Adoption and Guardianship Enhanced Support (AGES): Providing Families What They Need, When They Need It

Background/Purpose: Legal permanence through adoption and subsidized guardianship is a desirable outcome for children when reunification is not possible. However, adoptive parents and guardians often report feeling ill-equipped and unsupported to meet the needs of their children, which may result in familial instability or diminished well-being. In an effort to help these families, a new intervention, Adoption and Guardianship Enhanced Support (AGES), was developed to provide adoptive and guardianship families with the supports and services they need to maintain long-term, stable families. The paper aims at describing the challenges confronting families who participated in AGES and how issues were addressed by the program.

Methods: Using a grounded theory approach, interviews were conducted with 32 adoptive parents and guardians (caregivers) AGES participants. This systematic approach is used to develop a broad conceptual theory that explains a phenomenon, process, action, or interaction. Grounded theories are used to construct a theory that emerges out of data to highlight participants’ experiences and generate, inform, extend, expand, and refine knowledge in various fields. Responses were reviewed, recorded, transcribed, and coded using open coding, axial coding (creating subcategories), and selective coding (refining theory) to get a sense of the interview as a whole before breaking it into parts. To develop themes that assist in answering research questions, coding is an essential connection between collecting data and developing an emergent theory that reflected the participants’ experiences.

Results: Adoptive and guardianship families struggled with a wide range of issues, and the themes that emerged revealed that caregivers reported different degrees of urgency. Urgent issues include difficulty managing the behaviors of their children and lack of access to services to address urgent and emerging needs. In comparison, some issues needed to be addressed with long-term plans. These included issues such as negotiating a relationship with birth family, and issues related to transracial adoption. These diverse issues require a variety of responses and assistance from the AGES workers. Caregivers reported that, more than anything, they needed support that would help them increase their capacity to care for their children. These types of supports were reported: 1) helping families make difficult decisions; 2) being a sounding board for families; 3) equipping families with knowledge of available resources; 4) assisting families with the set-up with those services; 5) navigating the various systems; 6) figuring out the right diagnosis and establishing the appropriate services to help with that diagnosis.

Conclusions: The findings illustrate issues that are faced by adoptive and guardianship families. Caregivers offered the following recommendations for service providers: 1) provide services and resources earlier in the adoption and guardianship process so that they might minimize the issues they were struggling with; 2) provide in-home support; and 3) ensure assistance is readily available; families should not have to spend years searching for appropriate help. Hopelessness resulting from endless struggling with issues with no hope of resolution contributed to permanence instability.