Adoption screening needs work

A UBC researcher says a tool to assess potential adoptive parents does not meet the needs of lesbian, gay or gender minority adults.

Sarah Dow-Fleisner, a professor in the UBC Okanagan’s School of Social Work, worked with Boston Children’s Hospital postdoctoral fellow Adeline Wyman Battalen and David Brodzinsky at Rutgers University, to test the validity of the commonly-used Transracial Adoptive Parenting Scale (TAPS).

TAPS is a measure of empathy and understanding and is traditionally used to evaluate the readiness of becoming a parent through transracial adoption.

Depending on where potential adoptive parents land on the TAPS scale, practitioners can then provide support in specific areas.

While TAPS is a commonly accepted measure in clinical practice, Dow-Fleisner’s research says it misses the mark when it comes to sexual minority adoptive parents, specifically lesbian and gay parents.

“These screening tools are meant to be able to assess the needs or areas where parents can use some support in terms of understanding what it means to adopt transracially, or perhaps a child with special needs or a child with a history of trauma,” she explains.

Screening tools do generally work, she says, but her research has determined TAPS is not accurate enough to determine what type of support sexual minority parents might need once they adopt a child. Her research shows the majority of lesbian or gay couples, about 60 per cent, adopt cross-racially—where at least one parent is a different race than the child.

“As a scale it’s not sensitive enough. It’s as if you were to weight a person with a scale that only measures tonnes. You will get an accurate weight, but not the most precise or useful weight.”

Having accurate screening tools matters, she says, since sexual minority parents are more likely to adopt a child from the child welfare system who may have some special needs.

“Our hope is for sufficient screening tools and continued research to help reduce discrimination against prospective sexual and gender minority parents looking to adopt,” said Wyman Battalen. In 2015 there were about 30,000 children in Canada eligible for adoption. However, many of those children will age out of the system before they are adopted.

“We have parents who are ready, willing and able to adopt,” DowFleisner adds.

The research was published in Journal of Evidence-Informed Social Work.