When Adoptions ‘Break’: New York Legislation Aims to Ensure Adoption Subsidies Follow the Child
A bill the governor has yet to sign is believed to be the first in the country to ensure that adoptive parents don’t continue to receive monthly payments after their children have been returned to foster care.
A bill awaiting New York Gov. Kathy Hochul’s signature would end an often undetected practice of adoptive parents pocketing funds for children they are no longer caring for, and allow child welfare agencies to transfer monthly payments to young people who face the abrupt loss of a home and guardian that had been promised to them.
“The money must follow the child,” said state Sen. Roxanne Persaud, the bill’s author.
Monthly adoption subsidies in New York typically range between about $900 and $1,200 a month, and far greater amounts depending on a child’s disabilities. The money is supposed to go for the children’s care and medical needs, and is meant to encourage adoption by supportive families, especially for children the state deems “hard-to-place.”
But millions of dollars appear to be misspent each year following what is known as “broken adoptions.” And after years of prodding by youth advocates, a majority of state lawmakers now acknowledge that a fix is long overdue. In some instances, parents continue receiving money even after children have died, a New York City audit found.
Persaud’s bill — which passed both houses of the Legislature on May 30 for the first time since 2017 — now falls to the governor to enact. If signed into law, it would terminate state funds paid to parents who could not provide proof to child welfare agencies that adopted children are still under their care.
Regarding those who accept such payments for absent children: “That’s just greed, in my opinion,” Sen. Persaud said in an interview with The Imprint. “If you gave up the child, then you shouldn’t be entitled to the money.”
Under her bill, in addition to the reporting currently required, adoptive parents would have to submit a certification of their support, and notify social services if the child is residing with, or under the care of, another guardian. Absent a response, child welfare agencies would need to follow up within 30 days. Payments can be sent directly to young people between ages 18 and 21 who have left an adoptive home and returned to independent living without another legal guardian.
Advocates who have fought for the legislation for more than a decade said if it becomes law, it will be the first of its kind in the nation.
Assemblymember Andrew Hevesi, who sponsored the bill in his chamber, pointed to clear benefits for adoptees who end up pushed out, as well as for all state taxpayers.
“New York state should not be paying for services that are not being provided,” he said in an interview.
In a 2021 report focused on New York City, the city’s comptroller found that its child welfare agency was lax when it came to keeping track of adoption subsidy payments. Officials failed to recover duplicate payments andoverpayments to guardians of deceased children, the audit found, and did not take action when parents failed to provide required proof that they were still supporting their adopted children.
The comptroller estimated that the city’s Administration for Children’s Services issued “inappropriate” payments of more than $200 million dollars each year between 2018 and 2020.
By better tracking the funds, Hevesi said his legislation “helps families, helps kids, and helps the families who are actually doing the work.”
Brooklyn native Christine Joseph experienced one of these “broken adoptions” at age 17, and speaks to the urgency of the need to make sure the subsidies go where they’re most needed. Growing up in foster and adoptive homes, she dreamed of studying social work, selecting her own apartment and building a better future for a child of her own. But when relations with her adoptive parent shattered around 10 years ago, she was forced to live in shelters and fend for herself.
At that point, “it was just me trying to find my way through life,” Joseph said in an interview with her attorney — a struggle that continued after she became a young mother.
When Joseph turned 23, she started searching for her adoption records and information about her birth family. During that search, she learned about post-adoption subsidies that she believes she should have had access to between the ages of 18 and 21. But by that point, it was too late.
“That money could have just helped in so many ways. I would have never had to go through the shelter system. I would not have to apply for government assistance in order to take care of myself and my son,” Joseph said. “If I had that money — I can only imagine what else I would be doing. I would have been in college, I would have been saving.”
Nonetheless, she hopes Gov. Hochul signs the adoption subsidy bill, and said she’s excited that it finally met lawmakers’ approval.
“It’s unfortunate that I wasn’t able to benefit from this,” said Joseph, who is now 27 and organizing for YouthNPower, an advocacy collective comprised of young people with experience in the child welfare system. “But I’m very happy,” she added, that others may soon benefit.
Children and teenagers leave adoptive homes far more often than is widely known, and for a variety of reasons.
There is no hard data on the number of “broken adoptions.” But in a survey for the federal Administration for Children and Families, researchers found that almost 10% of children who were adopted from the foster care system “experienced formal post adoption instability.” The number of children who dealt with “informal” instability, however, was much higher at 30% — including children who ran away or dealt with a period of homelessness. A USA Today investigation found that between 2008 and 2020, more than 66,000 adoptees suffered the loss of two families — birth and adoptive — and were returned to the foster care system.
In New York, Lawyers for Children, Children’s Law Center and Covenant House, a nonprofit serving homeless and other vulnerable youth, have long fought to reveal one particularly problematic aspect of broken adoptions: when parents keep kids’ money even after they stop taking care of them.
Child welfare attorneys Dawn Post and Brian Zimmerman wrote about the problem a dozen years ago in the Capital University Law Review. The article noted that some parents have “sought to dissolve their relationship with their adopted children, alleging extreme behavioral, psychological, or medical needs, only to return them to the state foster care system to receive treatment and care.” The authors noted that they are not always ill-intended, and include parents who typically understand that “the last thing adoptive children need is to be rejected by another family.”
But, the article stated, “these middle-to-upper class families argue that their children’s mental health needs are so great that they cannot financially, emotionally, or physically afford to continue to care for them.” Still other times, troubled kids who have been battered by life simply take flight — disappearing from adoptive homes for more independent lives.
Post and Zimmerman pointed out that “little attention has been paid to the many children who are a product of the foster care system and who return to family court through its revolving doors after achieving so-called ‘permanency’ through adoption.”
Betsy Kramer, director of policy and special litigation at the nonprofit Lawyers for Children, said she and her colleagues see this occur far too often. Adoptive parents don’t resume custody of their children for a variety of reasons, Kramer said. “Sometimes it’s because of the young person’s gender identity or sexual orientation. Sometimes it’s because having a teenager is just too much for them.”
Post emphasized the importance of better educating prospective parents about how trauma can affect children’s behavior, and fully informing them about any specific emotional, mental or physical health needs before they finalize an adoption. In addition to fully acknowledging the challenges that may lie ahead, she said, these households need resources and support to avoid terminating the adoptions when situations seem unmanageable. Parents often face challenges during adolescence — and then don’t know where to turn to for help.
“It’s surprising how many adoptive parents claim not to have known the significance of their child’s diagnosis before they adopted,” Post said.
Once the bill that tightens regulations on post-adoption subsidies reaches Hochul’s desk, she will have 10 days to sign or veto the legislation.
It is unclear how she is leaning. Hochul has sided with the rights of adoptive parents on two recent issues. Earlier this year, her administration overturned a rule that placed restrictions on New Yorkers adopting children from other states.
And last year, for the second time, she vetoed the Preserving Family Bonds Act, which sought to increase birth parents’ ability to contact children who’d been adopted or whose parents’ rights were terminated. “This bill would inappropriately substitute the judgment of adoptive parents with that of the court,” Hochul’s veto memo stated.
Previous opposition to the bill came from groups including the Adoptive and Foster Family Coalition of New York. In 2017, former executive director Richard Heyl de Ortiz said a previous version of the legislation “could penalize parents who have a commitment to their children while their child may have run away from home temporarily, may have chosen to live with a friend, or potentially couch surf.” He said in those instances, “that family is still maintaining a connection, wants that child to return home, and is working towards that.”
Former foster youth and adoptee Lawrence Booker, a Brooklyn native, is among those whose lives might have changed for the better if the law had been enacted years ago. Booker told his story to The Imprint in 2017, describing his fight in court to regain part of the subsidies taken by his adoptive mother. To deepen the wound, he said, he had been physically and mentally abused in her home for years before he left at 16 and found refuge with another family.
Booker was ultimately victorious. He ended up getting part of the monthly payments his adoptive parent had been receiving, which amounted to $1,237 per month. But at that time, he was just five months from his 21st birthday, when the subsidies would stop. He estimates that over a five-year period, his former adoptive parent received tens of thousands of dollars in his name after he left the home.
Now 28 and working in marketing, Booker said in a recent interview that he was happy to see the legislation’s progress, and took note of the impact it could have had on his case.
“It’s about time,” he said.
He also said he hoped his legal battle would contribute to change for others. “We were trying to really use it as precedent for other children to be able to access the resources and materials that they’re entitled to.”
It’s a sentiment shared by Booker’s former attorney Post, who worked at the Children’s Law Center at the time representing kids in foster care. Post has been a strident advocate for corrective legislation on the misplaced subsidies since 2010, two years before she published her law review article on broken adoptions.
“I am ecstatic that this is the first bill in the country that’s really going to address this,” Post said. “This provides a real opportunity for youth to continue to be supported with the funds that were originally intended for them."