Tag: John Bowlby

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.

Separation – The Damage

Just a reminder that this situation continues and children who have been separated from their parents at the border are NOT being returned to them but placed for adoption.  The parents are sent back to their home country and the children are taken away from them.  This does lasting psychological damage that will stay with these victims into their adult years.

Millions of years of evolution have gone into erecting the deepest of connections: that between mother and child.

That primal bond—when forcibly shattered or disrupted—can be devastating for both parent and child, according to scientists.  Though experts have attempted to dissuade the White House from continuing this policy, children continue to not be reunited with their original parents.

Back in 2018, the American Psychological Association sent a letter to President Trump with this statement – “Based on empirical evidence of the psychological harm that children and parents experience when separated, we implore you to reconsider this policy and commit to the more humane practice of housing families together pending immigration proceedings to protect them from further trauma.” Many other organizations, including the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, have released similar statements.  All to no avail.  Falling on deaf ears and closed minds and hard hearts.

Back in May 2018, when Jeff Sessions was still the US Attorney General, he  announced that the Department of Homeland Security would refer 100% of illegal immigrants crossing the border for criminal prosecution in federal court. Any minors accompanying them were to be taken into government custody.  And that is precisely what happened.  Since the start of the Coronavirus pandemic, all migrants are being kept in squalid conditions on the Mexican side of the border which, as bad as that is, is still far better than taking children from their parents.

In the past, immigrants charged with this misdemeanor were able to stay in shelters with their children while waiting for further direction.  Under the current administration, they were separated – and even when President Trump issued an executive order in 2018 to end the separation of families at the border – nothing actually changed.  It was all a “for show” piece of paper.

It is a known fact that babies and other young children were living for an extended period of time in “tender age” shelters in South Texas.  Then, the government simply lost track of them.  Really ?  Hard to believe there is no record of their disposition – unless it was deliberately destroyed.  That would actually not surprise me at all.

“I would definitely consider [this] a traumatic experience with long-term consequences,” said Chandra Ghosh Ippen, associate director and dissemination director of the Child Trauma Research Program at the University of California, San Francisco and the Earth Trauma Treatment Network.

When a child is separated from his or her parents under chaotic circumstances, a monsoon of stress hormones (like cortisol) floods the brain and the body. These hormones are important for navigating stress in the short-term. However, in high doses, these chemicals—if hyperactive for a prolonged period of time—can increase the risk of lasting, destructive complications like heart disease, diabetes, and even some forms of cancer. In addition, multiples instances of trauma early in life can lead to mental health problems like depression, anxiety, and post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD).

On top of this immediate biological response to separation is the frightening experience of watching a caregiver undergo severe emotional upheaval.

“When a child sees a parent frightened, it is extremely threatening,” said Lisa Berlin, an associate professor at the University of Maryland School of Social Work and co-author on a study published in 2011 examining the effects of mother-child separation on children under two years old. Regarding that study, Berlin notes that some of the participants experienced planned separations that were done “in an orderly way.” By contrast, she says, the situation of the migrants at the Mexican border was “chaos.”

The conditions under which these undocumented minors were living were varied and unclear, but when ProPublica obtained an audio, it appeared that the children were under duress.

“It sounds like, from what we’re hearing, that there aren’t people there to help console them and help them self-soothe, which would be something that would be really key to help offset those biological responses [to stress],” said Erin C. Dunn, a social and psychiatric epidemiologist at Massachusetts General Hospital’s Center for Genomic Medicine.

The situation is a case study in what psychologists call “attachment,” and it’s the reason why children who are separated from their primary caregivers desperately need mental health counseling.

“In early childhood, young children believe that their parents can protect them from anything, and that’s actually what allows them to feel safe enough to explore the world,” Ippen said. “When that safe base is disrupted, you might see a child who is very anxious, or who is clingy, or you might see a child who goes off and recklessly explores the world. This is the crux of attachment theory.”

Attachment theory is a set of ideas developed in the early 1950s by British psychiatrist John Bowlby. “It’s an explanation of why we are the way we are,” Berlin said. “[Bowlby] said that a big determining factor has to do with how much we can rely on our primary caregiver when we really, really need them. We need them for physical safety and because we’re young and immature and we can’t make sense of our world without their help.”

A reminder. Thanks to PBS and NOVA for most of this blog with my own perspectives added.  This is also what happens to adoptees taken from their original parents and placed with strangers who raise them.  This is why adoption trauma is a real thing.