The Children Money Can Buy

by Anne Moody

  The agency was a wonderful place to work, and the prospective parents I met were polar opposites of the parents I had worked with in Michigan. I had long been fascinated by adoption and was happy to have the opportunity to work with families who were undergoing this exciting process. The job was especially rewarding after a family’s child arrived; I was responsible for monitoring their progress for six months. Most of the time, this meant listening to the parents talk about how wonderful their new child was. These happy, loving families were the perfect antidote to the depressing cynicism I’d developed in my previous job.

  Being an adoption counselor suited me temperamentally as well as professionally. As a young mother, I used to go for walks in our neighborhood in the early evenings. The baby in the stroller provided an excuse for meandering rather than walking briskly, and I soon discovered that my enjoyment came not only from the fresh air and exercise but also from getting a glimpse inside neighbors’ homes. I loved to walk just as the sun was going down, when people were getting home from work and families were coming together again after their day apart. It wasn’t yet dark enough to pull the curtains, but it was too dark to be inside without turning on the lights. That combination turned the little houses into cozy fishbowls and brought out the voyeur in me. I thoroughly enjoyed these snapshots from the lives of these not-at-all rich or famous families. In much the same way, I thoroughly enjoyed the detailed snapshots of people’s lives that I was granted when writing pre-placement reports.

  Thirty-five years later, I still write pre-placement reports and still enjoy the process. The requirements remain essentially the same. All prospective adoptive families in Washington (and most other states) must have a pre-placement report before a child can be placed in their home. The purpose is to assess the adopting parents’ suitability for adoption, and to educate them about the adoption process and issues related to raising an adopted child. The counselor’s approach and the form of the report vary somewhat depending on the type of adoption being anticipated. In a private (also called “independent”) adoption, usually of an infant or very young child, legal custody goes directly from the birth parent to the adoptive parent. Standards for pre-placement reports for this type of adoption are established by the state. Agency adoptions generally require that state standards for the pre-placement report be met and also have additional requirements specific to the type of adoption being done. For example, if a family is adopting a child from China, the report will need to address cultural issues and explain that the adoptive parents thoroughly understand the process and the importance of helping the child learn about and value her Chinese heritage. Pre-placement reports for families who want to adopt children coming out of the foster care system must address concerns about the special needs and adjustment issues these children are likely to face. The length and thoroughness of pre-placement reports vary greatly, but the basic components are usually the same. They all require extensive background checks, medical reports, income verification, marriage licenses and divorce decrees, birth certificates, and letters of reference. The interviews cover biographical information, marital history, attitudes about child-rearing, attitudes about adoption, and much more.

  Working on a pre-placement report provides me with the perfect excuse for asking people all sorts of questions about their lives. I’ve never grown tired of hearing about things like where they have lived over the years, what jobs they have held, what activities they enjoy, and so on. Each person is new and interesting to me, and I feel privileged to play a role in helping people find their child—as important and exciting an effort as I can imagine.

  The stereotype about home studies (I’ll call them that now since that’s what most adoptive families call them) is that they are unnecessarily intrusive, time-consuming, annoying, and possibly even insulting efforts to weed out all but the most perfect (according to some secret standard) candidates for adoptive parenthood. The stereotype about counselors who do home studies is similarly negative: they are humorless, judgmental, and in search of reasons to turn down prospective parents. I have tried mightily over the years to change that image—as have most of the adoption counselors I know—but there is often still a degree of tension between a prospective adoptive family and the person who does their home study. And that is perfectly understandable.

  The majority of adoptive families quite naturally feel anxious about the home study. They assume that it will be an ordeal during which they might be judged harshly and possibly even denied the chance to have a child. I do everything possible ahead of time (even addressing that issue in my introductory cover letter) to reassure families that failing a home study is extremely rare, but people can’t help but worry. I am amazed and dismayed when, after I’ve spent many pleasant hours with people and am getting ready to leave their home, they say something like, “So, do you think we’ll pass?” It’s usually said lightly, but the anxiety comes through nonetheless and the air is heavy for just a moment. I say, “Of course,” and we all laugh, but it is clear to me once again how emotionally fraught the situation is.

  I remember one incident in particular that highlighted this for me. I was at a meeting where adoptive parents were comparing notes about their home study experiences, and one parent advised others to be sure to empty their homes of beer and wine before the counselor’s visit. I pointed out that this was unnecessary, then was shocked to hear a woman whose home study I had recently completed say, “But, Anne, you checked my refrigerator!” When I looked confused, she said, “Remember when I asked if you wanted cream in your coffee and you were standing by the refrigerator and offered to get it? I just assumed that that was your way of checking for beer and wine.” Until then I had assumed from how friendly the woman and her husband were throughout my meetings with them that we were comfortable with one another and were communicating well. Now I saw instead that they saw me as sneaky, even dishonest, and it seemed to me that the other adoptive parents in the room were more inclined to believe their version of reality than mine. So much for my conviction that I’d been doing a good job of dispelling the stereotype of the adoption counselor.

  Most families aren’t quite that suspicious, but plenty of people are noticeably wary about the home study. Some of my favorite times have been when a person who starts out feeling unhappy and nervous discovers that the interviews actually aren’t so bad. It’s almost always a man—a man of few words who isn’t used to talking a lot about anything with anyone. The idea of being required to discuss such personal matters as his family, his marriage, and his ideas about raising children with a stranger is annoying and intimidating. Often in these situations, I get a series of phone calls from the wife ahead of time, with lots of questions about just what it is that they are going to have to talk about. She’ll tell me that her husband doesn’t understand why they have to go through this process. Basically, she is warning me that he is likely to be less than forthcoming when we meet. But I’ve learned not to worry because, time and time again, I’ve found that once they get going, these men discover, much to their surprise, that a home study isn’t so bad.

  I usually start out with easy biographical questions about a person’s childhood, and I can see people start to relax when they recall things such as where they lived, the people they knew, the activities they enjoyed, what they liked or didn’t like about school, and so forth. I ask them to speak chronologically, and I rarely have to prod them with much more than, “And then what happened?” Sometimes the normally quiet men go on and on while their wives sit in amazed silence. When they have completed their story, they usually say something like, “I don’t usually talk that much.” Or, “It was fun remembering that stuff. I thought I’d forgotten all that.” My impression is that most people have a great time talking about themselves when given the opportunity.

  But I’m not surprised that the majority of prospective adoptive parents, no matter how socially adept they are, feel some anxiety about the home study. It is inherently
strange to have someone come into your home in order to scrutinize you, then render what feels like a life-changing verdict on your future.

  I turned out to be as nervous as anyone. I had been an adoption counselor for three years when my husband and I decided to adopt, and I spent a week in advance of our home study scrubbing every inch of our house. Leaving no strategic detail to chance, I even made sure that cookies were just coming out of the oven when the counselor arrived. (It paid off: a description of “big, soft, warm peanut butter cookies” made it into the home study, presumably as another bit of evidence for what good parents we would be.) In truth, none of that was the least bit necessary. Houses don’t have to smell of freshly baked cookies or be free of beer and wine. They don’t even have to be particularly clean in order to impress an adoption counselor (particularly one, like me, who cut her professional teeth visiting pee houses). It actually is difficult, both ethically and legally, to deny a family the right to adopt a child. There is no end of ways to be good parents, and any worthwhile adoption agency or counselor understands this.

  There has been only a tiny handful of people I was not able to recommend as adoptive parents. This is true in part because families do some self-screening before they even start the adoption process. Most people realize that if they have a history of child abuse, domestic violence, criminal convictions, untreated substance abuse, or untreated mental illness, they are not likely to be good candidates for adoption.

  There are exceptions, however—that is, an arrest record in and of itself doesn’t necessarily disqualify someone wanting to adopt. I remember running a criminal-history check on a prospective adoptive dad and getting back a rap sheet that made it appear that he had gone on an extensive crime spree across four states as a young man. He had been booked into jails in Montana, Idaho, Nevada, and California over a month-long period and ultimately ended up in Lompoc Prison for three years. His crime turned out to be driving a flower-painted van through Montana at a time when that sort of thing didn’t go over well with the local sheriff. Unfortunately, he had also picked up a hitchhiker who was carrying some marijuana. The man’s father, an attorney, decided to teach his son a lesson by declining to help with his defense. So the young man was transported in a rather leisurely manner from Montana to California by various law enforcement personnel and spent time in a number of small town jails along the way. Each night in jail was booked and duly recorded. The fact that he was ultimately sentenced to three years of hard time in prison came as a shock to his parents, whose definition of “tough love” was a little more benign. It struck me as incredible that this incident would come back to haunt him twenty years later, possibly denying him the right to adopt a child from Korea.

  Another client’s history was marred by a foolish and naïve encounter with the wrong people in his youth. While traveling, he agreed to bring a suitcase back to the United States for a friend of a friend with whom he shared lodging in a South American city. Two years later, seemingly out of the blue, his Seattle apartment was raided early one morning, and he was arrested and charged with drug trafficking and various other crimes committed by the suitcase’s owner. A student at the time, he ended up accepting a sentence of probation for the trafficking offense; the other charges were dropped when it proved impossible to link him to the actual drug traffickers in any other way. The man went on to a successful marriage and career, and this episode was all but forgotten until he applied to adopt a child.

  In both cases, the men wrote letters of explanation which, combined with their upstanding (and arrest-free) adult lives, satisfied the placing agencies that they were good candidates for adoption, and both men were allowed to adopt.

  It is a more difficult matter when a troubling incident is not as far in the past. If, for example, an applicant has a relatively recent history of DUI, went through treatment and has had no further legal trouble, I still feel the need to have an expert provide an evaluation. I, and most other adoption counselors, have no expertise in the field of substance abuse and treatment and therefore don’t feel qualified to make related assessments or recommendations. So before starting a home study in these situations, I ask families to seek an assessment from someone who specializes in substance abuse. If they can get a legitimate expert to determine that they no longer have a problem, I am extremely likely to accept that recommendation.

  Sometimes, as the home study progresses, families will withdraw their application upon realizing that they won’t be able to provide the court with sufficient reassurance about an issue in their history. But only twice in over thirty years of doing home studies have I felt that I could not recommend a couple as adoptive parents when they wished to proceed.

  The first time caught me completely by surprise. The couple I was interviewing had told me about their concern in our first phone conversation, and I replied that I didn’t see it as significant. The issue in question was age: the woman was twenty years older than her husband, and she told me that most people found this “unacceptable.” I told her that I didn’t see it that way (I have a brother-in-law who married a woman almost twice his age when he was twenty, and who is still happily married almost forty years later). But I eventually discovered that the age difference itself wasn’t what was troubling about this couple. Rather, it was the secrecy around the age difference: she had adult children and grandchildren from a previous marriage who were not allowed to acknowledge publicly that they were her descendants. Her husband’s family did not know that their new daughter-in-law had children and grandchildren. The woman had even gone so far as to train her toddler granddaughter never to call her “Grandma” for fear that others might overhear. The woman had told her neighbors that this little girl who visited so frequently was the child of friends.

  Since it was obvious that this woman was a lot older than her husband—she was clearly in her forties, and he looked about fifteen—this behavior struck me as futile and troubling. The husband seemed to have taken on a peculiar caretaking role in this marriage, with his caretaking responsibility consisting primarily of frequent reassurances to his wife that she looked half her age. I suggested that we should talk about this a bit further, hoping that she could realize she didn’t need to be so vigilant about keeping up the deception. I wanted to help her realize that if she could stop feeling defensive about the age difference, then her attitude would help others feel comfortable about it as well. While the husband was receptive, his wife was furious with me for not seeing that the problem was society’s and not hers, and for not understanding that her secrecy was necessitated by people’s unreasonable tendency to victimize her.

  After a few more sessions with them, with my attempts to reason with her only making her increasingly angry, I told the couple that I didn’t feel comfortable acting as their adoption counselor and I returned their fee. The woman concluded that I had misrepresented my true feelings and was just like everyone else in disapproving of their age difference.

  The second couple was hoping to adopt a little girl from China. They were older than the average adoptive family and already had grown children and grandchildren, including a three-year-old granddaughter who lived with them because of her own mother’s problems with substance abuse. Fifteen minutes into a scheduled two-hour session in my office, the husband fell sound asleep. Odd as this was, what seemed even odder was that his wife didn’t think it appropriate to wake him. I decided that maybe he’d just had an especially hard day, and agreed to a second session, this time at their home, a few days later. About forty-five minutes after I arrived, the wife informed me that she had to leave to pick the granddaughter up from preschool and would be gone for about an hour.

  Clearly, this couple didn’t understand the need for them both to be present and awake in order for me to complete a home study.

  With the wife gone, I kept talking with the husband. He said that he wasn’t working because of health problems but that he and his wife planned to support themselves by ope
ning an adult-care facility in their home. They had already completed their application and were expecting approval any day. He went on to say that they wanted to adopt an older child who could help with the caretaking. All this information was delivered in fits and starts, since the man kept nodding off while we waited for his wife to return.

  The couple and their granddaughter lived on an extremely busy, four-lane thoroughfare with additional lanes for on-street parking. When I asked the woman how they handled safety issues, she told me that their grandchild was never allowed to go outside unaccompanied. No more than ten minutes later, during heavy rush-hour traffic, she sent the little girl, by herself, to get something out of their car—which was parked out on the street. The last straw came when I asked the woman about the adult-care license she and her husband were planning to get. She initially denied that they had applied for one, then lashed out at her husband for telling me about it.

  She was self-righteously indignant when I declined to continue working with them, but I suspect the husband was relieved. And I was enormously relieved that no little girl from China went to live (and work) in that home.

  It is sometimes true that people who should never have been allowed to adopt manage to find their way through the process and do great damage to the children entrusted to their care. It’s not that hard for an applicant to keep up a reasonably good front during interviews with the counselor or to find people who will write good references for them. It occurred to me fairly early in my career that people who really were up to no good (probably, alas, like Geoff, the man who adopted the three boys from South America) would have tremendous incentive to present themselves well during the home study. Just as Geoff did, they would make every effort to be cooperative and engaging and to ensure that there were no grounds for denying them the opportunity to adopt. I remember that, despite the fact that Geoff had passed all the requirements of the home study, there was one woman in the office who said, “He makes my skin crawl.” When questioned further, she could only add that she thought he was a snob and she just didn’t like him. I agreed with her that he was a snob with some annoying affectations (like the name-dropping), but even if I had shared her instinctive dislike for Geoff, those feelings would not have given me adequate justification for rejecting him as an adoptive parent. Just as it is with birth parents, adoptive parents are allowed to be imperfect and annoying. Also, like some birth parents, some adoptive parents turn out to be bad people. I wish it was different for both types of parents—that there was a foolproof method for making sure bad parents didn’t get to have children either by birth or adoption.