Adoptive and foster parents want family planning benefits, too

Most families get nine months to prepare for the arrival of a child, but Andrea Danes and her husband had less than a week to prepare their home — and their lives — for the arrival of their 11-year-old daughter.

“When we had her come into our home it was literally a decision that was made overnight,” Danes says. Their family was welcoming a foster child, a process that differs from the traditional journey of family planning. Growing a family through fostering comes with unique challenges, and traditional support and benefits are often lacking for those that choose this route.

“There was no time off bringing a foster child or a guardianship situation child into your home,” Danes says. “My husband and I both worked full time, so we had to get her enrolled in school, get her set up, and go buy bunk beds in the evenings and on the weekends.”

There are currently more than 400,000 children in foster care across 218,927 licensed foster homes in the United States, according to the most recent data from the U.S. Census Bureau. And although just 2% of Americans have actually adopted, interest is high: more than a third of U.S. families have considered it.

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But the growing interest in alternative family planning options has done little to impact the integration of supportive benefits into workplaces — in a 2019 Employee Benefits research report, SHRM found that only 10% of employers surveyed offered some form of adoption assistance and less than half offered paid adoption leave to parents.

Today, Danes is the Global Human Services leader at professional services network Ernst & Young — which does offer benefits to foster and adoptive families, including 16 weeks of PTO for employees welcoming a child through birth, adoption, surrogacy, foster care or legal guardianship and who have been at the firm for at least a year, as well as a lifetime maximum of $50,000 to cover expense related to infertility, surrogacy and adoption. However, at the time, her previous employer was not as inclusive.

“Time off benefits should be the same if you're bringing in a foster child or adopted a child or had a baby,” she says. “There's this broad acknowledgement here at EY that you need that time to adjust your home and your family, but when we brought Grace in, there was nothing like that. We managed and I think we did alright, but it could have been easier.”

Those time-off benefits should cater to the unique needs of foster and adoptive parents, says Rita Soronen, president and CEO of the Dave Thomas Foundation for Adoption. It’s not just about the amount of time, but the flexibility to use it when needed.

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If a family is fostering or adopting through foster care, it may be that prior to the adoption the family needs to take the child to medical appointments, or set up school needs. New families may also have to coordinate visits with extended families that are still in the child's life, Soronen says.

“[The adopted family] may need time off in increments of one or two hours as opposed to two weeks of paid leave,” she says. “So it’s really about looking at the special circumstances.”

Another important benefit for this population is providing financial assistance and health insurance support. While many businesses will often offer an average of $10,961 per child to help cover legal fees and adoption costs, things like a grocery stipend or money to put toward furniture could make a big difference, Danes says.

Additionally, having a child put on health insurance the same way a biological child would be can help cut back on out-of-pocket costs. When Grace joined the Danes family, they were unable to put her under either parent’s insurance policy from work, due to the fact that her foster status kept her from being listed as an official member of the family unit. Instead, they had to turn to third-party providers like Medicaid for help.

“There were a handful of times where we ended up taking her to providers and paying for things out-of-pocket because Medicaid didn't cover it,” Danessays. “Having access to true health insurance through an employer would make a big difference.”

Rachel Lauren, senior director of people and culture at non-profit organization Dream Corps, has fostered seven children total — three of whom she adopted — and was the first person in her organization to use their foster care and adoption benefits. Lauren wasn't alone in needing them, she was just the only one who knew they existed.

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“They had a whole system where they actually gave monetary assistance and leave and our organization didn't know about this policy,” she says. “The organizations that do have something in their systems need to talk about more and need to actually practice it in the same breath.”

As the definition of family continues to grow, adoption and foster care benefits affect a wide-demographic of employees. From same sex couples to couples suffering from medical infertility, having a company that is willing to commit to different methods of family building and planning is not just a want, it’s a need. And when companies don’t evolve to make that process easier, it can stop couples from achieving their dreams of having a family.

When Danes has spoken to families about becoming foster parents or taking guardianship of children, the concerns or hesitation have never been about matters of raising those children — they’ve always been about how they would find the means to acclimate their families and homes to the change. Providing more robust support can help children and parents make their lives complete.

“If working parents knew that they would have a four to six week window where they could adjust their existing family, do the logistics, do the paperwork, they would pick up where they left off [at work] with a new family in place,” she says. “I am confident it would significantly increase the number of people considering fostering.”