Difficult Circumstances

In the world of children at risk there are adoptive parents and foster parents. Beyond the children, there are their own natural parents to consider. So, if you are raising someone else’s kids . . . maybe the natural parents don’t like you simply because you have their kids and they don’t.

Maybe they don’t agree with your parenting style, they think you are snooty, they don’t like going by your rules and parameters to see their children. Maybe the natural parents sense you could cut them off from seeing their children.

Maybe if you are a foster parent, the natural parents worry you will fight against their getting their kids back.

Maybe either substitute parent just thinks you as the natural parent dress funny.

Bottom line, the substitute parents simply do not like you.

What would you as the natural parent do to improve a situation like this ?

Though it is not my situation, I’ve seen a similar situation up close and personal with my middle sister’s son. It is actually a tragic circumstance where the paternal grandparents gained custody and the paternal grandmother attempted to poison my nephew against our family. A situation that has not resolved itself and sadly – at the moment – he has closed the door to all contact with us.

Dignity

Imagine the circumstances in your young world are such that adequate care and love from your parents doesn’t support you as every one of us would wish for our own self.

A question came up in relationship to foster care where the foster parent was introducing a foster child as that aspect of their identity. ie my new foster child Dylan or foster child Caroline. When people do that it shows just how little they are able to actually empathize with the experience of the child in their care. That is a terrifying situation to place a child in.

This feels immediately demeaning to me personally. It highlights a tragic circumstance as the first impression of this child to a neighbor or even a complete stranger.

Why not say something like this is Jake and he is going to be staying with us for a bit ? Why do people have to disclose a kid is in foster care ? Actually, simply saying the child’s name is better. No one needs to know you foster. The people who don’t know as part of the process, certainly don’t need to know.

This same unthinkable behavior can be extended to include an adopted child – why do people say this is my adopted son or daughter ?

After all, no one announces “this is Suzy my biological child”. Just simply introduce the child by their name. No need to add details related to the child’s most difficult circumstances. Life is hard enough without piling on.

Don’t Adopt

So for years you have been trying to conceive and after several miscarriages, you have decided there is only one way to get that baby you have been dreaming of – adopt one. Just don’t do it.

I am the child of two adoptees and both of my sisters gave up children to adoption and for the last few years I have really gotten an education about what adoption does to people. I belong to a group which discusses the reality of adoption among all the members of the triad – the original parents, the adoptees and the adoptive parents and the bottom line understanding is – please just don’t do it.

Your first order of business should be to let some time pass before you start thinking about adoption. It is very important that the feelings of loss and grief are given time to take their course. Realize that you may look at a child you adopt and think: What if?, or: I wish… or: would my own child look/behave/be different? It is important that you work through these questions BEFORE any child is adopted. Seek the help of a therapist.

Then realize this – there are no positives for the baby or their mother in infant adoption. Pregnant women are targeted by agencies so they can make money from selling their babies. It’s an unregulated baby broker business with big money involved. Among those who know (adoptees who are now mature adults) infant adoption is looked at as terrible because of the unethical practices that come with it. Beyond that simple fact is the loss of the child’s natural family and true identity.

About the only idea that is acceptable would be adopting children who are in foster care whose parental rights have been legally terminated. And even in this case the plan should be for an adoptive parent to do everything they can to keep some kind of relationship open for the child with the natural family in any way possible. Guardianship is preferred over adoption but many states won’t allow guardianship as a long term option.

Adopt someone who wants to be adopted, and is old enough (13 or older) to consent to adoption. Adopt a legally available child from the foster care system. Do not change their identity in any way. Be sure you have complete medical records so they can live a more normal life as they mature. Babies grow up. The child you adopt will be grown very quickly but the damage you could do will last a lifetime.

What Is Wrong With This Picture ?

There was a time in my sons younger days when I worried that their behavior was going to result in unintended consequences. Sometimes well-meaning people insert themselves in ignorance into other people’s lives. Fortunately, we weathered those years without the worst happening to us. That is not always the case for some families.

In Mein Kampf, Adolf Hitler writes –

“The state must declare the child to be the most precious treasure of the people. As long as the government is perceived as working for the benefit of the children, the people will happily endure almost any curtailment of liberty and almost any deprivation.”

This is definitely a reason for concern as our government has been trending authoritarian.

In a YouTube titled “Legally Kidnapped: The Case Against Child Protective Services” the narrator says – “They don’t want you to know what is going on because if you did you’d rebel, you’d fight back.”

There is an agency that has ripped families apart for decades. In 2014, when that video was made there were 400,000 children in out-of-home care. That is a staggering number. It is true that 20% of Child Protective Services removals are for physical/sexual abuse.

With the ongoing legalization of marijuana in many states in this country, it may shock you to know that a vast percentage of child removals have been for the use by their parents of this substance.

The sad truth is that foster children are 6 times more likely to die of medical neglect, physical abuse and/or sexual abuse while in CPS care than a child suffering in poverty is.

You can learn more at https://stopcpslegallykidnappingchildren.org/

The Forgotten Children

One of the better known adoption failure stories is that of the Harts. Since I grew up with the surname Hart, I suppose this really caught my attention. One may remember that a same sex couple drove their SUV off a cliff with the children inside.

Less known is the sadly typical story of their older brother. The biological older sibling spent eight years in the Texas foster care system. He had acted out violently when the state removed him and his siblings from their home in 2005. He became a victim of the foster care-to-prison pipeline: separated from his brothers and sister, heavily medicated, shuffled between foster homes and shelters, institutionalized in a psychiatric hospital and placed for years in a restrictive treatment center. By age 19, he was in a Texas prison serving three years for robbery.

Sadly, “Once they get diagnosed with something like this, it’ll stay on their record and show up on their permanency reports, and it’s assumed to be true.”

He never gave up on reuniting with his siblings. He didn’t learn of his siblings deaths until he was released from prison in October 2018, more than six months after their fate had been widely reported in the news.

“That was the last little hope I had in my life, you know? I had that hope that I was gonna see my little brothers again; one day we gonna kick it,” he said. “I used to cry sometimes thinking what we could be doing, growing up.”

Days after he was separated from his siblings for the last time, the 10-year-old tried to commit suicide by strangling himself with a belt at a therapeutic foster home.

Siblings placed together have fewer “non-progress” placement disruptions for reasons such as incompatibility with the caregiver. Research has linked changes in caregivers to child delinquency, even for children not in foster care. Those who experience two or more changes in their primary caregiver before age 10 are significantly more likely to engage in serious violence during adolescence — including homicide, robbery and aggravated assault — than those who do not experience multiple caregiver changes.

There’s no real sustained public awareness about these child welfare systems — how broken they are, and what they do to kids. Sharing this story is my attempt to raise awareness a little more.

Only For The Extreme Cases

In some ways, Judge Ernestine S. Gray with her child-friendly courtroom, reminds me of Juvenile Court Judge Camille Kelley of Memphis in the Georgia Tann days but whereas, Judge Kelley became corrupted, I have an intuition that is not going to happen with Judge Gray. She gives each child who appears before her a bear and a book. She believes it makes what can be the worst day of their lives just a little easier.

This soft touch belies the power that Gray wields as one of just four Louisiana judges who control the entire child protection docket in their jurisdiction. And she has used that authority to upend the status quo and reduce Orleans Parish’s foster care numbers to levels unmatched anywhere in the country.

Between 2011 and 2017, the number of children in foster care here fell by 89 percent compared with an 8 percent increase nationally. New Orleans children who do enter the system don’t stay long. Seventy percent are discharged within a month; nationally, it’s only 5 percent.

Gray has effectively all but eliminated foster care except in extreme situations, quickly returning children flagged by social workers to their families or other relatives.

“We shouldn’t be taking kids away from their parents because they don’t have food or a refrigerator,” she said in explaining her philosophy. “I grew up in a poor family in South Carolina, and we didn’t have a lot. But what I had was people who cared about me.”

Removing a child is extremely traumatic, and the best outcome is to make sure kids go home to their families where they deserve to be as quickly as possible, or not enter the system at all.

Few who know anything about the foster care system would disagree that it is severely broken nationwide due to decades of mismanagement and inadequate funding. Instead of protecting children, it often traumatizes them further. They have poorer outcomes in education, employment, housing and early pregnancy, studies show. By 17, more than half will have been arrested, jailed or convicted.

The Family First Prevention Services Act is the biggest overhaul of foster care in a generation. The law redirects money from paying for state custody to providing services designed to keep families intact, such as mental health care, substance abuse treatment and parenting skills training.

Judge Gray stresses that “The greatest threat of harm, for most of the children who appear before her, is being unnecessarily removed from their families.”

“Foster care is put up as this thing that is going to save kids, but kids die in foster care, kids get sick in foster care,” she said. “So we ought to be trying to figure out how to use that as little as possible. People have a right to raise their children.”

This Is Us

First, a disclaimer. We don’t watch commercial TV in my home and I’ve never watched this show. What I do know is that it attracts the attention of a lot of adoptees and former foster care adults. Clearly, from the image above there is also an issue of transracial adoption.

For anyone somehow connected to adoption or child welfare, such viewers are likely to watch this show through a different lens. There are pebbles of accuracy surrounding adoption, foster care and birth parent reunions in the series as it unfolds from week to week. It is well not to forget that this is still a dramatic television show, which is never able to give anyone a fully realistic picture of what it’s like to be adopted or reunited with your birth father. But it’s definitely been judged one of the closest mainstream shows to attempt this issues.

The show’s writers are judged to have done their research and consulted with adult adoptees with the hope of accurately portraying not only aspects of transracial adoption, but also search and reunion, identity and trauma.

The truth is that each adoptee has a unique perception, opinion and view of their adoption experience — and that those very perceptions, opinions and views may change on a yearly, daily and at times hourly basis! But overall, the “feeling” of adoption as portrayed in mainstream culture is usually one of goodness, happiness and “rainbows and unicorns.”

In “This is Us,” we are introduced to a different side — the trauma and loss side — of adoption and foster care. We feel the push/pull of how an adoptee struggles with their feelings toward their birth parents. The writers painfully convey the angst that Randall feels when he discovers his adoptive mother knew from the time he was an infant who his biological father was — yet kept it a secret.

We see young Randall in a grocery store asking random adults to curl their tongues because he has learned this trait is hereditary and wonders if any of them — because they are Black — might be related to him. As he battles with forming his identity, he also carries a little notebook where he documents his encounters with people of color. In current time, we see Randall deal with panic attacks and his need for perfection and control. He is paralyzed by his own fears and the unknown.

As an adult, Randall and his wife, Beth, decide to become foster parents. They begin fostering an older girl and the writers introduce trauma triggers of abuse as well as the child’s deep connection with her mother. We sense Randall’s internal battle between wanting to protect his foster daughter while at the same time empathizing with her mother and the struggles she has experienced.

This show is recommended for adoptive and foster parents, especially those parenting children of color. This show would be appropriate for teenagers to watch, but it does have adult storylines and content.

The Indian Child Welfare Act

A lawsuit filed by a non-Native American couple in Texas claims the ICWA discriminates on the basis of race and infringes on states’ rights. It will be heard by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit.

The federal law, passed in 1978, mandates that states prioritize placing Native American children up for adoption with members of their family, their tribe or other Native American families — a remedy to policies that had previously empowered the government to take native children from their parents without cause and eradicate their tribal identity.

The Texas couple, Chad and Jennifer Brackeen, sued the U.S. Interior Department in 2017 after their petition to adopt a Native American toddler they had fostered for more than a year was challenged in state court. Texas Child Protective Services had removed the boy, called A.L.M. by the court, from the custody of his paternal grandparents and placed him in foster care with the Brackeens.

He lived with them for 16 months, according to court documents. They sought to adopt him with the support of his biological parents — members of the Navajo Nation and Cherokee Nation — and his paternal grandparents. The ICWA requires, however, that a child’s tribe be notified before an adoption placement is approved.

The Navajo Nation located a nonrelative Native American family in New Mexico willing to adopt the boy, though that placement ultimately fell through. The Brackeens eventually successfully petitioned to adopt A.L.M. and are trying to adopt his younger sister.

In October 2018, a federal judge in the Northern District of Texas agreed that much of the ICWA is unconstitutional. Defendants in the case, include the federal government and the Morongo, Quinault, Oneida and Cherokee tribes. They have appealed that decision.

The Circuit Judge, James L. Dennis, wrote that the ICWA aimed to classify children not by race, but by politics. The definition of “Indian child” under the law is broad, he wrote, and extends “to children without Indian blood, such as the descendants of former slaves of tribes who became members after they were freed, or the descendants of adopted white persons.”

In a statement affirming ICWA intentions, tribal leaders wrote –

“We never want to go back to the days when Indian children were ripped away from their families and stripped of their heritage.”

The ICWA was passed in 1978 in response to what was viewed as a family separation crisis for American Indian and Alaska Native communities. Studies showed that 25 to 35 percent of all native children were being removed, and of them, 85 percent were placed in homes outside their families or tribes. This happened even when suitable family members were willing to foster or adopt. Those trends followed decades of mistreatment of Native American communities by the U.S. government.

Not Actually Lucky

The perspective “out there” is improving and it isn’t happening by chance but because adoptees are speaking out about the circumstances of their lives. And though it may not change at the individual life level, I am hopeful it is changing in the larger sense.

I recently read about an adoptive parent who was told – “They are so lucky you adopted them.”

This adoptive mother reflected on that perspective and realized – “They are not lucky! It is not lucky to be orphaned or born to a parent who is unable to parent at that time. It is not lucky to live in an orphanage or foster care, and it is not lucky to be thrust into a home with perfect strangers and try to form parental attachment and bonds with them. There is nothing about coming to the place where you need to be adopted that is a lucky and they are not lucky we adopted them. We are blessed to have them in our family, but if the luck had been on their side there would not have been unfortunate circumstances that kept them from being raised by their birth families in the first place.”

In my mom’s case, her adoptive mother was over the moon happy to have her. But there were nagging doubts because she had been lied to about the circumstances of my mom’s “need” to be adopted.

She did not “need” to be adopted. Her original mother WANTED to raise her and tried very hard to keep her but got bested by a master of deception – Georgia Tann. My adoptive grandmother was told my mom’s parents were married students who weren’t ready to raise their child and were financially unable to provide for her. That last part was the struggle my original grandmother was trying mightily to address.

My adoptive grandparents did feel blessed to buy two children, the “perfect” family unit of an eldest son and a baby sister. But at least for my mom (I don’t know the circumstances surrounding my uncle’s adoption) it was all unfortunate circumstances. No wonder she died firmly believing she had been stolen from her parents. In effect, she was.

Not A Choice

Imagine. You are just born. Immediately, your tiny self is thrust into the chaos of foster care and/or adoption. You had no say in what was done to you.

Your newborn self wanted no one else in the world but the mother who carried you in her womb, who’s blood ran through your veins, who’s heartbeat was your lullaby as your neurons formed and connected. You wanted her. You cried for her. You experienced the rush of cortisol and adrenalin as your primal need was denied.

You did not sign up to be involved in adoption.

You did not volunteer to become an adoptee.

Those choices were made by others, and that was that. It is the common plight of all people, when they come into the world. Infants cannot dictate who cares for them – or the quality or lack of it that is administered. Infants cannot control where they are taken, what sort of environment they are raised in, or the people around them.

If you were adopted, when you are old enough, you can speak out about your feelings. You can speak about what you experienced, you can speak about the feelings you have had, the life you have known, and the pains you have felt. Tell your own truth honestly.

Find other adoptees, so that you know that you are not alone in having these feelings.

Do not be ashamed that once upon a time, you told other people that you were happy to have been adopted. You had nothing to compare it to.

Do not be ashamed, if you often cry in private. You carry a profound grief. Do not think it wrong to try and find your original family. If you are able to do that, the experience may (but that is never guaranteed, as people as very complex creatures) be healing. If nothing else, it will be the reality you were once denied. The truth of your origins.

You have my sincere compassion. I am not an adoptee but my family of birth is full of adoptees – for one reason or another. You truly are not alone.