Posted on November 5, 2015 on Huffington Post

Eventually, every candidate running for president will probably say it. Child-welfare professionals work mightily to practice it. U.S. laws and policies promote its essential truth: Every child deserves to grow up in a safe, permanent, loving family.
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Yet tens of thousands of children in our country spend too much of their lives intemporary (i.e., foster) care, unable to return to their original families but without sufficient prospects for moving into new ones. Click here to read entire article

Posted on October 29, 2015 on Huffington Post:

National Work and Family Month is drawing to a close. But in these last few days before month's end, can we please pause to consider exactly what we mean by "family"?
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Adam Pertman has a bone to pick. The journalist-turned-adoption-reformer doesn't think employers or insurance companies are doing nearly enough for adoptive (or would-be adoptive) parents. Sure, the most progressive companies offer partial reimbursement for adoption costs, paid leave, and sometimes educational support and resources--as I know from my own work helping companies put together "great place to work" applications.  Click to read entire story

Posted on September 4, 2015 on Huffington Post

At the beginning of the 1900s, grim predictions punctuated the debate over women's suffrage. Everyone in the family unit would be damaged in innumerable ways if this outrage were allowed to happen, argued the critics, some of whom went so far as to predict the end of civilization itself.

​Half a century later, another historic social change was in the offing, and the warnings of impending disaster were at least as dire. Indeed, some opponents of the movement to extend civil rights to people of color in our country were so sure that personal and social ruin were lurking around the corner that they fought with filibusters, nooses and guns to maintain the status quo. Click here to read full story

Posted January 26, 2015 in the Huffington Post:

Finding safe, permanent homes for children in foster care -- usually through adoption when they cannot return to their families of origin -- has become a federal mandate and a national priority during the past few decades. That's obviously a very good thing, but there's a too-little-discussed downside to this positive trend: Far too little attention is being paid to serving children after placement to ensure that they can grow up successfully in their new families and so that their parents can successfully raise them to adulthood.

Notice the use of the word "successfully" twice in the last paragraph. It's the key. It's also the founding principle of a new organization I'm proud to lead, the National Center on Adoption and Permanency (NCAP). Our mission is to move policy and practice in the U.S. beyond their current concentration on child placement to a model in which enabling families of all kinds to succeed -- through education, training and support services -- becomes the bottom-line objective.


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