Idyllwild Town Crier
Vo. 79, No. 31, p. B1
Thursday, August 1, 2024
Local Author to Speak of Foster to Adoption Journey
By David Jerome, Correspondent
Tuesday August 6, the Idyllwild Library will welcome local author Lane Igoudin, who is on a tour for his book A Family, Maybe. It chronicles the ‘twists, turns, and heartaches” along the path to adopting two foster daughters through LA county’s “overburdened and at times chaotic” child welfare system.
Igoudin and his husband have been living part-time in Idyllwild for almost 20 years, and parts of the story take place against familiar backdrops: the Nature Center, story time at the (old) library, the 4th of July Parade, Town Hall Camp. The book is both a memoir and a guide for foster parents wishing to adopt. Lane answered a few of the Crier‘s questions about his experience with the foster adoption process.
What do you wish you had known before the adoption process?
LI: I wish we had understood better how complex and unpredictable it is. Not that it would have scared us off from taking in the children, but it would have helped us to prepare ourselves better to manage it. The antidote to uncertainty is knowledge. You can learn from books, websites, experts, social media groups, adoptive parents in your community. This will give you the understanding and the tools you need to address the issues as they arise. That’s what we did, and it helped us make it through the most difficult parts of our journey.
Describe a little about the court process. You say prospective adoptive parents are not included, and these proceedings are not public?
LI: The intention of the process is to figure out what’s best for a child detained by the court, and, using another legal term, how to best dispose of their case – send the child back to their birth families, keep them in the foster system, terminate their parents’ rights so they could become eligible for adoption, and so on. . . The foster parents are generally treated as paid caretakers. The needs, responsibilities, and biases of each party to the case also fluctuate, which can make the outcome of the child’s case highly unpredictable.
Has the process changed for better or worse since your adoptions?
LI: Not much, unfortunately. Children’s Law Center of California reports that there are still over 25,000 kids in foster care in Los Angeles County alone. The legal framework is still the same, and the caseloads of social workers, judges, and attorneys remain high.
What changed in the last 10 years though is that the preference for birth family reunification has grown stronger, reflected in new federal and state laws that redirected some group home funding towards programs meant to strengthen birth families. That backfired in that there are now fewer homes available to take in foster kids, and some of them, as Los Angeles Times reported in a series of recent articles, the county is now placing in hotels.
Igoudin concludes, “This may sound like a lot to handle, but I still encourage prospective parents to consider fostering and adopting children. There is such tremendous need for children to find forever families. Even getting one child out of the system makes a world of difference. It’s worth the sacrifice.”
Lane Igoudin, author of A Family, Maybe, at the Idyllwild Public Library, 54401Village Center Dr., Tuesday, August 6, 5:30 p.m.
Lane Igoudin | Author, Professor, Dad 