Today’s Guest Blogger is Mary Laderer.
This article follows the stories of three adopted youth who ended up homeless and later found out that their adoptive parents were still receiving money from the government to care for them. The article asserts that there are loopholes in many states for adoptive parents to continue to receive adoption subsidies even if they are no longer taking care of the adopted youth.
One strength of this article is that it provides the reader with specific situations in which there was not enough oversight post-adoption, which has resulted in adoptive parents collecting payments but not using it to take care of the kids.
One weakness of this article is that it does not provide any actual national research on this issue. They provide the reader with enough information to believe that this is happening, but do not have information on how big a problem this actually is. Another weakness is that this article is focused on people abusing the system, but not about the kids with failed adoptions who are living on the streets. The article calls for changes to the legislation in order to stop payments to adoptive parents that kick these kids out, but not call for more support to keep these families together to begin with.
I would argue that this article promotes myths about the adoption system. It promotes the idea that prospective adoptive parents are adopting to make money off the system. It also creates this idea that there are all these children living on the streets while tax dollars are given to their adoptive parents, while the amount of instances of this case may not be as rampant as the article is alluding to.
Work Cited:
Published January 29th, 2016, by Amelia Pang
http://www.theepochtimes.com/n3/1939505-adopted-children-left-homeless-while-parents-still-get-money-to-care-for-them