As you can imagine, when children join us, they're not little ones. They need a lot of time to know that you're going to be around and you're going to be present. When you have the stress of going back to work, you bring new stress into a house that's already filled with a lot of stress because you're adapting to one another. We haven't benefited from the initial nine months to become accustomed to one another and then the full year of growing and getting the attachment and having the child know they are secure.
As I mentioned earlier, they don't know how they can really trust the adults in their lives. They don't know if you're going to just leave, like many of the foster care families that have left before and have moved around and all of that.
Adding the 15 weeks would truly allow for a child to live a full cycle of one year and therefore to live without the ambiguity of not knowing how that will be. The three months that are missing are so crucial. Truly, they impact these family dynamics as a whole as well.