If you’re a grandparent raising grandchildren, there are many practical issues to consider—including legal, financial, and caregiving support. Learn what help is available for parenting the second time around.

Exploring Medication for Adopted Children: Mental Health and Behavioral Treatment Options

Published by the Adoption Advocate, July 2023, Issue Number 173

The adoption community has made great progress in understanding the impact of trauma on children’s mental health and emotional well-being. As more adoptive parents seek healing for their children through mental health services, they are part of an overall rise in the general population of children and adolescents whose mental health and behavioral treatment plans involve medication. In this issue of the Adoption Advocate, child psychiatrist Joshua Sparrow outlines common concerns and considerations for psychotropic medications, when to worry, tips for observing, describing, and understanding your child’s behavior, and how to develop a team approach for parents, children, doctors, and teachers.

It is always better for children and youth to remain with their birth families if it is safe to do so. When foster care is necessary, the goal is to provide a temporary safe, stable and nurturing environment for children and adolescents while actively seeking and supporting reunification with their families. A robust relationship between a child or youth’s birth parents and foster parents or kinship caregivers can help achieve this outcome and reduce trauma for everyone. These relationships are best nurtured when child welfare staff, parent partners, court and legal personnel, court advocates, foster parent organizations and other service providers are supportive and help facilitate early and ongoing communication.

The National Strategy to Support Family Caregivers (Strategy) is the result of three
years of focused effort by two Congressionally mandated advisory councils: The
Recognize, Assist, Include, Support, and Engage (RAISE) Act Family Caregiving
Advisory Council and The Advisory Council to Support Grandparents Raising
Grandchildren (SGRG) (collectively referred to herein as the Advisory Councils).
The two Advisory Councils were formed in 2019 to explore and document the
challenges faced by family caregivers and kin and grandparent caregivers, respectively.
Each was charged with providing actionable recommendations for supporting their
corresponding caregiving populations in a holistic way both now and in the future. In
addition, the RAISE Act directed the development of a family caregiving strategy.

In the U.S, almost 2.7 million children are currently being raised by kin—family members other than their parents[1]. These families have been formed through both formal and informal processes. For the wellbeing of these children and their families, as well as for the professionals who serve them, we must take a more critical look at the current practices of kinship care and adoption.

Before formal adoption policies were established either in the United States or abroad, kinship care was a common practice in most cultures around the world. For centuries, when parents felt unable to raise a child or protect their safety for a period of time or indefinitely, they often reached out to relatives to step in and care for a child or children [2]. This common practice of relying on relatives to help raise children still exists alongside formalized domestic and international adoption and foster care programs[3]. However, because of these informal roots, many involved in kinship care and adoption are not receiving the necessary support to make permanent placement for these children secure and successful. Today there is often a gap in understanding how to address the needs of children who have experienced hardship and trauma and a lack of consistency in how to best support and educate families stepping in to care for these children.