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DHS placed our granddaughter with us over 2.5 yrs ago as kinship foster care. Child had just turned 2 at the time. Parental rights were court terminated in Oct.2006 and in Dec 2006 we applied to adopt. Based on some legal mess in hubby's background, and some negative recommendations from his grown kids, DHS is denying our adoption of her. We will be appealing the decision soon obviously, but I am curious if there would be other options we might suggest such as guardianship,etc where we would keep this child, but might ease DHS's minds where they could still kinda oversee the situation, if you follow me. (They are saying that they know she is getting excellent care now, but that they worry if she will be safe when she becomes a mouthy teen due to negative things hubby's grown kids said about him related to their teen years.) Anyone have info like that? We are in Michigan. I am afraid of them removing this child and what it would do to her mentally and emotionally...in addition to what it would do to our whole family who is super bonded to this child. She calls hubby and I mommy and daddy and this is the only home she remembers ever living in. I'm in a panic.
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I don't really have much experience w/ something like this, but I know from some volunteer work I do that often, courts will order a parent to get anger management counseling as a condition of unsupervised visitation or continued custody. If your husband were to volunteer to get some counseling, perhaps they'd back off of that issue. If nothing else, it would appear that they made efforts to manage what, on paper, appears to be a problem placement. Look into some parenting programs or counseling in your area and show up w/ a list of options. I would think that, coupled w/ the child's bonding, might be persuasive. Plus, really, how would it hurt to get information on how to parent and communicate more effectively with our children? We can probably all use that. Just a thought.
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We've asked them if they would like us to take anger management, or parenting classes. The psych eval went well and the only recommendation from the guy who did that testing was a 1-2-3 magic disciplining class, which is fine with us, but they've refused to let us set up. We'd do ANYTHING. This child is our heart, our blood. She belongs here.
We do have an attorney who is familiar with adoptions and this sort of thing. He seems to know what he is doing, it's just hard sitting back not knowing what to expect.
We are trying to figure out where there are some anger management classes anywhere near us, so far not finding them. Hard too when hubby drives truck over the road and is only home weekends normally, unless he takes time off.