Life Unexpected - New adoption related TV show

How incredibly sad...and probably her mother has thought she is being brought up in an adoptive home with two parents who could give her 'a better life'. I will watch for the show... I do wonder though how all the lobby groups working to stop open records laws will feel based on their premise of stopping the laws because birth parents were promised privacy and this show will prove without a doubt how much bunk that is...tee hee... Kind regards,Dickons

I saw this in the beginning of the fall season when TV Guide proclaimed it a mid season series to watch for. It is my kind of show, but I can see as a birthmother with a teenaged daughter how it might trigger some stuff. I have a weird feeling the premise of a healthy, seemingly mature and normal teenage girl not being adopted by anyone by 15 and being returned to the birthparents is going to inflame some close to foster parenting or adoptive parenting. It's just not realistic, but personally I think it's going to be like Juno in the sense that the focus is supposed to be on the relationships between the characters and not necessarily the circumstances that threw them together. However I think there are going to be some that will have an issue with a birthparent gaining custody back after the child was relinquished as a result of a teenaged pregnancy. Then again, I just spent my new years watching Melrose Place on DVD, and some of those plotlines are WAY more far fetched (Jo losing custody of her unborn child simply because her friends are messed up and single and her ex's parents are Mom and Pop Middle America??? Seriously????) and most of us were able to see it for what it was. I plan on giving the show a shot, I hope others do too because it looks pretty interesting.

When watching the previews I did kind of wonder how a CC infant child was not adopted from foster care. I wonder if the show will go into that at all. But again, it is just a TV show, but it does look good so I will be interested in watching it.

When I first saw the promo on tv, I thought it ridiculous that a healthy adorable girl had never been adopted. It's another fantasy show that is totally unbelievable. I thought the same with the August Rush movie -- the boy had been in an orphanage his whole young life because he didn't want to be adopted? Since when have babies/children been given a choice??? Maybe this new tv show has a legal explanation that the bparents never signed away their rights, but I think the bparents would have been approached long before. I am also bothered that the bmom doesn't look old enough, and the fact that the daughter is very blonde while the parents have dark hair -- just doesn't ring true for me.

we know a CC boy who just turned 16. he has been in care since he was born in CA. he has never been adopted by the single family that has fostered him all this time, although they have adopted many other children before and after him that they have fostered. i get the feeling that they were never sure if they wanted to parent him forever and for some reason want to reserve the right to return him whenever they want. (horrible) anyway.....my point is....however wrong it is, it happens.

Actually in NC children over the age of 12 do get a choice. If they say no, there isn't an adoption.

That is sad. I guess I can see that happening though if a baby comes into care who lingers for some time before TPR. Especially if that child goes to more than one home and is a bit older before available for adoption. But it just appears that in THIS story, the child is relinquished at birth into the foster care system. So there would be no lingering there. But again, it's a TV show and I don't expect everything to be reality based. LOL! It looks like a good show to me. :)

For what it's worth, if the mother voluntarially relinquished the child, then that is no barrier to later adopting a child - even the same child that she relinquished earlier. (or of becoming a foster parent, or a guardian, etc.) This came up in my state several years ago. A woman had her children removed by CPS, and she voluntarially relinquished them because she didn't think she could kick her drug habit. But she did. Long story short, around ten years after relinquishing her kids, she came across one of them, and found they had not been adopted. She petitioned the court, and was permitted to adopt her bio children out of foster care. Of course the news didn't list all the ins-and-outs of it, but just the bare bones of the "happy news" story. So, while it sounds far-fetched, it's not out of the realm of possibility.