newborn babies than she had adoptive parents. "It stuck in my head," says Moser. She and her husband couldn't get pregnant naturally, and they had decided not to try infertility treatments. They considered adopting a baby, but originally dismissed the idea considering Moser owns a play therapy exercise in Cape Coral, Florida, that has a foster care contract. She wanted to keep her work life and her personal life completely dissever.

Moser went home from the network-ing event and talked to her married man. By December, they had finished filling out adoption paperwork. In March, the social worker called Moser and said a baby boy was born who happened to look exactly like Moser and her hubby. They took him domicile when he was a week old, and the adoption was final in July.

"Being a social worker has impacted raising him," Moser says. "I'thousand very large on attachment parenting, particularly with the adoption cases I work with." To increment bonding, she gives her son massages, carries him in a sling close to her centre, and spends every moment she tin with him. For the first six months, she took him to work with her every day. She now has a nanny, but Moser yet takes her son to the function when she does paperwork or goes to staff meetings. "He attached almost instantly," she says. "Nosotros literally do everything together."

Considering Moser had helped clients go through the adoption process, she knew what to expect with her son'due south adoption. "I wasn't every bit scared," she says. "Having that leg-up was helpful."

Across the land, social workers like Moser are becoming adoptive parents. "Lots of social workers adopt," says Adam Pertman, executive managing director of the Evan B. Donaldson Adoption Institute. "For social workers, it's frequently an easier road–not considering they have to do any less filling out of paperwork, but considering they empathise it better." While no 1 interviewed for this article had any solid data about the number of social workers who become adoptive parents themselves, anecdotally, Pertman sees information technology happening.

When Moser adopted her son, she did everything she could to make certain there was no believable conflict of interest in her adoption procedure. She adopted him from a private agency that she had no affiliation with, and since the father of one of her employees is a local judge, she made certain the adoption case wasn't on his docket. "I wanted everything completely divide," she says. "We dotted our i's and crossed our t's so there was no question."

But non everyone so deeply considers the ethical issues involved when a social worker adopts a kid. Frederic Reamer, a social worker who has adopted children himself, has consulted on a scattering of cases effectually the country where social workers take worked with a child, become attached to that child, and wanted to adopt the kid. "On the i hand, what a magnanimous thing for a social worker to open her or his heart and dwelling house to a child," says Reamer, who has written books on ethics and social work and chaired the committee that wrote the code of ethics for the National Association of Social Workers. "At the same time, those situations tin can be fraught with ethical questions."

For example, he says, if a social worker is writing reports to a courtroom to influence terminating the parental rights, then that social worker shouldn't prefer that kid because the social worker's want to parent the child might cloud or influence his or her judgment. Reamer explains that many agencies merely won't allow a social worker to adopt a child they have worked with. While some agencies will permit a social worker to adopt a child, several take protocols to ensure that the social worker has not had whatsoever direct involvement in the child's case. "They would want at that place to be a brilliant line between the social worker's involvement," Reamer says. "A firewall."

Virtually of the social workers Reamer's known who have considered adopting a child they worked with accept not gone through with the adoption. "This doesn't happen that often," he says.

Gayle Ward, a senior social worker for Kinship Heart in Carmel Valley, California, says sometimes other social workers frown when she says her children were originally on her caseload. "It'due south unusual," she says. "But I did the right thing." Ward get-go met the brother and sister who she would eventually adopt when they were 2 and 3 years old. "I accept never fallen in love with anyone on my caseload the aforementioned style," she says. She told her husband she actually wanted him to meet the kids. "My husband said, 'Information technology's your chore to take care of many kids, non bring them abode.'"

At that time, she didn't follow her heart and endeavour to adopt the siblings because she felt it would be ethically wrong to cross that boundary and get also intimately involved with them. Another family adopted the children and they would occasionally transport Ward cards and pictures. Ten years later, the adoptive parents called Ward and told her they had given upward. The children were acting out, and the parents couldn't handle it, so they asked the juvenile courts to take them back. The girl was living in a grouping abode, and the boy was dorsum in foster care.

"I was carrying them around in my heart from the fourth dimension I met them, and kick myself from here to everywhere that I hadn't acted on my emotions when they were [first] in foster care," Ward says. She became a licensed foster parent in a nearby county where she doesn't work, and she adopted both children when they were teenagers. "My husband said to me, 'I knew they'd come someday,'" she says. "When you take that kind of feeling in the heart, yous should be dauntless enough to challenge the systemic conventionalities non to get as well involved."

Ward was honored this year as an Affections in Adoption past the Congressional Coalition on Adoption Institute. "Information technology was the best thing we've ever washed," she says. "It was the hardest affair nosotros've ever washed in terms of trying to help them heal."

The bulk of social workers who adopt, though, do not adopt from their own agency, but they practise use their professional cognition to help their own families. Deborah Siegel, a professor of social work at Rhode Island College, has attended workshops for social workers who are likewise adoptive parents. "At that place are so many of us who practise it," says Siegel, who specializes in adoption and has adopted two daughters with her husband, Reamer. Siegel says that the workshops she's attended hash out what information technology'southward similar to piece of work in adoption and live in it likewise.

Libby Slaton, a 37-twelvemonth-sometime social worker in Malvern, Arkansas, spent eleven years training foster parents. She's currently in the process of adopting a 4-year-old daughter. "It's much dissimilar when they live with yous–you're having to practice what you preach," Slaton says. She didn't want her ix-year-old biological daughter to exist an only child, merely she didn't want to have some other baby. "My hubby and I knew we did not desire to starting time completely over," she says. "Nosotros did not want to start with midnight feedings once again."

The little daughter they are adopting was in several foster homes before coming to the Slatons, and she had some aggression and difficulty expressing her needs. "We had a really crude period in the beginning," Slaton says. "But with consistency, patience, and love, she's really doing well."

Like Slaton, Caren Sue Peet is a social worker and adoptive mom. Peet has devoted her life to helping other children get adopted because of her ain feel adopting children. Peet helps adoptive parents every step of the way. She has a poster lath in her living room in Smithtown, New York, with pictures of the two,000 babies she'due south helped place. "Some were born terminal week, some were born 17 years ago," Peet says.

She tells anxious potential parents non to be nervous and to relax, and she shares her ain story with them. Peet was born with a genetic status called neurofibromatosis, in which nerve tissues grow tumors. Since there was a 50% take a chance that she would pass her status on to a baby, she decided to prefer her two children instead. "The whole procedure was actually overwhelming," she says.

She met a potential birth female parent, but a week before the babe was born, the birth mother inverse her listen. "I simply sat and cried," Peet says. "To me, information technology was like having a stillborn. That was my baby. We named him, his name was going to exist Matthew–which means 'souvenir from God.'" Weeks later, Peet was introduced to a 17-year-old daughter in Louisiana, whose mother said that if she had the infant, she had to move out of the firm. But after the boy was built-in, the grandmother changed her heed, and said they could both stay. So, Peet lost another baby. "I was in terrible grieving," she says.

But somewhen, Peet received a call that a infant male child had been born in Queens, New York. She took him abode when he was five days old and named him Justin. Since Justin'southward birth mother was from Paraguay, Peet decided she wanted his younger sibling to await similar him. "I knew if I had a blond, blue-eyed babe, he would feel different," she says.

When her son was 4 years one-time, Peet adopted his baby sister, Heather, from Guatemala. It took six months of bureaucratic paperwork, messages to members of Congress, and Peet flying to South America and pleading with the U.South. Embassy to process the paperwork to become her girl's Visa and take her home. "That was really hard knowing she was waiting for us and nosotros couldn't take her," Peet says. Now she encourages and inspires other adoptive parents, volunteers, and advocates for orphans.

Last yr, she collected 4,200 pairs of socks for orphans around the world. "I hate when my anxiety are cold," she says. "Information technology just drives me crazy." Then, when she is helping a family prefer from an orphanage oversees, she sends 100 pairs of socks with them to take to the kids. She was recently honored for her efforts by being named an Angel in Adoption by the Congressional Coalition on Adoption Institute. "I live and breathe adoption," she says. "I wanted to brand the adoption experience exist a wonderful experience for people."

Information technology can be hard to divide work as a social worker with being an adoptive mom, says Dr. Judith Lee. "Your child actually needs a female parent. You tin exist a social worker to everybody else's kid," says Lee, who has a PhD in clinical social work. When she and her married man tried to adopt a babe in New York 25 years ago, adoption agencies turned them abroad considering Lee is Jewish and her husband is Chinese. "We weren't the same," she says. Because of Lee's own difficulty adopting a babe, she spent 15 years running a warm, welcoming adoption agency. She now works with private adoptions, telling parents to never give up hope because they will find their babe.

That's the attitude Lee took in finding her own children. When she and her hubby were turned away by adoption agencies, she took out her high schoolhouse and college yearbooks and wrote letters and fabricated phone calls to everyone she had ever known request them to help her notice a infant. A friend of a friend knew a bookkeeper in an attorney'southward function in S Carolina who was pregnant and didn't want to keep her son. Lee adopted the Italian-Israeli boy equally an infant. Eight months later, Lee received a phone telephone call from another friend of a friend of a friend who knew a woman who was having a baby girl, who was going to be ane-4th Chinese. The pregnant mother liked the idea of the baby having a Chinese father.

Lee and the birth female parent of her second child became close friends during the terminal months of her pregnancy. "I really, really loved her," Lee says. "She and I both cried with 1 another, sharing with 1 another. Nosotros were both incomplete women: I was unable to accept a baby, and she was unable to take care of a baby." The nativity female parent asked Lee to promise to give her infant girl art and music lessons. Lee said that was something she would do anyway. Years ago, Lee and the nascence mother lost touch, only her girl is now studying opera in Zurich. Her daughter said to her one day, "We kept the promise, didn't we Mommy?"

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