SARANAC LAKE — A local support group for adoptive and kinship families has expanded into this village, offering information, financial assistance, counseling, community and advocacy, all for free.

This comes at a time when organizers say the state is prioritizing kinship placements over the foster care system and as the drug epidemic fragments and rearranges families.

The Saranac Lake Family Forever program is run out of North Country Permanency Resource Center in Tupper Lake. This center is operated by the Child Care Coordinating Council of the North Country, which receives funding from the state Office of Children and Family Services.

The Family Forever group meets on the third Monday of every month at High Peaks Church at the end of Will Rogers Drive in Saranac Lake. Resource Center Program Assistant Minda Briaddy said they currently have three families who meet up, and there’s room for more. Resource Center Coordinator Kristy Conlon said she knows there are more families who don’t know about this program.

Along with monthly meetings, the program also offers a slew of resources, including information sessions, connections to advocates and play groups.

At the meetings, Briaddy brings homemade meals, qualified people look after the children and the parents can meet with people who understand what their lives are like while learning about the legal, emotional and psychological systems they are navigating.

All their discussions are confidential. Topics range from mental health and self-care to advice for parenting children with trauma and potty-training tips.

It’s a time for kids to play with friends or talk through trauma and for parents to share advice or just a listening ear. It’s also a night when they don’t have to cook dinner and can have someone qualified looking after their kids.

“The parents, sometimes they just need a breather,” Briaddy said, adding that it is hard to find babysitters for children who require trauma-informed care.

Briaddy herself has fostered and adopted children with her husband John. She enrolled in the Family Forever program as a parent several years ago and began organizing a support group in Saranac Lake. Conlon recently hired Briaddy to work for the organization.

All of the council’s services are free. The organization is funded through state grants, and Resource Center Project Director Juliette Lynch said their goal is make the programs as accessible as possible.

The council also accepts donations, which can be made by contacting Lynch at jlynch@ccccnc.org.

The organization operates a “Family Forever! Adoptive and Kinship Families of the North Country” private group on Facebook. Lynch also recommended the New York State Kinship Navigator as a resource.

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Kinship

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Conlon said kinship placements are rising because of two reasons: a new law and the ongoing drug addiction epidemic.

The federal Family First Prevention Services Act went live in New York in 2022 with a goal of preserving families by putting an emphasis on placing children with relatives, instead of in the foster care system.

“Outcomes for children placed with kinship caregivers tend to be better,” Lynch said.

She said being raised by someone with a similar culture, background and familiarity is less disruptive to the children and easier to reconnect them with their birth parents, if it is possible later.

Substance use disorder is a common reason for kinship placements and many of the family guardians are grandparents.

“That’s happening a lot, because of the drug epidemic,” Briaddy said.

When people are struggling heavily with addiction, they lose custody or relinquish their kids to family. Some are killed by the addiction, and family members take in the children they leave behind. Briaddy said there’s been an increase in grandparents taking in grandchildren.

“A lot of the kinship families we have are grandparents whose child either has passed away due to drugs or is incarcerated or are still abusing drugs, so the kids have been removed from the home,” Conlon said.

Oftentimes, these are single grandparents living on fixed incomes. Their choice to support their family disrupts their retirement plans, and they end up spending their assets and money to keep their grandkids out of the foster care system. They often also have their own child struggling with a crisis, or a need for grief counseling after their child’s death.

It can be isolating.

Their peers aren’t in the same boat, and they’ve been “out of the game” for a while, Lynch said. Because of this, maintaining community is very important.

Conlon recalled how one grandparent told her how much the support group helped them at a time when they were raising five grandchildren and grieving the loss of their only child.

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A different type of parenting

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Adoptive and kinship parenting are different than other forms of parenting, Lynch said. It is what Briaddy calls “parenting kids from hard places.” Many children being raised by foster, adopted or kin parents have experienced trauma, Briaddy said.

“They have learned to be survivors, and they have learned to be an island unto themselves to survive,” she said.

This takes a different style of parenting. For example, she said, instead of putting a child in “time-out” as a discipline — which she said can reinforce the idea that they are “bad” or an “island” — it is better for the parent to have the child sit with them, so they know they are not rejected.

Not only is the parenting done differently, fostering, adopting or kinship parenting takes a lot more financial work, legal work and paperwork.

“There’s a learning curve that comes with fostering, adopting and raising kids who have had these types of interference in their childhood,” Briaddy said.

The Family Forever group holds workshops, sends people to attend the annual Adoptive and Foster Family Coalition of New York conference and provides resources for families to learn how to navigate the courts, find financial support and care for their children.

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Data

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Data from the state Office of Children and Family Services shows an average of around 11 in every 1,000 children in Franklin County in the foster care system in the past five years. In Essex County, around six of every 1,000 children were in the foster care system in the past five years.

There were 127 children in foster care in Franklin County in 2023, slightly up from the year before, but lower than it had been — 141 in 2019 and 142 in 2021.

There were 38 children in foster care in Essex County in 2023, a low for the past five years from a high of 52 in 2019.

At the start of the year, Franklin County had 10 children in foster care with a goal of adoption and Essex County had 14.

Both counties show a sharp spike in admissions into the foster care system in 2021 — nearly doubling in Essex County that year — but dropping in 2022 as kinship was prioritized by the state. Discharges from the system dropped off heavily in Franklin County 2023, from an average of between 63 and 75 to 43 last year.

In Franklin County, more than half of children leaving the foster care system return home, around 18% are adopted, 11% go to independent living, and 11% are leave for “other.”

In Essex County, more than 40% of children leaving the foster care system return home, around 12% are adopted, 4% go to independent living, and around 40% leave for “other.”