Jealousy After Abandonment

Today’s story – I was abandoned by my birth mother at 8 weeks old and my birth father gave up his rights before I was born. I was left in a house for a week long while my birth mother went on a drug binder. Her roommate is the one that called the police and my grandma. My grandparents become my legal guardians with in the week. At 5 years old I was legally adopted by my grandparents. I do call them mom and dad and those are the terms I will be using here since they are all I know! My mom has 3 children from a previous marriage (my biological mother being one of them) and my dad has 3 children as well. I do have 3 half brothers and 1 I am super close with (we share the same biological mother) and my mom and dad also adopted him when he was 16 years old. I will not be sharing his story, just noting that there was a lot of abuse!

Growing up I never really fit in with my siblings (actually my aunts & uncles), other than my biological brother. They never wanted my parents to adopt me. My dad’s daughter literally cut him out of her life because of it. Both of my mom’s daughters never failed to make me feel out of place. Constantly reminding me that I was “adopted” and therefore, not “blood”. Which technically I am… One of my mother’s daughters would always bring it up, whenever my mom and her got in an argument, even if it was not about me. Mind you, there is over a 20 year difference between that daughter and myself. By the time I was born, she was married with 2 kids. Any time my parents did anything for me, it was “you treat her better than me and I’m your blood daughter”, even if they actually did the same things for her. Anytime I would be hospitalized and my parents would stay at the hospital with me, it would turn into “you spend all your time with her and she’s not even your real daughter”.

Then, she does admit – I had a lot of behavioral issues growing up due to my adoption trauma, so anytime I would have “out bursts” and she was around, she would yell at my mom “are you really gonna let her treat you this way, She’s not even your real daughter. You need to put her in her place”. Comments like that. Her own dad was a “dead beat” dad. So any time my dad would be a dad, she would get pissed. Even though my dad always treated her with respect and never tried to be her dad but he’s all I know. Plus both my mom and dad do so much for her. If she comes for a visit and I’m not there, she wants to know why I’m not helping. My parents are older and have health issues and so, I do my best to take care of them because I only live 10 minutes away.

My mom recently had major back surgery. I went to the hospital and then, cooked for 2 weeks straight – so my dad could focus on my mom and they both could eat good. Well she ended up coming down and my mom asked her to make dinner. She said “ I don’t know how to cook” even though she was a cook for 10 years at a restaurant…. She did end up cooking dinner and I went over there to eat with them. At the dinner table, she made the statement “I don’t cook as much as she does, so it probably won’t be good”… but it was good and everyone said that. It was nice to have someone cook for me as well but she complained that I didn’t help.

The happy news – I got married on October 3rd and so, she will no longer be in my life because I’m tired of putting up with her trying to make me feel small and saying that I do not belong. That is because there were conflicts on the day of her marriage that she was directly responsible for and issues related to her birth mother who is in jail but knows information about her and her brother that appear to have come from this sister/aunt, even though she knows about the abuse and trauma that both of them have endured. Anyway, she says that she is really hurt, heartbroken in fact, and can’t help but think it hurts even more because she is adopted. She notes – That I never felt “at home” or whatever but I always tried to be nice, respectful, and loving and even when I felt like she thought I was not deserving of love.

Another adoptee shares – I’m so sorry! Yes in my experience it has been other family members making adoption feel less than. I feel like I don’t have a family unless I am impervious to being offended and a major people pleaser.

You Can’t Fix This

A woman writes about her adopted son. He is now a teenager. She adopted him at age 6. She asks, “Has anyone else felt that their adopted child is still greatly affected by their past despite begin adopted in a healthier home ?”

His genetic mother was her sister-in-law and she is aware that his mother had mental health issues. Her adopted son had what she describes as extreme behavioral problems

blogger’s note – which really isn’t that uncommon in adopted children due to adoption trauma.

He was diagnosed with autism and ADHD. She says he is defiant.

blogger’s note – I get that. I have 2 sons – one was defiant and one was compliant.

She does recognize that now that he is older, his behavior is drastically better (though she credits school and church, and of course the environment she brought him into).

blogger’s note – Well, my “defiant” son is much easier now in his older years than at 6 as well and since he was educated at home and we don’t go to church, I think it just comes with adapting and maturing.

One commenter noted that from the adoptive parent’s perspective – all of his good traits are due to her parenting and all of his bad traits are due to his genetics.

A transracial adoptee commented – I feel so much for adoptees in homes like this. As a child who was labeled “bad” for having trauma responses and trouble forming healthy attachments, I know this kind of treatment from an adoptive parent only makes it harder for an adoptee to find healthy footing later in life. Really hope this kid finds a good, empathetic support system that lets them know that their trauma is valid.

The Goal Is Reunification

Officially it is. However, too many foster parents do it as a means of adopting a child in a market with limited availability. As one former foster care youth notes – “I keep telling everyone reunification is lip service and the younger kids never get reunited.”

The New Yorker has an article out in collaboration with ProPublica – When Foster Parents Don’t Want to Give Back the Baby by Eli Hager. The subtitle reads – In many states, lawyers are pushing a new legal strategy that forces biological parents to compete for custody of their children.

In this story, a typical couple who’s infant ends up in foster care, actually decided to do the “hard work” to get their baby returned to them (the infant had been placed with foster parents). The couple had met every one of the judge’s requirements, and then some. They’d tested negative on more than thirty consecutive drug screens between them, including hair-follicle tests that indicated how long they’d been clean. They had continued to visit their son weekly, even when due to the pandemic that meant Zoom. The father took a job as a maintenance man for the county, installing plumbing in low-income housing and mowing the fairgrounds. The mother quit working in a bar and began delivering mail for the U.S. Postal Service plus manning the deli counter at a grocery store on her days off. They spent much of what they earned replacing carpets, repainting walls, and fogging air ducts to remove any lingering trace of meth from their one-story house. They had completed parenting lessons and were in therapy, getting support for their sobriety and learning how to be better partners to each other. In other words, the foster-care system, whose goal under federal law is to be temporary, in service of a family reuniting, seemed to be working.

Then, after being sober for 6 months, another requirement was added – an expert evaluation of how well they interacted with their son. What they didn’t know was that they would be competing for him. His foster parents, hoping to adopt him, had just weeks earlier embraced an increasingly popular legal strategy, known as foster-parent intervening, that significantly improved their odds of winning the child.

The background is this – it has become harder and harder to adopt a child, especially an infant, in the United States. Adoptions from abroad plummeted from twenty-three thousand in 2004 to fifteen hundred last year, largely owing to stricter policies in Asia and elsewhere, and to a 2008 Hague Convention treaty designed to encourage adoptions within the country of origin and to reduce child trafficking. Domestically, as the stigma of single motherhood continues to wane, fewer young moms are voluntarily giving up their babies, and private adoption has, as a result, turned into an expensive waiting game. Fostering to adopt is now Plan C, but it, too, can be a long process, because the law requires that nearly all birth parents be given a chance before their rights are terminated. Intervening has emerged as a way for aspiring adopters to move things along and have more of a say in whether the birth family should be reunified.

Intervenors can file motions, enter evidence, and call and cross-examine witnesses to argue that a child would be better off staying with them permanently, even if the birth parents—or other family members, such as grandparents—have fulfilled all their legal obligations to provide the child with a safe home. Regarding our unfortunate couple, the evaluator who is a social worker reported “Neither parent has the kind of relationship with (their son) that will help him feel safe in a new situation.” The mother was bewildered when she read the report. Didn’t the evaluator understand how hard it is to bond with a baby you’ve only been allowed to see a few hours a week. Why was the baby’s eye contact with her described as lacking “affective involvement”? She also opposed the baby being returned to his parents on the grounds that the foster-parent intervenors had reported that he pitched fits and struggled to eat and sleep after seeing them.

It turned out this social worker had a long-standing independent agenda: helping foster parents succeed in intervening and permanently claiming the children they care for. No wonder some people feel the system is rigged against them. Relying heavily on this expert assessment, the county moved to permanently terminate the parents parental rights. In the 1950’s, the British psychoanalyst John Bowlby posited that being separated from a maternal figure in the first years of life warps a child’s future ability to form close relationships. The the American Academy of Pediatrics has concluded that kids who grow up with their birth family or kin are less likely than those who are adopted or are raised in non-kinship foster care to experience long-term separation trauma, behavioral and mental-health problems, and questions of identity. It’s not acceptable in most family courts to explicitly argue that, if you have more material (financial) advantages to provide for a child, you should get to adopt him or her.

Ultimately, even though the couple had complied with their treatment plans, the filing concluded, their son had been in foster care for three years and needed “the permanence that only adoption can afford him.” However, his parents fought back. They filed an Open Records Act request, and soon received dozens of invoices. In all, their tiny, unaffluent county had spent more than three hundred and ten thousand dollars on their son’s case. An internal investigation found improprieties in the handling of the case. The trial was cancelled, and, the county finally dropped its case. Then, his mother joined other birth families in testifying in favor of new state legislation that would give biological relatives more priority in foster-care cases and prevent foster parents from intervening, until they had cared for a child for a year. In August, that law went into effect.

There are a lot more details in the article, if you are further interested. PS it is possible to get around the paywall with a bit of persistence and read the article in full.

When “Mom” Isn’t Mom

Today’s story is not from the source of the image above but seemed to fit anyway. It begins with – “I’m struggling so much with the hurt feelings of the biological mom.”

In 2020, my littles (ages 4 and 5 – siblings) were removed from their biological mom and initially lived with their grandma. I was a childcare provider in a large daycare center and they were in my toddler classroom (they were only 1 and 2 years old at the time). These siblings were super attached to each other, the older one protecting their younger sibling. They had trauma and food insecurity, neglect etc. I bonded with these two kids and loved having them in my class.

Then one day, after about 6 months into being in my classroom, they were abruptly given up by their Grandma (she was really struggling with the behaviors of the older one and was already raising her older two grandchildren from the same biological mom). She just couldn’t handle it anymore. So they were just gone one day, and the caseworker didn’t give us at the daycare very much info. I assumed at the time they were together. This was summer 2021.

Fast forward to Autumn 2022 and I bumped into the younger sibling with her foster family at a pumpkin patch and instantly started looking for the older sibling. I found out they had been separated and placed into separate foster homes, and more than once because they were deemed behavioral problems. I emailed Child Protective Services and did some digging. I offered both a home together with me and my own biological kids (5, 16 and 17). I did all the paperwork and training and the siblings moved in Jan 2023.

Here’s the dilemma, in the 2.5 years they were in the foster care system, their biological mom has done nothing to achieve reunification. She does show up for some visits, I think 7 total in the whole year. I applied for sole custody (decision making responsibilities) and she agreed, both fathers are incarcerated. She does believe she’ll get them back some day. I’ve offered them a permanent stable home and I will continue to supervise visits with her and the children, when she’s able to make it to visits. I’ve agreed to at least once a month, but it’s understood that at this time, I will be raising these children.

Both children started calling me “mom” within a couple months of moving in. At first I corrected them but it really hurt their feelings and I realized these kids just need a “mom” in title and I absolutely love them as if they’re my own. They also have chosen to call their biological mom by her first name, even though I always refer to her as Mommy. This is something they’ve been doing since before they moved in with me. This hurts her feelings so much and she spends much of the visit correcting them, which frustrates them.

How do I handle this gracefully? Or is this just going to be something that we’ll be living with? The children also run to me if they’re injured or scared and she’s gotten upset about that too. I don’t want to hurt her feelings but something has to give. In almost three years, she hasn’t become stable enough to care for them. She has suffered from addiction but is currently clean. I’m proud of her for achieving this but I’m scared the kid’s behavior towards me will trigger a relapse.

I’m open to all suggestions on how others may have navigated this part of the journey. Thanks!

One person shared – We try to honor all the mothers our niece and nephew have had. We refer to them as “momma – first name.” I’m momma Krista, they also refer to their bio mom and prior foster moms in the same manner. Perhaps this would be a good middle ground?

An adoptive mother notes – This is an emotionally tough situation, for everyone involved. It sounds like you are being flexible and respectful to all involved, and holding space for the kids to maneuver and decide for themselves what they need. I suspect it will continue to be an evolution.

Another one writes – I think this is a great time to have a conversation with her alone as suggested. It sounds as if she trusts you as a caregiver which is a huge plus. First/birth parents often struggle with seeing their children call another person mommy/daddy. And they do see themselves as being in a position someday to parent again. They typically experience significant loss and it can be a gut punch, regardless of the decisions that have created this unfortunate situation. Approach it from a standpoint of letting her know you are not trying to take her title, however young children will naturally gravitate to using mom/dad because they have to label people. We all do. They are also hearing your other children call you mom and its natural for them to do the same. Let her know that your only goal is to provide love, guidance and support for the children. See if she is ok with them calling you mommy Tish and them calling her mommy “her name”. This may not feel good but it may be a middle ground. Those babies do see you as mom. You are their safety and comfort. They don’t understand all the other stuff, so it makes sense that it would confuse them. This will be a challenging situation but helping her understand that she is still an important part of their lives should be the focus. This is heavy stuff. Breathe deeply through it.

Another said something similar – Sit down with her (and not in the presence of the kids) and tell her to stop correcting them when they call you mom because you are ALSO “their mother” now. You are the one doing all the “mom” things all the time. This doesn’t take away from the truth that she gave birth to them but she has to know her role at the moment in the play we call Life. Remind her, that when they get hurt they’re going to run to you because you’re the one who takes care of them day in and day out. Tell her it’s like when your sibling comes over with their kids, they will love on you and stuff but if anything goes south those kids are going to run to your sibling, even though you’re their aunt and very close.

There Seems To Be No Solution

Today’s concern is a lack of mental health options within the foster care system. A woman who provides foster care wrote a long piece detailing the problems which I won’t repeat entirely for this blog. After describing several recent situations, she gets to the heart of what is troubling her. “My thought is . . . what is the alternative for kids who are so far gone mentally? There is a huge shortage of foster homes for kids with mental illness or on house arrest. I have extra space, but I am not taking more while I have (this one) because she needs my full attention.”

Being in mental institutions or group homes seems to cause these kids to deteriorate especially over time. There seems to be no solution for the ones who need so much monitoring that a foster home simply can’t do. Maybe a therapeutic home run by doctors could, but how many if those exist?! What’s the solution? I’m referring mostly to teens since that’s what I saw, though it could apply to some younger kids.

What is the system supposed to do with kids, especially teens, with serious mental issues too complex for most foster homes to handle? If group homes are so bad, which from what I’ve seen they are, then what is the solution? Also it’s apparently very hard for them to find long term care for mentally Ill teens.

The amount of time and appointments needed make it very difficult to parent these kids even like “B” who isn’t so far gone. She still has a great chance at getting and staying better, going on to have a nice happy life which she wants. There are no good group homes I’ve seen for long term. There are not enough foster homes willing to accept teens. Not to adopt them but provide a place for them while they do what they need – therapy, school, job, etc – to step into their next phase having a successful adult life within the next few years.

blogger’s note – I don’t have a solution to this but I am putting it out there because there seems to be a serious need to address it.

Even so, one adoptee shared – My son has a mental illness and we placed him in a residential treatment center for 18 months when he was 11. Some kids there were foster kids. A few parents who placed their kids there, chose to have them go to foster care after treatment instead of returning home – usually for the safety of their other kids. PLEASE don’t judge them. The foster parents who took these kids in went through special training and had to develop relationships before taking them home. They also had a ton of resources available to them for free. This is the way it should be.

Another person explained – Kids with the most intense needs often end up in foster care because their families cannot handle them. Mental health resources for children are terrible. Kids like this need therapeutic school environments as well as trained living situations. Even excellent insurance only pays a tiny fraction of inpatient treatment after the child is no longer suicidal. I know families who terminated their rights in hopes the state would pay. The kids ended up in a cycle of group homes and short stay hospitalizations. It is heartbreaking. I don’t have a clue how to solve this. Kids are in serious crisis. There are residential facilities but the good ones cost the moon and abuse there is also a BIG issue.

blogger’s note – I understand this completely because my parents were faced with an inability to help my sister due to the costs that would have been involved. She was already an adult and never in foster care. And my were unable to get any information about the extent of her problems due to health care privacy laws.

From an adoptee who is also a behavioral health social worker – I know of no state that provides adequate mental health services for children and adolescents with intense behavioral, emotional, and mental health needs. Sadly, services are patched together to try to meet needs, until eventually many of these young people cause enough trouble that they end up in the criminal justice system, where unfortunately, there’s always room for one more.

A Missouri Crisis

The Missouri Independent declares it LINK>Truly A Crisis dated June 20 2023. No idea how many other states have similar issues.

Of the 13,183 foster children in the custody of the Missouri Children’s Division at the end of April, 52 were housed in medical facilities and 258 were housed in mental health facilities. At the end of April 2022, there were 72 foster children in medical facilities and 92 in mental health facilities.

The Department of Mental Health also has difficulty finding residential support providers. It has 704 clients who are developmentally disabled waiting for a residential placement, with the more than three dozen housed in hospitals considered among the most critical for placement.

“Unfortunately, right now, hospitals are a place where both residential facilities and in some cases, therapeutic foster families — or you know, or families in general — will bring their children because they don’t feel adept at caring for the child,” said Michelle Schafer, regional vice president for behavioral health at SSM. “There are usually significant behavioral components to the situation.”

All of Missouri’s hospital systems have served this function at one point or another in the last year, and the number of children in limbo has been growing. Foster children living in hospitals or other temporary locations for long periods isn’t just a Missouri problem. Many states are finding it difficult to recruit foster parents, especially in rural areas, KFF Health News reported this week.

For the Department of Mental Health, one of the biggest issues is community providers are struggling with staffing issues. “We lost about 50% of our residential beds, because we had a workforce shortage, which then sort of turned this cycle into a situation where we had a lot of kids, and we had no place for them to go,” Schafer said.

Senator Elaine Gannon sponsored legislation that passed which directs the Mental Health and Social Services departments to study and report on the impact of hospitalizing foster children and Department of Mental Health clients “without medical justification because appropriate post discharge placement options are unavailable,” and how to end it. “This doesn’t happen,” Gannon recalled thinking. “They don’t leave somebody in a hospital for six months, a year or even a month because they don’t have anywhere to send them. I can’t really believe that. Well, let me tell you, it’s the truth, and it is happening, and it’s happening everywhere.”

“That’s not a good setting either for the child or the young adult who’s in that situation. They need social supports, they need connections to communities, that a hospital just can’t provide.” said Brian Kinkade, vice president of children’s health and Medicaid advocacy at the Missouri Hospital Association. “Hospitals are not designed or staffed to provide housing for foster children and adults with developmental disabilities or behavior issues that do not need treatment for acute conditions,” Kinkade said.

“What we’ve decided to do instead is come together in what is truly a crisis and say, ‘You know, we’re all going to recognize that it is a failed system, that deinstitutionalization is failing right now. And we’re all going to lean in and be committed to doing our part to make it better,’” Schafer said.

Missouri puts children into foster care at nearly twice the national average rate, according to the LINK>National Coalition for Child Protection Reform. And part of the process of rebuilding the division is focusing on preventing removal in the first place. “If you put services on the front end to prevent those things from getting to a place where a child had to be removed, that’s a much better expenditure of money,” Children’s Division Director Darryl Missey said during a January budget hearing. Each child in foster care costs the state around $25,000 per year. Traditional foster families receive a maintenance stipend of $450 to $630 a month.

The point, Mary Chant, chief executive of Missouri Coalition for Children said, is to break down jurisdictional barriers where people disclaim authority, leaving people in limbo. “Those things may be true, but none of those things help us figure anything out,” Chant said. “Our first question has to be: What is it that the child’s family needs? And what do we need to do to get them that?”

With everyone at the table agreeing Missouri’s systems are in crisis, the first step was to get past blame, Schafer said. “Blame has no place in this,” she said. “It is literally all collaboration and partnership as we are committed to do this work, and up to it including having legislative support.”

Thanks to Terry West over at LINK>Indivisible Rural Progressives of the Eighth District and LINK>Jess Piper on TikTok for awareness.

Abandonment is a Perception

Perception matters. As we go through our own “adult” stuff and often have to make hard choices, we are not always aware of how our children are perceiving what we had to do. My marriage at 19 ended in divorce after the birth of our daughter a few years later. Eventually, I then left my daughter with her paternal grandmother (about the age of 3), but she eventually ended up with her dad and a step-mother. I made attempts to stay in contact and reassure her always that it never was about her directly but my own problems. Fortunately, we are close today as adults raising children (my grandchildren and two sons I have now from a subsequent marriage who’s ages are close to that of my grandchildren). I have faced that as a child her perception was understandably about having been abandoned, even though it was never my intention to never to have her under my own roof again during her childhood.

Today, I read about a woman with somewhat similar concerns. She left her child’s father when her daughter was only a year and a half old. She gave her mother legal guardianship of her daughter as she was going through a really rough time in her life. It’s shameful and it’s tough to face these kinds of reality. Finally, this woman met someone with whom she has been able to create a whole and loving family with her daughter and a subsequent baby brother from her new relationship. This daughter is now 9 years old and there are understandably “issues”.

Her daughter has ADHD and a fiery personality. Also some mood and behavioral problems exasperated by her abandonment trauma. She tends to be self-centered (normal) and melodramatic (from me). She can be very mean and unforgiving at times. She easily gets stuck on feelings of being left out or forgotten, even while we’re actively spending time with her.

One response suggested – Behavior is communication. Give each other grace. You are not the choices you made.

Another offered a perspective which I find valid – She has emotions that she is shoving down because she does not know how to deal with them. A huge part of healing childhood trauma is to grieve the losses that caused the trauma. For her, it was not having you or her father in her life for those years. My suggestion is that you start working on grieving your losses, and be open and honest with her about it (age appropriately). Let her see that you are in denial, angry, bargaining, sad, and finally accepting of what happened. That will give her permission to explore those feelings that she has inside of herself. I would also suggest a trauma/grief informed counselor.

You were part of your daughter’s wounding, you can play a major part in her healing too. It all starts with the parent healing as an adult. Learning what triggers us, so we can be the calm, consistent adults that our kids need because our calm becomes their calm, our ability to regulate our emotions becomes their ability.

More than one recommended LINK> Trust Based Relational Intervention – which I have seen and mentioned before. TBRI is an attachment-based, trauma-informed intervention that is designed to meet the complex needs of vulnerable children. TBRI uses Empowering Principles to address physical needs, Connecting Principles for attachment needs, and Correcting Principles to disarm fear-based behaviors. While the intervention is based on years of attachment, sensory processing, and neuroscience research, the heartbeat of TBRI is connection.

Someone else suggested mediation. Sometimes a safe person who’s not her parent can help her better understand/hear what you may be trying to communicate (and vice versa). And her suggestion came from personal experience – “I’ve had mediations done with both my and my mother’s therapist, and each time seemed to help shed some light on new aspects of a topic being discussed with our respective therapists.”

And an acknowledgement that I also understand personally – The mere fact that you care so deeply, is absolutely everything. DO NOT ever give up on that. Parenting is so hard, even without the added guilt you carry. All you can do is wake up and do the best you can do for that day.

Finally this from someone who’s been there (and hits me in the guilt place for I have done this too) – I wish my mom had owned her hand in my trauma WITHOUT excuses or trying to push blame onto others. I wish she would have validated my experiences. I wish she would have created and protected a safe space for me to understand and unpack all of the feelings and thoughts I had, preferably with a therapist. I wish she would have spent time one on one with me doing things I cared about, getting to know me deeper. I wish she wouldn’t have told me how hard XYZ was for her, I didn’t care, it wasn’t a competition, I was the helpless child. Even if my mom’s choices were between bad and worse, she was an adult who had brought me with her to that point. I wanted a mom who wanted to BE my mom.

She added – Your bit you wrote about your daughter feeling left out or forgotten hit me like a ton of bricks. That feeling is something I am working on to this day. I felt so out of place with my mom, stepdad, and new baby brother. I knew I was forgettable and honestly with a new baby – replaceable. They felt like a whole little family and I was just the chump she had to come back and get so I could tag along. (blogger’s note – though I never was able to bring my daughter back into my own life fulltime – we did have visits – I did go on to have 2 sons who I have been raising. This caused me to consider how that might feel to her – even though she is an adult with children of her own.)

One more – Focus on being your best self today and in the future. That’s how you can make it up to them, they’re often incredibly wise about this stuff. This way of thinking encourages you to reach a point of acceptance and decide… everyone’s alive, healthy, and you can’t change the past. I think that’s what I would say to my own parents, just sin no more and I don’t want to dwell in the past. (Though there may be times when the wounds bubble back up.)

My own last insight – life is messy, complicated and sometimes very very difficult. We can only acknowledge where we have failed but instead of continually beating ourselves up over that – move forward with being the best person we have managed to be at this time.

Needing Attention

Though my children are not adopted, when the youngest son was born, at about 2 years old for him and 6 for the older boy, there developed a lot of problems. I would wake up every morning thinking I am not going to fight with him and within 20 minutes he would act up and I would react. My dad had quite a temper that terrified us when we were growing up even though he never laid a hand on us – just seeing his face turning red was enough to suppress us for fear of going too far.

Also, my mom and youngest sister had a terrible relationship and so I knew how important it was to turn the situation around as quickly as possible. My husband started taking the younger one and I started taking the older one when each parent needed to have direct responsibility for one kid. That took care of it in only a matter of months. Thankfully. All that was needed was the direct attention that had been in short supply as I cared for an infant.

Today, I was reading about a foster parent having trouble with older foster children (ages 9 and 12) who also has 4 younger biological girls (ages 2, 3, 4 & 6). It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to see that the acting out and behavior problems of the older foster children are cries for attention. It is tough enough to have been removed from one’s original parents . . . just that explains much. I do know how this situation came to pass as a kind of natural trajectory but it doesn’t appear to have a good prognosis though the foster parents are trying and do care. It may be that they simply cannot give enough with the other demands in their immediate family.

An Atlantic article in 2015 details some of the behavioral problems that adoptees exhibit. This is the happy story a lot of people believe –

There is something temptingly tidy about the idea of adoption: A family with extra love and resources meets a child in desperate need of both. The happy ending almost writes itself.

Only that is often not the story that actually exists. At the start of kindergarten, one study showed, about one in four adopted children has a diagnosed disability, twice the rate of children being raised by both biological parents. Adopted children were significantly likelier than birth children to have behavior and learning problems; teachers reported they were worse at paying attention in class, and less able to persevere on difficult tasks.

A follow-up study suggests the problems for adopted children not only fail to fade with time—they multiply. A growing chorus of voices are challenging the popular Pollyannaism around adoption including adoptees who are now speaking out. Add me to that chorus.

Adoptive parents tend to be especially sensitive about their children’s well-being, and aggressive in obtaining diagnoses and related treatment for them. In other words, the very qualities that make adoptive parents stand out—their resources, their proactivity—also prompt them to seek out expert care at the earliest sign of trouble.

With parents this dedicated, why do adopted children seem to struggle so much? One theory might be based in knowledge about attachment – a strong bond with at least one nurturing adult—usually the mother—is essential to a child thriving. Mother/child separations cannot help but be part of the problem.

Helping Families Stay Together

We’d be better off spending the money upfront, whether that’s in the form of early childhood education, preventative healthcare, or helping families get the support they need to stay together. It would cost less overall and be more beneficial to those who truly need it. There will always be cases where throwing more money at a scenario doesn’t help, but overall, it makes more sense financially and emotionally.

If we really cared about children, we would want to do everything in our power to keep them out of the foster care system.

I am so grateful no one ever reported us as having children out of control. There was a time in our lives when I worried about that. I even cautioned my children to try to be on their best behavior out in public or they could end up like that episode of The Simpsons when the children are taken away.

I was happy to read that there are efforts underway to totally rewrite how child welfare works.

As a society, we should be helping children BEFORE a caseworker shows up at their house. We should be supporting that family BEFORE anyone feels inclined to call a child abuse and neglect hotline on them.

As a society, we can be spending taxpayer funds more effectively by spending them on prevention. Many believe it would be cheaper to intervene earlier. It would be less traumatic for the children and their parents. Therapists, parenting coaches (children do not arrive with an operating manual) and mental health professionals could help families avoid bad outcomes.

A good goal to begin with is to find families at risk but not over the edge yet. Families that lack secure food and housing because of poverty. Those young parents who grew up without good attachment to their own parents (in my case, my parents were adoptees and I can see now that they were strangely detached as parents, though overall good parents who did love and care about us).

I remember my mom telling me how she didn’t know how to cook or clean house when she first married my dad because her mother lacked the patience or tolerance for flaws to teach her. My mom made certain her daughters had such skills.

Here is the shocking statistic for only ONE of these 50 United States –

In 2019, in the state of Colorado there was a $558 MILLION dollar budget and 8,820 children were taken out of their family homes and placed in foster care.

I find that staggering and very very sad.