Definition Essay 1st draft

Debbie Suer
Joel Murphy
English 51
18 April 2009

Adoption

The word adoption is not in the mainstream families’ dialogue, but for a small percentage, the word means the world to them. Adoption is having the parental rights of a child’s biological birth parent(s) permanently and legally transferred to the adoptive parent(s). It is a most rewarding, yet challenging concept that takes an enormous amount of time, patience, diligence, open-mindedness, humility and most of all commitment. Once you finally come to that painstaking decision to parent someone else’s biological child as your own, there is no turning back.

There are other aspects of parentless children, for example, foster care and group homes. They are not, however, a permanent solution for these children. Unfortunately, sometimes these deprived victims get “lost” in the system. There is also private adoption, but those guidelines and procedures go down an entirely different path. The people who will be the guides, educators and professionals that you deal with when attempting to adopt a child, are going to be; Riverside County Department of Public Social Services (dpss.cps.adoption.3) social workers who specialize in teaching the adoptive parent how to parent. Child Protective Services, also a division of DPSS, play the role of removing children from unsafe and unhealthy situations. There are also specialized social workers who assist in the actual matching and placement of a child from the foster system to the adoptive parents. (dpss.cps.1)

Adoption was a scary word for me to comprehend at one point in my life. Over the last seven years, I have concluded that being an adoptive parent is the most rewarding life experience ever. I cannot even begin to explain the feeling I get when my children come up to me and call me “Mommy”. I have saved them from what would have otherwise been a life of “hell”. I believe that every parent should have to go through the same kind of parenting courses before they give birth to a child. I’m not saying that they must get a license (as the adoptive parents need to get), but that they go through at least half of the scrutiny that adoptive parents go through, so maybe there would not be so many children “in the system” in the first place.

The social workers do an amazing job in so far as being the guides for which adoptive parents need to rely on. They are needed in our society on many levels. The child protective services social worker, at the other end of the spectrum, has a very difficult job. Taking a child out of his/her home due to violence, abuse or neglect, or away from his/her mother in the hospital because the child was born addicted to a drug, for instance, is heart wrenching. The social workers and I do have the same interests as far as making sure that all little souls deserve the very best care, love and devotion they need to thrive and grow into healthy productive human beings.

I happened to be extremely lucky with the experience of adopting through the county as opposed to a private/open adoption. I believe my desires are being met day by day and year by year. It has been over seven years since I began my journey and just yesterday my daughter came home from school with a flyer inviting parents to attend a 15 hour – ten session Parent Education Course presented by RCDPSS (Cooperative Parenting). Therefore, little by little, I believe our society is finally starting to head in the right direction by “teaching” our parents how to parent.

Works sited
http://dpss.co.riverside.ca.us/ChildProtectiveServices.aspx
Cooperative Parenting. Catholic Charities San Bernadino/Riverside