This seems like an enormous mismatch of needs and solutions.
First and foremost, if you are in anything close to a position to mandate this sort of policy, you should also be able to control the number of homeless—preferably by buying them homes. Taxes are good for this. If you mean runaways, in many cases the first response should be to return them to their birth parents, although there may be good reason to monitor and adjust the situation as needed.
Adoptions are good thing, and people already recognize this. The three barriers to full adoption rates are:
Red tape. Newborns and babies are in high demand. People regularly pay between $10,000 and $25,000 to adopt these kids—although it can take many months for the adoption to go through, especially when adopting from overseas. In these cases you don’t need to make anything mandatory, just make it easier.
Age. People don’t tend to want older children. This is where your model will be the most useful, but there is likely to be a lot of resistance. People who want a baby may resist a ten-year-old replacement even more than they would a random baby. I suspect that you will get a much better response if you don’t model it as a replacement. It won’t be hard to get these kids adopted (again, red tape is probably the biggest barrier), and they will be better off with parents that adopt them with the support of a stipend rather than those who adopt them as a legal mandate.
Problem children. Kids with mental, psychological, health, and behavioral problems are the ones who are hardest to place, least requested, most likely to change homes multiple times, and have the highest needs. The current lottery of children that nature has set up is pretty awful; not all parents are ready for a child with special needs. Requiring a subset of parents to raise a “problem” child as their first child is likely to help with population control, but isn’t necessarily the best choice for the child. It is probably going to be better than cycling through multiple foster homes, so your system may be an improvement, but I suspect that here is another chance for you to use your impressive power to improve things not through the power of forced placement, but through the power of taxes. In these cases, an orphanage staffed with very-long-term employees including very patient adults who have experience with a wide range of kids, along with a few mental health professionals, speech therapists, occupational therapists, and nurses, is likely to be your best bet.
There is some skepticism as to how reasonable it is create an orphanage with long-term live-in staff that can effectively act in all the roles that parents need to fill.… but I think it is a safe bet that even an imperfect but fully staffed high-needs orphanage will out-perform forced placement.
This seems like an enormous mismatch of needs and solutions.
First and foremost, if you are in anything close to a position to mandate this sort of policy, you should also be able to control the number of homeless—preferably by buying them homes. Taxes are good for this. If you mean runaways, in many cases the first response should be to return them to their birth parents, although there may be good reason to monitor and adjust the situation as needed.
Adoptions are good thing, and people already recognize this. The three barriers to full adoption rates are:
Red tape. Newborns and babies are in high demand. People regularly pay between $10,000 and $25,000 to adopt these kids—although it can take many months for the adoption to go through, especially when adopting from overseas. In these cases you don’t need to make anything mandatory, just make it easier.
Age. People don’t tend to want older children. This is where your model will be the most useful, but there is likely to be a lot of resistance. People who want a baby may resist a ten-year-old replacement even more than they would a random baby. I suspect that you will get a much better response if you don’t model it as a replacement. It won’t be hard to get these kids adopted (again, red tape is probably the biggest barrier), and they will be better off with parents that adopt them with the support of a stipend rather than those who adopt them as a legal mandate.
Problem children. Kids with mental, psychological, health, and behavioral problems are the ones who are hardest to place, least requested, most likely to change homes multiple times, and have the highest needs. The current lottery of children that nature has set up is pretty awful; not all parents are ready for a child with special needs. Requiring a subset of parents to raise a “problem” child as their first child is likely to help with population control, but isn’t necessarily the best choice for the child. It is probably going to be better than cycling through multiple foster homes, so your system may be an improvement, but I suspect that here is another chance for you to use your impressive power to improve things not through the power of forced placement, but through the power of taxes. In these cases, an orphanage staffed with very-long-term employees including very patient adults who have experience with a wide range of kids, along with a few mental health professionals, speech therapists, occupational therapists, and nurses, is likely to be your best bet.
There is some skepticism as to how reasonable it is create an orphanage with long-term live-in staff that can effectively act in all the roles that parents need to fill.… but I think it is a safe bet that even an imperfect but fully staffed high-needs orphanage will out-perform forced placement.