The Children Money Can Buy

by Anne Moody

  It was clear that the parents in this family were used to succeeding at whatever they took on and that they still felt a lot of regret over not having been able to be successful parents to this child. The boy had come out of the U.S. foster care system and was close in age to the older boys in the family and quite a bit older than some of the other kids. Over time, it became evident that he was victimizing the other children in the family in various ways. The parents were smart and experienced, they had tried everything they could imagine, including counseling, and they still didn’t feel that they were doing an adequate job of protecting the other children. They made the decision that this child would have to leave their family because they were good parents to all of the children. Obviously, it was not good for the other children in the family to be put at risk, and it was probably even more harmful to the boy to be put in a situation where he was able to be abusive. Prior to this child’s placement in the home, someone should have realized that a houseful of more vulnerable children was not an environment in which this particular child could be expected to succeed. It was more like a setup for failure. When even the most dedicated parents cannot keep everyone safe, either from being abused or from being abusive, it doesn’t serve anyone’s best interests to put any of the children at risk.

  A family who adopted two children from Russia experienced a variation of this type of disruption. The first child had arrived at about a year old and had always been a gentle and sensitive child. His parents adored him and were eager to give him a little brother or sister, so they applied to adopt again from Russia when their son was almost four years old. They were delighted to receive a referral for a second son about a year later, and although they were a bit concerned that this child was only six months younger than the older boy, they eagerly went ahead with the adoption. But when the new child arrived, there was immediate trouble: although he was younger, he was bigger, stronger, and far more aggressive than the other little boy. Also, the new child had been living in an environment where he had to compete to get what he needed and wanted; as a result, he was easily able to dominate and overwhelm the older boy. This dynamic wasn’t good for either child, and, understandably, the mother was finding it difficult to bond with a child who was making her beloved first child so unhappy. Worse still, when she expressed her fears to friends and family, some of them suggested that she was overreacting and that the boys would be able to work things out in time. This only added to her misery and strengthened her resolve to defend herself and her older child.

  It may have been true that the boys would eventually “work things out” in some fashion (possibly with the older child always being subservient, the younger being a confused bully, and lots of resentment for everyone), but it wasn’t the children’s relationships with one another that was of greatest concern. More worrisome was the mother’s attitude toward the younger child. It wasn’t her fault that she found herself in this dilemma, but more significantly, it wasn’t the new child’s fault that his style didn’t mesh well with his new family. In this family, his physical strength and assertiveness were interpreted negatively simply because, even as a three-year-old, he had the ability to frighten and threaten the older boy. If he had been placed in a family with children who were a few years older, he would not have been a threat to anyone. His behavior would not have been viewed as a problem, and his mother wouldn’t have been busy protecting another child; she could have focused on nurturing him instead.

  Happily, that is exactly what happened: the boy moved to a new family with much older and bigger kids who could easily handle his rough-and-tumble ways. I think the child suffered only moderately as a result of the disruption because it happened quickly, and he gained enormously. The first family continued to receive criticism for what most people saw as a failure, but they had no doubt that they had made the right decision for themselves as well as for their first child.

  An extremely dramatic and traumatic disruption came to international attention in 2010 when an adoptive mother “returned” the seven-year-old Russian boy she had adopted by putting him, all by himself, on a plane bound for that country. I have no information about that particular situation other than what was available from the media, but I do have some insight into the struggles that children endure in Russian orphanages, how these struggles result in adjustment problems in the adoptive home, and how desperate that woman must have been. There is no excuse for the method she chose to try to extricate herself from any connection to the child, and the repercussions of that choice went far beyond what she apparently expected they would be. Surely, she didn’t realize that she would be held responsible for the heartbreak of so many other adoptive families and waiting children whose adoptions were prevented when Russia claimed to be closing down all adoptions to the United States, supposedly in response to this woman’s actions (though really in retaliation for United States imposed sanctions). This woman was thoroughly vilified and, although she should be held accountable for her cruelty and her astoundingly bad judgment, I suspect that there is a side to this story that paints her in a slightly better light. It’s easy to say (and to believe) that we could never imagine giving up on a child, but is that really accurate? The adoptive mother claimed that the boy endangered the household because he lit fires, and she needed to protect herself and her other child from the possibility of a house fire. Assuming this was true, how do parents in these situations choose between the best interests, safety, and well-being of all of their children when these things seem to be in direct conflict? This question, and our inability to answer it satisfactorily, is often at the root of adoption disruptions. Things are further complicated in international adoptions, in which the adoption has already been finalized by the placing country before the child arrives in the United States.

  Well-established and well-run agencies have procedures in place for dealing with placements that don’t work out. Most of the time, when there is a disruption and a child needs to find a new home, it is possible for the placing agency to find a suitable family on their list of waiting families, and the re-adoption process can be handled without too much difficulty. But when a child’s problems are severe, the task of finding a new home can be very difficult. Sometimes it’s not even possible. Some children have problems that are too severe for any family to handle, and they require a different type of care, such as a group home or residential treatment facility—which are usually extremely expensive options. Then the problem becomes not only where this child should live, but also who should support him and for how long. Legally, when the adoption has already been finalized in another country, the adoptive family is held financially responsible for the child despite the fact that few families actually have the ability to pay for the type of long-term care that is needed. And is it really reasonable or ethical that the consequence to the family for failing at this adoption should be lifelong responsibility that is likely to deplete their financial (and emotional) resources?

  The most troubling and urgent questions around a failed international adoption are, “What went wrong?” and “What can we do to prevent this from happening again?” As we often do when bad things happen, we want to hold someone responsible so we can believe (as people did with my grad school friend Miles and the little girl who died) that it all could have been avoided if only a particular person hadn’t made a particular mistake. But it’s likely that most parents in this type of a disrupted adoption are guilty primarily of naïveté or wishful thinking, rather than unkind or negligent behavior. In fact, there are more than a few child-placing agencies that actually seem to encourage wishful thinking in prospective adoptive families, along with the idea that a lot of love and prayer will fix most problem behavior. As a result, children are placed with families who are woefully unprepared for them. These same agencies provide little actual help in the way of post-placement services when families find themselves in situations they cannot handle and with children who bear little resemblance to the ones they tho
ught they were adopting. While it’s obvious that agencies that provide inadequate preparation and support for adoptive parents deserve blame for these ethical shortcomings, they are typically not legally responsible because the adoption has already been finalized in the placing country. Adoptive parents can find themselves very much alone in these situations; sometimes even their normal support groups (family, friends, church community, other adoptive parents) condemn their failure. That is harsh punishment for wishful thinking.

  Countries that send their children to the United States (or another country) to be adopted want to be assured that the child is all right and is actually living with the family that adopted him or her. Post-placement reports usually provide this sort of evidence as long as everything is going well for the child and family. (They also help to counteract the recurrent rumors about children being put to use as domestic laborers or organ donors.) When there are problems with a placement, the placing country’s concerns focus not only on the particular child but also on all the children it sends, or is about to send, to the United States. Problems serious enough to end in a disruption jeopardize other children’s placements, the reputations of both the U.S. agency and the placing agency, and possibly the future of adoption between the two countries. Everyone works extremely hard to avoid and prevent disruptions for the sake of the individual child and family, and also for the sake of all international adoption. But it’s important to keep in mind that in many cases a disruption is in the best interests of the child and doesn’t need to be deemed a failure on anyone’s part.

  I was involved with one family who made the decision to disrupt and I couldn’t have been happier. They were a couple in their late thirties who adopted a ten-month-old baby girl from China. I had not done the home study but was called on to consult with them when problems developed. Apparently, the adoptive mother had seemed fine during the home study but, as the previous counselor explained, it had now been several weeks since placement and she was not bonding with the baby. In fact, she was telling her husband and parents that she had decided that she didn’t want a child after all. People aren’t expected to bond immediately, especially if the child is also having a hard time and is rejecting the parent’s efforts to attach. However, it is unusual for adoptive parents to express this degree of unhappiness when the child is so young and there isn’t an apparent problem. So I went out to see what was going on and what could be done to help.

  The family’s house was a bi-level in a suburban neighborhood, and the living room was stuffed full of dark, oversized furniture, with the curtains tightly drawn, even though it was early in the day when I arrived. The baby was napping, so I had a little time to talk with the couple before meeting her. The husband seemed pleasant and made it clear that he was still hoping that I could convince his wife that she didn’t really want this child to go away. I had thought ahead of time that the wife was probably having a version of “post-placement depression” and just needed some time to adjust to everything. It’s not uncommon for adoptive mothers (like all mothers) to be hard on themselves in the first weeks, expecting complete bliss and finding worry and exhaustion instead. But after I met this woman, I came to a different conclusion. As she told me about the difficulties she was going through, I found myself cringing at the level of immaturity and self-absorption she was expressing. I felt thoroughly embarrassed for her and her husband, but she seemed to be completely unaware of how off-putting her comments were. In fact, she seemed to be expecting me to sympathize with her and to convince her husband that he needed to side with her against the baby.

  It turned out that the husband was doing virtually all of the child care because the woman either was too tired or found it distasteful for some reason. There didn’t seem to be any aspect of parenting or anything about the child that appealed to her. She didn’t like diaper changing, feeding, or even holding the baby. The immediate problem was that the husband had to go back to work and no one, least of all the wife, felt comfortable leaving her alone with the baby. Her parents had offered to help, but they couldn’t be there all of the time. The wife said she wasn’t worried about hurting the baby but felt that being alone with her, and being expected to provide care, was just too much to ask. I think everyone else was worried about her hurting the baby, however, and her own fears about this may have been at the root of her detachment as well.

  I expected the baby to be fussy, demanding, or somehow mysteriously unappealing, but that was not the case at all. She woke up sweetly and was all smiles as the husband walked into the living room with her in his arms. She was bright and engaging and adorable, yet the woman practically recoiled from her. On the surface, her reaction looked almost like jealousy, but I think it was closer to panic and that she had decided she wasn’t capable of being a mother. She made it clear to me that she didn’t want counseling. My job, in her view, was to help her husband and parents come to terms with losing the baby. As unsympathetic as this woman was, thank goodness she was honest with herself and everyone else about her reluctance to become a parent. Most people would have resisted acknowledging the feelings she expressed, fearing the condemnation of others.

  The happy side of this story is that there is an abundance of eagerly waiting families for babies in these situations. These are families who are waiting to adopt and expecting to be called with referral information about their future child several months before they are actually allowed to travel to get him or her. Instead, they receive a call telling them that their wait could be a matter of days rather than months, and that their adoption will be significantly less expensive than anticipated since they might only have to travel across town instead of all the way to China, for example. The new adoptive family for this little girl was a couple in their early forties with an eight-year-old son from China; when I spoke with the mother, she seemed as different as possible from the first woman. She was talkative, self-assured, and interested in hearing every little detail about the baby and how to help her make a smooth adjustment to their family. Most importantly, she and her family were ecstatically happy that this baby was going to be joining them. As was I.

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  “Doing Good” Isn’t Always Good

  Some adoption disruptions can result from the best of intentions; and adoption is rife with misguided good intention.

  A few days after the attacks on the World Trade Center, an extremely intelligent and goodhearted woman called to ask what I knew about adopting one of the children who had been orphaned there. A Goldman Sachs orphan?

  Such a call is not uncommon. When there is a large-scale disaster resulting in loss of human life (Hurricane Katrina, the World Trade Center attack, earthquakes in Haiti, tsunamis in southeast Asia), the phones are likely to start ringing at adoption agencies. True, the well-intentioned callers will be deeply affected by the suffering of others and want to help out, but the odd outlet for their concern is the urge to acquire the children of victims. With even a little thought and self-examination, it should become apparent that instincts leading people to help in this particular fashion aren’t exactly selfless. If you doubt this, consider that families touched by the plight of children in Haiti would eagerly go into debt to come up with hefty adoption fees but would never send that same amount of money (or even a small portion of it) to a charitable organization where it could be used to benefit innumerably more Haitian children.

  I think it is important for parents—both adoptive and biological—to recognize that the desire for a child is, at heart, selfish. People decide to get pregnant because they want a child, for whatever reason—but never out of a selfless conviction that a particular combination of egg and sperm deserves to be born. Parenthood certainly becomes a selfless undertaking once the child arrives, but the decision to become pregnant is not selfless. Similarly, it is important for adoptive parents to understand that their desire for a child, rather than their desire to “do good” (or look good), is the proper motivation for adoption.
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  Families who introduce themselves to me by saying that they want to adopt for charitable reasons are a challenge to counsel. I find it particularly difficult when they say that they are pursuing adoption because they “have a heart for children” or “feel called to help the children of Ethiopia,” or some similar statement. They don’t seem to recognize that most reasonably nice people are also touched by the plight of children in need. Families who feel that these sentiments set them apart can come across as naïve rather than generous and caring. It can be difficult for them to understand that what feels like uncomplicated goodwill on their part can look more like self-congratulatory pride to others, most importantly to the child who is on the receiving end of their charity.

  Children should not be made to feel that their arrival in an adoptive family resulted from an act of charity, nor is it good for them to go through life with the idea that they are supposed to feel grateful to their parents for rescuing them. Birth and adoptive children alike ought to be grateful for the love and care their parents provide, just as parents are grateful for the love and care their children provide. Adoptive families feel grateful to God or fate or blind luck or whatever it is they believe brought them together in the same way that biological families feel grateful for one another. There should be no expectation of extra gratitude from an adopted family member. Sadly, parents who believe that adoption is an act of charity are in danger of creating distorted relationships with their adopted child. These are the parents who are hurt and astounded when, instead of being grateful, their children are resentful of their charity. And these are the parents who are likely to be extremely resistant to the idea that good intentions don’t cancel out the damage caused by viewing adopted children as evidence of their parents’ “good works.”