by Anne Moody
People who do home studies are being asked to pass judgment about the adoptive applicants they work with, but they are not—nor could they be—asked to provide assurance that these people will necessarily be good parents. It isn’t realistic to expect that a counselor could proclaim with certainty that an applicant would be a wonderful parent. All the counselor can say is that the applicant has met all the requirements of a home study and appears to have personal qualities that would make them successful as a parent. That’s a very different statement and doesn’t make promises that the counselor is in no position to make.
The fact that a counselor or agency feels an affinity for an applicant or shares basic values or beliefs with the applicant should not affect her professional judgment about that person’s ability to properly parent a child. This should hold true whether an applicant is rejected or welcomed. Surely, reasonable people can agree that there isn’t one best way to be a parent and that a healthy society accommodates a variety of parenting philosophies and approaches. I certainly have my own opinions about a preferred parenting style, and I also have the widely held tendency to believe that my own views are “correct.” However, my job has given me an unusual amount of information about how other people live their lives, and I couldn’t have avoided coming to the realization that the world is full of happy, loving, successful families whose approach to raising children is nothing like my own.
* * *
1. www.wacap.org/AboutUs.
10
Adoption Is the Good Thing That Happens
After the adoptive placement of a child, a certain number of visits and reports are required from a social worker before the adoption can be finalized. With many international placements, the adoption is considered final in the placing country prior to the child’s departure, but post-placement visits are still necessary in order to finalize the adoption in the United States. The purpose of post-placement visits is threefold: (1) to help the family with any adjustment issues or other difficulties they or the child might be having, (2) to report back to whatever entity placed the child, and (3) to reassure the U.S. agency and legal system that all is well and recommend that the adoption be finalized.
The period of adjustment for a child and family will vary depending on such factors as the child’s age and previous living situation and how well the family has been prepared for the adoption. With international adoptions and children coming from the foster care system, it is typical for the placing agency to require three to six visits over a period of six months to one year. In private infant adoptions, the courts usually require only one post-placement visit, while families who adopt an infant through an agency can be required by that agency to have as many as four or five post-placement visits during the first year. Once the requirements for post-placement supervision have been met, the social worker can recommend finalization of the adoption, and a court date is set, at which time the adoption becomes final.
Obviously, one purpose of the post-placement visits is to make sure that the child is doing well, and most adoptive families assume that the written report will be an assessment of their abilities as parents. It does happen, though rarely, that serious problems are discovered during a post-placement visit, and a child placed with a family for adoption is removed from the home against the parents’ wishes. Generally, this action would be taken for the same reasons that children are removed from the home of biological parents, such as physical abuse or mental-health concerns. When the problem is discovered prior to the finalization of the adoption, the placing agency retains legal custody of the child. The situation becomes much more complex with international adoptions, in which the adoption has been finalized in the placing country prior to the child’s arrival in the United States. While the placing agency might be able remove the child from the home, the adoptive parents would retain legal responsibility for the child. Even in situations where the child has been removed from the adoptive home due to abuse, and against the parent’s wishes, judges usually do not feel it is in the child’s best interests to sever legal ties with that home until (and unless) there is another adoptive family ready to take over responsibility.
The period of post-placement supervision isn’t simply a time in which the adoptive parents are scrutinized; it is also a time when they must decide whether to fully commit to this adoption and this child. There is a period of adjustment with all adoptions, and even with infant adoptions, the best course of action might not always be clear at the time of placement. For example, a child who appeared to be in good health and developing normally at birth might a short time later be discovered to have problems that the particular adoptive family does not feel capable of handling. Situations like this are tremendously sad, but the parents should not be judged harshly if they decide not to follow through with the adoption. It is important to remember that it is in the best interests of the child to be in a family that truly understands and accepts the situation and is prepared to provide the type of care the child needs. If the original adoptive family does not feel capable of providing this type of care, then they are not the right family for this child. Hopefully, they will be given understanding and support for knowing their own limitations and won’t be pressured not to “give up,” or criticized for doing so. In my experience, it has been far more common for adoptive parents to be the ones to decide not to complete an adoption than for agencies or the courts to force that decision on a family. Happily, both of these situations are extremely rare and the vast majority of post-placement visits are untroubled.
Due to the requirements for post-placement supervision, I have spent lots of time with adoptive families and children, and this has almost always been a joy. The families I serve in this capacity all live in western Washington, with the majority in the Seattle area. They have diverse socioeconomic backgrounds, but they share a general culture that is primarily Caucasian. Although their personal networks of family and friends are distinct, their wider communities—people like teachers, doctors, store clerks, and folks they pass on the street—are probably fairly uniform. I would expect that people living in the same sorts of communities would have similar experiences when they take their children out into the world, but the reports I hear from some adoptive parents would suggest that this is not the case.
When I meet with a family to complete a post-placement report for a child of a different race, the parents usually say something along the lines of, “We can’t go anywhere without people stopping us to say how beautiful she is,” or, “We never realized until now how many people are interested in adoption.” They tell me about how much fun it is to go out with their child and that her presence and her race, which makes it apparent that she was adopted, get people talking to them in ways that never happened before. They probably don’t realize that their experience is, in part, common to all new parents; babies in general tend to bring out the friendliness of strangers. But the important point here is that these parents enjoy the fact that their child attracts attention, and they interpret other people’s interest in a positive way. They occasionally report that someone has said something awkward or insensitive and wonder how to best respond in these situations, but they see such comments as unusual and don’t let them dampen their joy in showing their child off to the world.
A much smaller and far more vocal group of parents put the opposite spin on what appears to be the same experience. These parents tell me, “We can’t go anywhere without rude people commenting on the fact that she is a different race,” or, “We can’t go anywhere without people asking us all sorts of nosy and personal questions about our adoption.” I find this attitude unfortunate and largely unnecessary, and I feel bad for the children of these parents. It’s hard for any child to have parents who see the world in a negative light, and it’s even harder when the child suspects that a particular negative experience is somehow connected to them. The parents feel that they are acting as their child’s advocate and protector
by being vigilant about slights, but the child more likely will see only that there is something about them (race and adoption) that causes the parent distress. Even very young children can pick up on the tension when a parent responds defensively and, as children often do, they are likely to take it as evidence that they are somehow to blame for the problem.
This is not to say that adoptive parents don’t encounter plenty of situations that require them to educate people about adoption or that parents should be passive in response to hurtful comments. All adoptive parents owe it to their children to take every opportunity to correct misperceptions about adoption, and parents need to help their children negotiate negative situations around adoption, race, or any other subject that presents concerns for them. But they need to do it in a way that strengthens the child and the family. Interpreting every problem the child faces as having its roots in adoption or racial difference is more likely to be confusing and troubling than enlightening or comforting.
I remember one mother of an Asian child, for example, who was convinced that a little boy at school was bullying her daughter because of her race. The children were in the second grade and the little boy, who sat behind her in class, was regularly pulling the girl’s hair. The mother was frustrated because her daughter’s teacher did not see this as racist and wasn’t taking what the mother felt was appropriate action to educate the children in her class about racism. I don’t know the motives of the little boy, but the little girl was a class leader, had many friends, and didn’t seem particularly upset about the hair pulling when she talked with other children about it; there was no evidence of racial taunting or slurs. I suggested to the mother that the little boy may have just been trying to get her daughter’s attention in the annoying manner of little boys since the dawn of time, but she didn’t like that idea at all. She felt that her complaints about racism in the school were being ignored and she wanted something done about it.
The hair pulling soon stopped, but the mother’s concern about it did not, and the most likely result was that this mother’s preoccupation gave her daughter an unnecessarily fraught message about race. It likely also served to make the girl feel cautious about telling her mother anything that had the potential to be turned into an uncomfortably big deal. The mother thought her actions were empowering her daughter, but I suspect the opposite was true. I suspect it made the child wonder why the fact that she was Asian had so much power to upset her mother.
Another Caucasian family I knew had two children of Asian heritage: an outgoing and popular daughter, who seemed unworried about the racial differences in her family, and a younger son. The boy had just started high school and was struggling. His parents, who wanted to help in whatever ways they could, wondered if he was struggling with racial identity or adoption issues. Teenage adoptees in interracial families do indeed face racial-identity issues and continue to do so as they mature. However, after I met this boy it seemed far more likely that his sudden unhappiness was brought on by the onset of pretty severe acne and a delayed growth spurt that made him one of the shortest boys in the ninth grade. Both of those things were probably transitory (and shared by many teenage boys), and I suspect that they bothered this boy in the same ways they would bother a boy who was not adopted and not of a different race from his parents. The fact that the boy’s self-esteem was at an all-time low seemed unlikely to be simply “an adoption issue.”
Many adoptive parents reflexively wonder if a given problem of their child’s is adoption related. It’s hard to blame them. There are lots of books written for young children about adoption that suggest that kids commonly have negative feelings about being adopted. These books are upbeat and informative for the most part, but there is usually at least one page in which the child, or animal, who is the main character is shown to be sad, with the explanation being that sometimes she worries or is confused about what it means to be adopted. I remember one illustration of a little girl sitting on her bed, clearly in a funk. The narrative explained that she just needed to be by herself and feel bad for a while about being adopted. A parent reading this book might conclude that when his or her child was feeling grumpy or down, it could be attributed to worry about adoption or her birth mother. And it might be, but it is far more likely to be about something else: children, whether or not they were adopted, have all sorts of reasons for feeling grumpy.
Too many books meant to educate adoptive parents are guilty of perpetuating a negative image of adoption. This impression is often transmitted through the use of such carelessly broad statements as, “Children who are adopted are more likely to receive counseling than non-adopted children.” Technically, that is true—but it is also misleading. The broad category of “adopted children” includes those who were adopted at older ages and suffered broken attachments, those who have come from traumatic circumstances, and those who have different special needs. Obviously, these children are going to have a higher than average need for various types of extra support, including counseling, but a child who has been placed in an adoptive home at birth has little in common with a child who spent his early years with an abusive parent and in a series of foster homes before being adopted. And abused children, whether adopted or not, share a common need for counseling. A child who is in need of counseling due to a history of abuse is far more likely to get it if he has been adopted than if he has continued to live with the abusive birth parents. While abused children who have remained with their birth parents are less likely to receive counseling, they are certainly not less likely to need it. This explanation seems obvious, but most people who are told that adopted children need counseling at a higher rate than non-adopted children don’t stop to consider why this might be true. Instead, they assume that there must be something about being adopted that puts these children at greater risk for psychological problems.
I strongly object to the pathologizing of adoption, which is widespread in our society. It is common to hear adoption cited as the explanation for an individual’s problems. People are likely to explain developmental delays or behavioral issues simply by saying that the child “was adopted,” without taking note of such actual contributing factors as fetal drug or alcohol exposure, early neglect or abuse, traumatic experiences, institutionalization, frequent disruptions in caregivers, and other misfortunes well known to harm children. Instead, people simply characterize the struggling child as “adopted,” as though that explains all of his or her problems and as though all adoptees are the same, whether adopted as a healthy infant or as a preteen refugee from a war-torn country. Media coverage of a terrible crime committed by an adoptee never fails to point out that the perpetrator was adopted, and we react as though that fact explains everything.
I find this pathologizing of adoption particularly frustrating because the general perception brought on by these attitudes—that adoption is risky business for both parents and children—is the opposite of the truth. For most children in need, adoption is the good thing that happens when the bad things are over.
11
Adoption Disruptions
Unfortunately, adoption isn’t always the happy ending everyone was expecting. When I worked in the foster care system, it was not unusual to get calls from beleaguered foster parents asking to have a child removed from their home. This wasn’t exactly unexpected, especially when the child in question had significant behavioral problems, but it was usually extremely depressing for all concerned. If the child had been in the home for a while and/or if the placement had been expected to be long term, this sort of move was called a “disruption.” The same sort of thing happens in adoptions, and while adoption disruptions are mercifully infrequent, when a child has to leave an adoptive home it is usually more accurate to describe the situation as devastating than depressing.
The first family I knew who had a disrupted adoption impressed me when I met them as not only picture perfect but perfect in more meaningful ways as well. There were two preteen sons w
ho had been born to the parents, and the family had adopted three younger children, one of them a beautiful baby girl with serious medical special needs. At some point, the family had also adopted another boy, but I didn’t know about him when I met with them to complete a post-placement report for the baby girl. I remember at one point in our conversation saying something boneheaded to the mother about how I didn’t understand how families could just return children when things didn’t work out, and she calmly replied that that had happened in her family. I was stunned. There was no way to undo what I had said, but I tried to suggest that perhaps it hadn’t been a “real disruption” somehow. She wasn’t buying it and didn’t give in to the temptation to gloss over an awkward moment by agreeing with me that her situation had somehow been different. In fact, it had been a classic disruption and, although completely justified and necessary, it had left scars.
