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Why One Mother Gave Back Her Adopted Son
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https://shine.yahoo.com/parenting/why-one-mother-gave-back-her-adopted-son-163800330.html
I just stumbled on this story and I find it quite shocking. I suppose if the child is happier where he is now then that's the main thing, and I know not all adoptions work out, but something about the way this woman tells the story makes her come across really badly.
Maybe it's the use of the phrase ""Having an instant multicultural family was magical"...something about this ideal that multicultural families are "a dream" really doesn't sit well. Possibly because it's stripping people down to their skin colour and making that the most important thing about them?
I just stumbled on this story and I find it quite shocking. I suppose if the child is happier where he is now then that's the main thing, and I know not all adoptions work out, but something about the way this woman tells the story makes her come across really badly.
Maybe it's the use of the phrase ""Having an instant multicultural family was magical"...something about this ideal that multicultural families are "a dream" really doesn't sit well. Possibly because it's stripping people down to their skin colour and making that the most important thing about them?
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Their Old age is not one of peace and tranquillity and perhaps in hindsight they would have had such a better life if he had gone to another home but as my friend told me if we had given birth to him we couldn't give him back and we can't either.
Was he adopted from foster care? If so, he would have most likely experienced some pretty horrific child abuse before. I don't understand why people just expect severely traumatised children to just 'adjust' and get on with things. How can a child who's never experienced love understand what it is?
OP, this happens unfortunately. She expected a little boy, taken from his own country and culture to just magically be OK. He would have had all kinds of trust issues and was acting out. And god knows what he had witnessed before being taken to this new country to a new family. Traumatised kids act out because they are scared.
I was just about to say the same thing!
Sorry she's not fit to have any kids. I'm bloody furious after reading that pathetic self justification, basically for her inability to behave like an adult. To worry about hitting him? She needs help!
I see this so often with adoptive parents. They use very traumatised children, often from orphanages in poor countries and just use them to build a family. It's never ever in the interest of the children. Sometimes they place the child somewhere else, so it's rejection after rejection for these kids. Makes me so angry.
Here's another tragic story
http://adoptionvoicesmagazine.com/adoptive-parents/adoptive-parent-rehomed-adoptee/#.UziBablOXIU
Notice that it's the 'Adoptive parents nightmare'? And not 'Every traumatised adopted child's nightmare?'. It's never about the child's needs.
Roelie Post, who works a lot with international adoption, works to help keep children in their own country and culture, and to help with whatever issues that lead to children ending up in orphanages. She's done amazing work.
I recall a case a few years ago where a couple who had small kids of their own fostered a 13 or 14 yr old lad who then raped at least one of the little ones.
Iirc the boy had history and the local authority took the twisted view that it was prejudicial to the teenagers rights to warn the parents what exactly they were taking on.
It lead to the couple splitting up. They tried to sue the council but lost for, iirc, the reason that they were not the ones effected.
How the father was never found hanging around the social services car park with a baseball bat I'll never know.
Please don't refer to abused and traumatised children in this way.
I think there is a difference between people fostering, as they are doing it to help the children (although I agree that social services absolutely messed up in this case and they should have been sued and held accountable for what happened to the younger children).
And people going to poor countries and taking traumatised children and trying to build a family with them. It should always be about the needs of the children, not the parents.
These stories are about privileged people who get all upset at the bad behaviour of children who have undergone trauma and damage that they will never be able understand.
I read the book - I was glued to it but, I will never read it again and have avoided seeing the film. Super traumatising.
I have had experience of this from the child point of view and all I can say is that sometimes children that are placed can be terribly damaged before they've been adopted. Really, I think it should be mandatory for social workers or whoever oversees the adoption to provide full disclosure and ongoing support to the parents and the child. If this isn't done and the adoption breaks down it's just seen as yet another rejection by the child and the parents feel a failure. Not fair all round.
I think you are being harsh on the parents. They were guilty of being naive. The way you are saying it it's like some posh toffs becoming offended because the child flicked a bogey.
They were under-prepared, ill informed and believed love could conquer all...naive. Not bad.
It's been going on for years, and I can't see it ending. There will always be delusional adoptive parents who take these children and pretend to themselves that 'their kids' will be different.
There's so much information out there about attachment and the psychological problems adoptees face, not just ones from orphanages, but infant adoptions too. But people get into denial about it.
And on top of that, is that these children are expected to feel grateful for being adopted, which is a huge burden. If you imagine all they've been though before the adoption, possible abuse and being left in an orphanage. Then taken to a strange country, new name, new language, and then expected to just be OK, and adjust.
We need to talk about the ethics of these international adoptions, not just the emotional damage to the children. There are so many instances of adoption agencies going into these poorer countries and exploiting them and basically child trafficking. Here's what happened in Cambodia, when poor mothers were tricked into selling their babies to adoption agencies to pass onto American families.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gfnja90whuI
Here's a documentary about Roelie Post, she's awesome. She is very much against international adoptions as it encourages child trafficking. She worked a lot in Romania in the orphanages. Many of the kids end up in the orphanages because the parents are too poor, sometimes they leave them there wile they go looking for a job. Then the kids are literally sold to adoption agencies without the parents knowledge. It's shocking.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cf2_N0-Hdss
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UsDxGX-9ijs
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UsDxGX-9ijs
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2vNCuXkaxew
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kgo-Pj-OuWQ
This is a lecture on attachment, and it talks a bit about the effects of international adoption with regards to culture change, transracial adoptions etc
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y3pX4C-mtiI
I for one was glad when Russia banned international adoptions, it's time they took responsibility for their own children and sorted out the reasons these kids end up in orphanages in the first place- drugs, alcoholic parents, poverty etc. What these kids need are intensive, therapeutic foster homes, not being taken out of their country to live with strangers. This is what Rolie Post, and others are advocating for.
Rolie Post on how Russian adoptees are not monitored after the adoptions in America, and how many end up abused or dead.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bQlPOy10aus
I think people are being harsh on her, yes. Her preparation for adoption seems to have been appalling - who in the world thought a difficult, demanding five year old with severe attachment disorder was an appropriate child for an inexperienced new mother (biologically)? People are talking as if he was a bit difficult, or as if she gave up at the first hurdle; they are ignoring her very real desire to protect the younger children from someone could not control his behaviour. It was just a terrible mismatch; it seems self-evident that someone whose children were much older would have more experience and less of a problem with the challenging small boy. Adoption advertisements often say "must be the youngest or only child" for good reasons.
Failed adoptions are much less common in the UK than the US because the process itself is much more rigorous. But they do happen. Adopted children sometimes ask to go back into care; if they have been adopted late on, they may find family life too much, and prefer the less intense environment of a residential adolescent unit.
When my children were at nursery school, one of the mothers - rather a wealthy young woman, who spent all day, every day at the gym, emerging just in time to collect her son - adopted two Romanian orphans. It quickly became obvious that she loathed them. They were unresponsive, could not be toilet trained, rocked, smeared faeces, bit people. The last I saw of her, she had imported a downtrodden, tired looking Irish nanny to look after the twins, which she pretty much ignored from then on. I do sometimes wonder what happened to them all.
I still think, though, that to continue viewing the whole situation only from their own perspective (I cried for weeks, that's how caring I am, and on top of that we're now being judged because of it) minimises my sympathies for them somewhat. There's no suggestion that everyone was failed by a system that doesn't work, no call for action that would prevent something similar happening. It just seems to be a general 'be careful, guys, you might get a dodgy kid and everyone will blame you for it'.
Shit, I just did it again didn't I?
Why are we not discussing the ethics of taking the children out of Haiti?
http://www.counterpunch.org/2013/09/17/child-trafficking-and-adoption-in-haiti/
I agree, they tried to provide a loving home for a very damaged child, when it became clear that wasn't going to be in the best interests of him or the other 3 younger children they found a solution that, while painful for them, seems to have been better for him and was certainly better for the other children.
I think the kind of honesty that has been displayed in describing how the adoptive mother felt throughout the process is incredibly valuable for other people who might be going through similar situations.
Shame on the people who are calling her names as a result, such judgemental reactions are rarely helpful.