Most older children that are currently going through the adoption/foster care system have been physically and/or sexually abused, and many have been traumatized by their removal from their birth home. These children most often come into the system bearing psychological problems, such as Post Traumatic Stress Syndrome, attachment issues, and developmental problems (Robinson 3). Not all of these problems can be fixed immediately, if at all. The only way for these problems to be corrected is through the support of the adoptive family, as well as a therapist that the child has trust in.

Many of the children that enter care today have been exposed to some kind of traumatic

Orphanages have disastrous long-term effects on children. In a study that compared women who had been raised in an orphanage to those that had not, the institutionally reared women showed a higher rate of poor parenting skills and psychosocial difficulties (Harnack 40). It was also found that while foster children seem to have a more traumatic past than children raised in orphanages, there were no behavioral differences between the two groups (Harnack 41).

Children often go through the six classic emotional stages of grief when going through a separation. The first stage is shock. The child just simply can not believe that he or she is going to be taken away from the people that he or she knows as parents. The second stage is denial, where the child will often act as if they are unaffected by the change, even though they are hurting inside. In the third stage, known as “bargaining”, the child will make promises, for example, to be better, or nicer, if only the outcome of the situation would change. Mourning sets in during the fourth stage, and it is then when the child will appear sad about the event. Children often emotionally regress during this time period. During the fifth stage, children realize that they must move on with their life, although they are still sad, and it is in the sixth stage where the children realize that the parent is gone, and they begin to reminisce. Children often deal with painful separations by treating them in much the same way that the child would treat it if the parent had actually died (Gray 86). The new parents need to be there to emotionally support the child, as the child is not yet fully emotionally developed enough to handle this situation by themselves. By changing the adoption system, children would be able to stay in homes as a more permanent setting, ideally, the foster system would be replaced by a system that places children with a family that will be able to adopt them within a short period of time, rather than risk the chance of the child being relocated to a new foster family.

The current system for adopting a child can take years. In one case, it took a family six years to adopt their child. This absurdly long time is not the unusual case in adoption. The average length of an in-country adoption is 5 years. The current United States adoption system includes a lengthy home-study, which is defined as “an assessment of the parent’s needs, limits, and strengths related to parenting and adoption” (Robinson 19). During the home study, the adoption worker usually schedules several meetings with the prospective parents. These meetings are held with both parents there, as well as with the parents separately, and if any kids are already in the household, they will be questioned as well. The parents are usually asked to submit a short autobiography, as well as numerous references from friends, doctors, and employers. A doctor must verify that the couple is in good enough health to survive through such a long commitment. By the end of the home study, the adoption worker must have “a sense of strengths, weaknesses, and expectations of the couple” (Robinson 174). It is only after this study that the worker decides whether or not the prospective family should be allowed to adopt a child or not. If the couple is deemed inappropriate for adoption, this couple will never be allowed to adopt through this agency. If the couple still wishes to adopt, the couple must complete another home study, but this time with a

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