According to a news story from Massachusetts, the adoption of two children by a family with 5 children has been stopped because of a law about the number of children in a home where foster and adoptive placements are made.
The report in the Sun Chronicle (Attleboro-North Attleboro, MA) indicates that the prospective parents are a financial analyst and nurse, and that the sisters they want to adopt, ages 6 and 11 (who are currently living in separate foster homes), had already begun the counseling process to help them adjust to the move to an adoptive family.
Setting arbitrary numbers just doesn't sit well with me. Each family is different as is each child, and if the placement of children in a larger family is going to be in the children's best interest, isn't this kind of a law self-defeating... in a system that strives to meet the "best interests of the child?"
In addition to the issue of siblings living apart when they could be living together, I find it hard to reconcile a law limiting the number of children in a home with the shortage of foster and adoptive families for children in the U.S. foster care system which, if we listen to the pleas from child welfare agencies across the nation, has reached a critical point.
When the adoptive family is qualified, loving, and the placement is deemed appropriate for the children, isn't that what matters?
The story is not online in its entirety and this link may not work for long, but here's a link to a summary of the story:
http://www.thesunchronicle.com/artic...city/city2.txt