The process of adoption through the foster care system can be anywhere from fairly simple to time-consuming and complex. 

The short answer is that the foster to adopt process can take 6 months (plus the time for filing court documents), all the way up to 28 months if you are the first placement for a child.

The rules are the same, however, each situation will reflect a different result depending on the details of the case. Federal rules determine the answer to this question. Below is an excerpt from lawshelf.com detailing the Adoption and Safe Families Act (AFSA).

States are affirmatively required to proceed with the termination of parental rights when a child has been in foster care for 15 of the most recent 22 months. There are only three exceptions:

1. The child is placed with a relative (at the option of the State).
2. The State documents a compelling reason not to file a petition for termination of parental rights (TPR).
3. The State has not provided the services, identified in the case plan, necessary to make the home safe for the child’s return within the time frame specified in the case plan.

There are 2 basic roads for a child to move from foster care to adoption. One is a voluntary Termination of Parental Rights (TPR) and the other is an involuntary TPR.

The difference is obvious, the timing is completely dependant on how the case progresses and the path that the birth parents choose.

Voluntary Termination

This may seem unlikely to happen in most cases however, there are several instances where the voluntary Termination makes sense to a birth parent.

Imagine you are a young mother. At 17 years old, being a teen mother is quite a challenge. You were raised in a religious tradition that absolutely forbids premarital sex.

The lack of a ring or a husband says to everyone in your family’s sphere of influence that you are guilty of the sin of premarital sex.

Your parents are embarrassed by your actions and they are also the only support you have in your life. You chose to go against their advice to put the baby up for adoption and are consequently locked out of the only home you have ever known.

The struggle suddenly becomes overwhelming. Trying to finish school, finding a job willing to hire a pregnant teen, and supporting the 2 of you is more than you can handle. 

Over the next 18 months your child is born and despite your best efforts the child welfare office has stepped into your life. They tell you that you don’t have the resources to properly care for your baby, and you hate it, but you know they are not wrong. 

The parenting plan they set up is full of challenges that as a teen Mom, you find impossible. After a little more than 2 years, it becomes apparent that your baby would be better off with a functioning family. As a last resort to help your baby you chose to terminate your parental rights so that he is legally available for adoption.

This is just one example of how voluntary termination works. 

Another example is a mother who has tried to work within the system and has been unable to successfully complete the parenting plan due to active addiction.

In both cases, the parents decide that they can not provide the life that their child deserves and chooses to give them the opportunities that another family can provide.

In the case of a voluntary TPR, the time frame can be guided by the birth parents’ decisions.

Involuntary Termination

When an involuntary TPR occurs, it is either because of an inability to meet the requirements of a parenting plan within the legally mandated time frame. 

The law says that any child who remains in Foster Care for 15 out of any 22 consecutive rolling months should trigger the fostering agency to file for TPR.

That isn’t to say that it will be automatically granted, but it should be filed and “could” be granted.

In our experience, this is usually a story that is punctuated with an addiction struggle. 

I can only really speak to the experience of our family. What we have seen is that a majority of these cases involve an addiction of some sort.

As anyone who is familiar with the effects of addiction on the life of a loved one will tell you, the path out of addiction is not well marked and looks more like a cliff to climb than a path to endure.

The number of cases that end in an involuntary TPR are disproportionately drug and alcohol-related. Most of us have seen the long-lasting effects of the havoc wreaked on lives drowning in addiction. However, as addiction takes hold on the life of a birth parent, they usually don’t see the addiction as a real problem. 

Anyone who doesn’t see it as a problem will not want to go through the struggle to get and stay clean. This leads to a failure to follow the parenting plan and leads toward TPR instead of reunification.

Time spent in foster care

I have heard countless cases of children who spent years in the foster care system, only to age out of the system and become emancipated without the benefit of finding an adoptive family to support them throughout the rest of their lives. 

The Adoption and Safe Families Act was designed to prevent children from lingering in and out of care for years and years. It sets some time-triggered actions that create accountabilities for birth parents to step up, or step out of the lives of the children they are accused of neglecting or abusing. 

The majority of the children that age out of the system are kids who have become eligible for adoption as older youth.

The kids that become legally available for adoption are typically more likely to be adopted if they are younger. 

The foster care timeline

As was mentioned earlier the 15 cumulative months inside of any consecutive, rolling 22 months is the basis for the timeline of the foster to adopt process. But, if a birth parent voluntarily waives their parental rights, adoption may come much sooner. In accordance with our state laws, a person must have a child in their home as a foster placement for 6 months before they will be granted an adoption. That 6 month period may run concurrently with the 15 months in care, but it doesn’t necessarily need to be concurrent.

So the short answer is that the foster to adopt process takes 6 months plus the time for filing court documents, all the way up to 28 months if you are the first placement for a child. However, the long answer is that all of these pieces will affect the case and so there is no simple answer that covers all cases.