Special Needs and Adoption-Related Terms: Adoption terms and special needs words may vary from agency to agency.The terms used in this Special Needs Adoption-Related Glossary may be slightly different from one State to another.
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- Semi-open adoption: An adoption in which a child’s birth parents and pre-adoptive parents may exchange primarily non-identifying information. After the child is placed in the adoptive home, contact with the birth family may involve letters or pictures or other communications sent through the intermediary of the adoption agency or the attorney who assisted in the placement.
- Sensory Integration Disorder (DSI): For most children, all senses develop and work together; touch, sight, sound, taste, and body movement. The proper interaction of the senses enables a person to function and feel comfortable. When the senses do not interact efficiently. A child may have sensory integration disorder (DSI). Symptoms can be quite annoying, and if left unrecognized and treated, often affect a child’s behavior, development, and ability to properly interact and learn.
- Separation anxiety: Excessive and persistent anxiety about being separated from one’s home or parents that interferes with normal activities.
- Sexual abuse: The employment, use, persuasion, inducement, enticement, or coercion of any child to engage in, or assist any other person to engage in, any sexually explicit conduct or any simulation of such conduct for the purpose of producing any visual depiction of such conduct; or rape, and in cases of caretaker or inter-familial relationships, statutory rape, molestation, prostitution, or other form of sexual exploitation of children, or incest with children.
- Sexual abuse symptomology: Indicators and behaviors which suggest that a child may have been sexually abused, including: excessive masturbation, sexual interaction with peers, sexual aggression towards younger and more naive children, seductive behavior, and promiscuity.
- Special needs children: Children whose emotional or physical disorders, age, race, membership in a sibling group, a history of abuse, or other factors contribute to a lengthy stay in foster care. Guidelines for classifying a child as special needs vary by State. Common special needs conditions and diagnoses include: serious medical conditions; emotional and behavioral disorders; history of abuse or neglect; medical or genetic risk due to familial mental illness or parental substance abuse.
- Speech and language disorders: Impairments of speech or receptive language. Speech disorders usually involved difficulties with articulation which can generally be improved or resolved with speech therapy, usually requiring treatment over months or years. Language disorders, on the other hand, often result in substantial learning problems, involving difficulty with language comprehension, expression, word-finding and/or speech discrimination. Treatment by a language therapist generally leads to improvement in functional communication skills, although treatment cannot be generally expected to eradicate the problem.
- Substitute care: Any kind of care sanctioned by the court of jurisdiction in which the child does not live with the birth parent.
- Surrender: Voluntary termination of parental rights. An action taken by birth parents to voluntarily “make an adoption plan” for a child.
- System: Often referred to as “the public child welfare system.” Refers to the network of governmental organizations providing a range of child welfare services.
For more information about parenting special needs children you might want to visit the Families.com Special Needs Blog and the Mental Health Blog. Or visit my personal website.
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