A Home For Orphans

Milton Hershey School

There is a need to care for true orphans that do not have living family to care for them. Milton Hershey is mostly known for perfecting a recipe for milk chocolate. I love their Hershey Bars with Almonds but I really shouldn’t eat them because my biology is afflicted with a tendency to have high blood sugar. If I let myself eat one small miniature bar, I want more or something else that I shouldn’t be eating that is too sugary. Mostly I just don’t.

Milton Hershey was a leading philanthropist during his time. In the early 1900s, he was a visionary about providing better working conditions for his workers. He knew this support would also allow them to do a better job in his factory.

Eventually, he built a company town. It was beyond what most companies did at that time. Not only did he build homes for his workers but supported the growth of businesses in the surrounding area as well as a transportation infrastructure.

He and his wife Catherine never had any children of their own but they cared about child welfare. This motivated them to establish a boarding school for orphans. Even now, the school provides a home and free education through high school to more than 2,000 boys and girls.

Hershey is a good example of a visionary social entrepreneur. His efforts never diminished his financial well-being but kept on enhancing that further, so that he could do more.

Lifetime No Contact Order

I didn’t know this was a thing. It seems draconian and excessive. There seem to be some cases of children placed into state custody where the parent has not only had their parental rights permanently terminated but is denied permanent contact forever with their own children. It may relate to addiction. But lifetime ? This just seems wrong and it may not actually be “lifetime”.

I read that – the court order essentially is in place until the kids turn 18. It is thought that the kid’s can choose whether to extend it or let it lapse at that point.

In the case I read about, which is typical of many poor people who encounter the legal system, the mother was coerced through fear tactics to sign this as part of her plea bargain. I agree with the person who shared this story that such a permanent lifetime no contact order would do more harm than good for the kids and their mom over the long run.

People do change. Lord, how I know that up close and personal. I’ve done some pretty stupid things in my lifetime, even put my sweet baby girl at risk in my naivety. Thankfully, she survived my immaturity.

It may be that how this particular situation resolves will depend on the relationship that the foster parent has with the genetic/biological parent. Hopefully in this case, both the foster parent and the mother can let the caseworker know they object to this stipulation that was obtained under duress. It may be that getting all of the parties to request the court make a change will prove successful in allowing the potential for contacts within this family. If the judge is not willing, there is always hope in an appeal.

Part of our modern reality is that there are parents now who have gotten into addiction – often it begins with a valid need for pain relief – or it did, until society woke up to the fact that the pharmaceutical industry had a profit motive in getting people addicted to begin with. End of societal inequity and/or injustice rant for today.

When Genetic Family Won’t

There are times and situations when it seems that adoption is the only answer. The mother dies and the genetic family does not volunteer to step in and care for the child. Or a father is overwhelmed. That happened in my father in law’s family. His grandmother died young after giving birth to her 3rd child. There were two older children to care for, so the baby was given to and adopted by a childless couple.

In my own family’s circumstances, my parents (both adoptees) were never willing to take on that responsibility for their grandchildren. With one sister, they led her down the path of surrender. The daughter seems to do as well with the situation as any adoptee can be expected to – issues of concern about the feelings of her adoptive mother if any attention is given to her genetic family.

The other sister does have a debilitating mental health illness – paranoid schizophrenia – and is prone to irrational responses. In that case, I am grateful she gave up my nephew and he is a high quality person. There are probably issues related to having been adopted for him and we aren’t close, though I have been warmly welcoming and answer any questions he or his adoptive mother have asked of me.

There is no simple answer to children needing care and each person/family has to make their own decisions for their own reasons. I understand that. I do try to share some of the impacts and implications because there have been more adoptions and related issues in my family than most people experience. About the only blessing for me is that I wasn’t given up when my unwed teenage mom discovered I had taken up residence in her womb. I consider that a minor miracle for which I am deeply grateful.

In the case of mothers who die after giving birth – realistically and ideally – the mother intended and wanted to raise her baby. She most likely did not want to die (unless it was a suicide which is complicated regardless). The mother would not have planned for her family to raise her baby, if she had survived.

It seems a little unfair to put that expectation of taking responsibility on the genetic extended family. Those who do are heroic in my own perspective.

Historic Reforms Keeping Children With Family

Only today thanks to a piece in the most recent Time Magazine, I discovered that one of the reforms I often advocate here became law in October 2018. The bipartisan legislation allows states to use federal funding to help struggling parents before resorting to putting children in foster care. Congress recognized that too many children are unnecessarily separated from parents who could provide safe and loving care if given access to needed mental health services, substance abuse treatment or improved parenting skills.

“If we can get more children being raised in a family-like setting, either with their parents or extended family, it bodes well for what happens in this country in the long run.”
~ William C Bell, Casey Family Programs

Nearly half a million children are currently in foster care. After years of decline in numbers of children in foster care, the number has risen steadily since 2012, with anecdotal evidence and expert opinion linking this increase to the parallel rise in opioid addiction and overdoses. Family First provides struggling and overburdened child welfare agencies with the tools needed to help children and families in crisis, including families struggling with the opioid epidemic.

Young people involved in the child welfare system do best in families, in a safe and stable environment that supports their long-term well-being, according to research. The passage of Family First took a large step toward this vision by restructuring how the federal government spends money on child welfare to ensure that more children in foster care are placed with families. The law also provides more support for critical services, such as mental health and substance abuse treatment, in-home training and family therapy that can help prevent the need for foster care in the first place.

The law gives states and tribes the ability to target their existing federal resources into an array of prevention and early intervention services to keep children safe, strengthen families and reduce the need for foster care whenever it is safe to do so. It also provides federal funds for evidence-based Kinship Navigator programs that link relative caregivers to a broad range of services and supports to help children remain safely with them, and requiring states to document how their foster care licensing standards accommodate relative caregivers.

There will no longer be a time limit on reunification services for a child in foster care preparing to return home, and a child returning home will now have access to 15-months of family reunification services beginning on the date the child returns home. It’s a start.

Meanwhile In Another Reality

Imagine the dominant social narrative surrounding adoption was flipped – that it was viewed negatively by society (media, public, social policy, etc) with no saviorism or birth mom/adoptive parent platitudes like brave or selfless.

Imagine it was considered a socially unacceptable way to build a family or to fulfill a deep wish or right to experience parenting and people seeking to adopt were viewed as selfish.

This radical change came about as the catastrophic effect on children caused by relinquishment, and subsequent adoption became common knowledge. And that clear understanding developed societal beliefs that deliberately perpetrating adoption was as unpalatable as the current “anti” adoption movement is viewed by proponents.

Instead, society truly became child-centered – where the child’s needs are put first. One that does not permit ownership, name you as parents nor replace the birth certificates, allow name changes, or any family severance. It is also socially unacceptable to brag about your adopted child, or even share their story. It is instead as embarrassing as it is to admit you are not raising your own birthed child (I know that one way too intimately).

Then other options (like guardianship) would be the default route for permanence when strangers are needed to care for children who are not able to live with their natural family for safety reasons. We can and should imagine “better”. That is why adoptees and original mothers are speaking out about the deep wounds that giving up children for adoption has caused for them.

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.

The Broken Birth Mom

This sculpture speaks so strongly to my own heart. I empathize with my grandmothers who gave up my parents to adoption. In a sense, though less permanently, I am one myself. Each of my sisters truly are. There are no words for how this haunts a person. No mother should have to live without her child, even though I do understand that sometimes the safety issues are so strong because that mother is so broken as a person, the child isn’t safe with her. I get it.

Adoption isn’t just a one-time event and it’s over. It is never over, it can’t be and it isn’t. It is something that follows an adoptee and their original parents throughout their lives.

I have obsessed in my guilt for not raising my daughter. Just like my maternal grandmother, I never intended to leave her daily life permanently. In my effort, just as it was in my grandmother’s effort, to work things out financially, circumstances changed and it was no longer the best outcome for her to take her back. Both my maternal grandmother and myself would have, if it had been possible or truly made sense to step back in.

There were no role models for absentee mothers in the early 1970s though one read a lot of stories about absentee fathers. I realize I caused the situation for myself. My grandmother stepped into a serious trap without realizing it when she turned to Porter-Leath Orphanage in Memphis TN for temporary care of my mom.

The superintendent there betrayed my grandmother and my mom to a master baby thief. Miss Georgia Tann was backed up by her good friend, the Juvenile Court Judge Camille Kelley, in her pressure campaign to exploit my grandmother and wrest my mom out of her possession so that she could sell her to my adoptive grandmother.

Being a birth mom who permanently surrenders her child is not a club you should want to join. It is a grief that lasts a lifetime. The pain of that wound will change over time but it will never go away. It will always be there. I have spent years trying to resolve my own. I know the reasons and the causes but there is no recovering lost time and those precious memories of your child growing up.

If you are an expectant mother, especially a single and financially challenged young woman, seek out the help that will make it possible for you to keep your baby. You will be glad you did. Here’s one place – https://savingoursistersadoption.org/

Eye Of The Beholder

We need to talk to each other more. We each have a perspective but it is not the whole picture. We need to be able to hear the sadness, grief and anger. We need to be able to hear the needs and good intentions. We need to be able to hear the frustration of a young parent not receiving enough support to do what it is they were assigned to do when they conceived a child.

Perspective is everything but it need not be fixed in a rigid position. We can expand upon what we are able to understand by seeking to hear from those others with a different view on a situation.

Money tends to rule too much of what is considered the right perspective in this country. For too long, the rules have sided quite strongly with the perspective of those people with the money who desire for their position in the adoption triad to be inviolate. We’ve allowed the legal system to put up walls to deny 2/3s of the triad any kind of rights in the circumstances.

Maybe I don’t have all of the answers to how we go about providing for the welfare of children in our society but I do believe that denying people their right to know where they came from or what became of a child they gave birth to and then lost – often for no better reason than poverty – can’t be the best answer.

Adoptees are speaking out. Original parents who gave birth and then lost a child who is yet alive and living elsewhere are speaking out. And the motivations and needs for security by people who are investing their time and resources to provide a stable and secure home for a child should be heard as well – but not to the degree that we deny the needs of other two limbs of this triad of persons.

Second Chance

One of the saddest situations in adoptionland is a child that was adopted and the adoptive family seeks to be rid of that child and it does happen.

In one case, an adopted child had been through four failed adoptions. This child had been renamed each time and didn’t even know their real name.

Or a child adopted internationally when they were 2 years old now up for re-adoption at the age of 8-1/2. The advertisement for this child is full of glowing attributes – why then is the need to be rid of the child ? It is beyond sad that people adopt without understanding the trauma and wounds that come from separating the child from their original family.

Between 1 and 5 percent of U.S. adoptions get legally dissolved each year. Some children are put up for “second-chance adoptions.” Second-chance adoptions are children who were already adopted and whose adoptive family no longer wishes to parent them.

Accurate statistics are not available for how commonplace second adoptions are, due to a wide variety of factors that include the closed nature of some adoptions, changed names on Social Security cards and birth certificates, and other paperwork issues.

Legally speaking, adopted children are recognized as no different from biological children. And for this reason, parents who opt to put a child up for re-adoption are doing nothing more legally complicated than any parent who puts a child up for adoption in the first place.

Children who end up in need of adoption a second time have lives that are deeply disrupted and end up with lifelong doubts about their worth. Most adoptees, even when their first adoption does not end up dissolved, suffer from similar issues.

Adoption is a complicated situation that is fraught with problems. That is why many adoptees are now speaking out against the process and looking for better alternatives for cases where a child’s welfare requires a more stable situation.

Adoption and Overpopulation

While overpopulation is a valid concern, the two issues should never be interconnected. A prospective adoptive parent who believes adopting a child, rather than procreating, is solving the problem of overpopulation, has objectified the child.

A child is not an object.

The issue of AI is important to me. So consider this. What are the ethical concerns associated with our use of automated intelligence ? What if that AI has been taught to feel emotion ? It is non-organic. Yet, it has feelings. It is an object. Do we have an ethical responsibility to it ?

When an adoptee is treated as an object to solve a problem, it is the same consideration. And adoptees are so often denied their basic human rights.

Adopting a child to satisfy a personal mission unrelated to the welfare of the child is simply the wrong reason to do so.

Actually, adoption needs to end. Guardianship that supports the welfare of the child without stealing their identity from them is a better choice – and not for reasons of solving overpopulation. Every child deserves consideration and respect for their innate humanity.