The initiative focuses on changing how state governments regulate adoption and foster care. While legal proceedings involved in adoption and foster care are a necessity, more attention should be placed on the welfare of the children involved. Children's mental and emotional health during the adoption process is an integral factor in their long-term welfare. The main concern in creating these new regulations is to provide children with happy homes.
While the initiative is attempting to break down racial and ethnic barriers, it should be concerned with gender, sexual orientation and marital status as well. These factors have no detrimental impact on the loving, nurturing environment that may be provided for adopted children. There are currently no laws preventing gay or lesbian couples or single parents from adopting children, but they frequently face significant obstacles. A gay or lesbian couple or a single parent who has met the same requirements as a heterosexual couple should not be denied the right to adopt a child based on their sexual preference or marital status. There are too many children in America without a home or parents to love and care for them to be eliminating potential parents from the pool. The ability to provide a nurturing environment for an adopted child should take precedence over all else.
Another concern the initiative addresses is the unnecessary removal of children from their families. Uprooting children from their homes, both foster and biological, can upset the emotional development of the child. A stable environment should be the goal of any foster placement. An integral part of stability is permanently establishing children in one home, to allow them to adjust to school and the people around them. While welfare is the main concern, trading young children like baseball cards must end.
Courts currently use the adversarial system to mediate adoptions, which depends on the court to resolve differences. Duquette aims to replace this adversarial system with mediation and family group conferencing. An approach such as this would help to ease the transition of adoption for both the child and the adoptive family. This conferencing could prematurely address the child's and the family's concerns, and could head off problems that children typically face further down the road as a result of adoption.
Due to the many innovations this initiative is attempting to set in place, the adoption and foster care process may become easier on all parties involved. The implementation of many facets of the plan would ease many of adoption's legalities. Adoption's purpose should be refocused on the most important parties involved: the children.