Disruption: When an adoption fails prior to finalization of the adoption.Dissolution: When an adoption fails after the adoption has been finalized. On Wednesday, Today Moms discussed the issue of adoption disruptions and dissolutions in an article entitled It takes more than love: What happens when adoption fails. It seems that the goal of the article [...]
The 2012 legislative session concluded with several changes to Minnesota child welfare policy. This has been covered extensively in past blog posts, but I thought the topic of sibling placement and separation was important to highlight. New statutory language related to siblings involved in child welfare Overall, the new statutory language indicates that keeping siblings [...]
Over the past few months we've highlighted some of the changes in Minnesota's foster care policies resulting from the 2012 legislative session. Here are some of our posts on the topic: New foster care legislation in Minnesota, part 2(Stability, Permanency, & Adoption Blog, July 18, 2012)Keywords: relative search, definition of family to a child, paternal [...]
A new report authored by Movement Advancement Project, Family Equality Council, and Center for American Progress discusses how legal recognition of LGBT parents is important for their children's social, emotional, and physical well-being. Specifically, this report, entitled Securing Legal Ties for Children Living in LGBT Families, focuses on how marriage and parenting laws impact children [...]
Photo from October 2011 of 'Baby Veronica,' provided by Melanie Capobianco, the woman who was in the process of adopting her. AP Photo/NewsOK It is important that I provide some background to this post prior to delving into the issue. A toddler named Veronica is at the center of this story. This is what I've [...]
An article highlighted in a recent Child Welfare in the News listing from Child Welfare Information Gateway discussed issues with Illinois' child maltreatment reporting hotline: Child abuse hotline callers must leave messages. The article states that "[m]ore than 60 percent of calls to Illinois' child abuse hot line...are answered by a message service instead of [...]
Earlier today in our Stability, Permanency & Adoption (SPA) blog, JaeRan blogged about data in the child welfare system as being "unorganized, uncentralized, and differ[ing] greatly depending on who is managing the data." She concluded with an explanation of how having better and shared data can help us better answer our questions about the wellbeing [...]
The Minnesota Department of Human Services has just released two bulletins summarizing the 2012 children and family services legislation & the 2012 adoption assistance legislation. Most of the new changes are effective August 1 or 2, 2012, with the exception of Jacob's Law, which is effective July 1, 2012. For our child welfare-related summaries of [...]