Through our Intensive In-Home Services, we provide help to struggling families, hoping to strengthen them and allow children to stay with their birth parents. Sometimes, this is not possible, but those children still need a “forever home.”
In Tennessee, the Youth Villages child adoption services partners with the state Department of Children’s Services to find permanent homes for the children in our care who have adoption as a goal.
In the other states we serve, our counselors work with state officials to facilitate adoption for children who cannot return to their birth families.
Right now, dozens of Youth Villages kids in Tennessee are looking for adoption, ranging in age from five to 18. Profiles are available for many of the children eligible for adoption in Tennessee.
Adoption in Tennessee
The children in our care who are available for adoption face special challenges. Most of them have suffered some emotional trauma in their childhood; many have suffered from abuse or neglect. Many of the children available for adoption have been in our foster care program for many years. Now, their birth parents’ rights have been severed, and they are ready to move from foster to forever homes.
They have received counseling and good care from us. To reach their full potential, all they need now is the kind of security that only a real family can provide.
Youth Villages offers an array of training, support and assistance to potential adoptive parents. Many adoptive parents also are eligible for continuing adoption subsidies from the state.
We began our adoption program in 1999 as a natural extension of our treatment foster care program. For some people, fostering a child with special needs is the first step toward adoption. Many of our foster parents adopt the children in their homes when they become eligible for adoption in Tennessee. Other parents come to us with adoption as their immediate goal.
