Redesigning The Foster Care & Adoption Experience
Foster Design And Adopt a Good Experience a Medium Series.
Creating great user experiences is all about telling a story and bringing things to life. Building a detailed narrative around your user helps you walk in their shoes and further understand who they are.
MDES cohorts are addressing various wicked problems this semester. Our latest problem addresses the foster care and adoption system in the United States. We hit the ground running by conducting secondary research. It was immediately apparent that this system is complex and there are intertwined interests of the stakeholders which make the system difficult to analyze. However, using design thinking, we are optimistic that we can address the problems that live in the system by tweaking the experience for everyone involved.
As Christian Saylor, Senior UX Design Specialist at Universal Mind says,
“Design creates stories, and stories create memorable experiences, and great experiences have this innate ability to change the way in which we view our world. Design thinking facilitates to cope with the complexity of the system.”
What is Foster Care and Adoption?
Many of us have heard about foster care and adoption, but what are the details? Foster care is a temporary arrangement of a house in which adults provide necessary utilities for children and youth, whose birth parents are unable to take care of them.
There are eclectic reasons for which children are taken away from their own houses, sometimes through parental consent and sometimes through social services and court orders. The primary goal of Foster care is to reunite birth parents with their child. However, in some scenarios, birth parents are denied any relationship with their child, and thus begins the journey towards adoption.
Adoption is a permanent arrangement, where the adoptive parents or parent, permanently and legally take the child under their wings as their own child.
Facts and statistics about Foster Care and Adoption.
According to the organization, ‘AMERICAN SOCIETY FOR THE POSITIVE CARE OF CHILDREN’ state’s as of 2016, 437,000 children and young adults are in Foster Care due to numerous reasons.
These are children who are growing and vulnerable during childhood development. , Children who should have a bright future, are instead struggling to find a stable home with loving parents. The fact that such a large number of children are deprived of parental love and familial stability is very disheartening.
As we started digging in deep about foster care and adoption we found that 61% are thrown out of there own houses due to neglect and 34% due to drug abuse parent.
A staggering 90% of youth in the foster system who have been exposed to trauma, and have to go through mental health check-ups every month. Even though there are so many platforms and government initiatives to support these children, they are still falling short of resources and are unable to provide these children with “homes”.
Walking in the child’s shoes.
Children suffering from neglect, abuse, domestic violence or even trafficking are rescued by social workers and are brought into a safer environment. This safe environment in many cases Foster Care is where these children, get a second chance of starting their lives all over again. Almost 30–60% foster parents drop out of parenting every year making this whole situation more vulnerable than ever.
But does it stop here? NO!
The social workers try hard to get birth parents and their child together since every child deserves to stay with their parents. But When this fails, the children stay in foster care, waiting for their adoptive parents.
Until they get a permanent home, the children travel from foster home to foster home trying to go about their life with the support of their foster parents and social workers.
Unfortunately, the average amount of time a child stays in the foster system is 31.2 months. There are constant efforts and arrangements made by foster parents and social workers, to increase adoption of these children. These consist of events for children, foster parents, and adoptive parents. These events encourage adoptive parents to meet their future child.
Even though these efforts are helping some children all over the USA, more than 23,000 children age out of the US foster care system every year, which means even after waiting and struggling throughout their childhood, they do not find their adoptive parents or are reunited with their birth family.
Walking in the adoptive parent’s shoes.
The adoption procedure can be stressful for former foster parents or new potential adoptive parents. They go through a comprehensive vetting process before meeting these children. Every set of parents have to go through a training session where they are evaluated as parents and individuals. Since so many foster children have faced trauma in their earlier life, scenarios and situations are discussed with parents by the social workers. Adoption from the foster care system can happen in various ways.
- Foster adoption: Children are legally adopted by their foster parents.
- Adoptive parents: Children stay in the foster home as they wait to get legally adopted by Adoptive Parents. In this case, most of the times the rights of birth parents are terminated and the kids are legally free for adoption.
With all of this in mind, how do we create a good experience?
After all this overwhelming information, it became clear that something has to change. All children deserve a safe home, loving parents, and a healthy childhood.
This led us to ethnographic research. We spoke to many people in the foster care and adoption system. After interviewing adoptive parents, foster parents, and social workers, we gathered insights and realized the need to make this experience more humane and enjoyable for everyone involved in the system.
Expectations and experiences are not always parallel
“When we were early on in the process, we had seen a girl who thought might be a good fit. The social worker thought they might fit (before the MAAP classes) — we were fast-tracked on the recommendation, but 6 months in, we found out that the child was in the complete opposite situation that the social worker had said. There have been a lot of our friends who went to meetings expecting one thing and not receiving the same experience.” — Adoptive parent
Foster parents are not paid deliberately for the utilities they provide for the kid
“They don’t pay you deliberately pay you less than half of what it would take to keep a kid. I’d be uploading alliance and that’s a quarterly, I don’t know what it is cause Jamie doesn’t get it, but we still get the check, for, you know, as if we were poster can take her,it comes every couple of weeks adds up to like maybe $5,000 a year, something like that. I guess we just put it in the bank, but we use it for, um, getting her hair done.” — Foster parent
Overwhelming work for social workers
“So here are some things she just assesses so overwhelming that they might have like 15 families that they’re working with at a time that is current, but they might also still have families. They very well do have families who have already been placed with a child, but they can’t close that case out until that adoption gets finalized. And it takes like a year or more to get finalized. So you could have like 15 active families you’re working with and trying to help them get mashed and stuff. But then you have all these kind of old families, right. You’re still responsible for that.” — Social worker
Together we march forward.
Everyone in the foster care system plays a crucial role in providing a better life for the child. Everyone involved deserves to have a better experience while handling such a delicate matter. Right now we are left with these thoughts in our minds:
How can we as designers, alleviate the experience within foster care and adoption for these children? How can we create a better experience by redesigning the system?
Stay tuned as we explore this wicked problem further.
In our next article, we will talk about how we gathered our secondary and primary research together to make the most of ‘USER INSIGHTS’.
