by Anti-Racist Parent Columnist Jae Ran Kim, originally published at Harlow’s Monkey
People all over the world are talking about the return of an adopted Korean child by a Dutch diplomat and his wife. I’ve written about disruptions and dissolutions before, namely here and here. I think one of the aspects of this case that is alarming people is the fact that the girl was 4 months old at the time of the adoption and had lived with her adoptive parents for 7 years.
A disruption is when the child is returned before the adoption is finalized. Disruptions often happen after a child is placed in the home a few months, but sometimes in the case of international adoption, it can occur when the family meets the child and decides not to go through with the adoption.
Once an adoption has been finalized, if the parents “return” a child it is called a dissolution. Dissolutions always occur after the legal status of parent and child has been established in a court of law. In the United States, for parents to dissolve an adoption they have to voluntarily terminate their parental rights in court.
We often think of disruptions or dissolutions as being something that happens fairly soon after the adoption, perhaps within months or a few years. It’s rare that we hear about an adoption dissolving 7 years later. But in my line of work, that’s not unusual. I have on my case load two siblings who were in foster care, adopted, and re-entered care six years after the finalization. We hear about the disruptions that happen in China or Guatemala because with other prospective families traveling in groups together, it’s going to be known. I want to know how many kids were adopted internationally and then years later when kids turn into teenagers (and normally get ornery and rebel), how many of those families dissolve with no one watching?
One of my frustrations has always been finding reliable statistical data on disruptions and dissolutions. In my earlier post “And even more about adoption disruptions and dissolutions” I asked for anyone who had reliable numbers to contact me. It turns out that the Department of Health and Human Services actually did keep track of the number of international adoption “disruptions” in 2006. According to this Newsweek article, “When Adoption Goes Wrong” there were 81 international adoption disruptions or dissolutions from 14 different states last year. Of course, we still don’t know how many international adoptions have dissolved over the 50+ years of international adoption to the United States. Anecdotally, I know of several adult Korean adoptees who spent time in foster care.
The return of Jade seems especially egregious because from the news reports out there, the reasons seem highly superficial; that Jade’s parents Raymond and Meta Poeteray had two biological children after thinking they were infertile, or blaming Jade’s issue with being a picky eater. My guess is that neither of these issues were the real reason Jade was abandoned.
Jade’s parents probably believed that adopting a child would make their lives complete and never thought much about the reality of having an adopted child. There is speculation that their status as a high ranking diplomat, wealthy and educated and with many connections, helped them adopt Jade. Whether or not it’s true, perhaps they just felt incredibly entitled to have what they wanted and at the time they wanted Jade. But whatever reasons they had for adopting, it seems they never really truly claimed her as their child. They didn’t obtain citizenship for her so now Jade is a girl without a county. They didn’t attach to a child they had at 4 months old. I wonder how much pre-adoptive training this couple had. Or were they too “privileged” to have to go through training?
The Poeteray’s blame Jade for the dissolution, but my guess is they were unprepared to deal with their own emotional baggage in terms of adopting transracially and internationally. Unfortunately there are a lot of adoptive parents out there who have the same misconceptions, and a lot of adoption agencies who will allow them to sit in merry little la-la land.
But it’s not just about assigning blame. Agencies get a terrible rap for misleading clients and withholding information and for not properly training them about all the needs these kids have. And yet – we also get a ton of negative feedback for being too “harsh” and “negative” and focused on the awful behaviors. Not to defend agencies, but is it really the agency’s fault that pre-adoptive parents don’t want to hear anything negative? In September, I spoke on a panel with two other adult transracial adoptees and we received negative feedback. The difficult part of all this is balancing our responsibilities to be honest and tell the truth while not scaring away prospective families for the children we have who need adoptive homes.
Sometimes I think we’ve gone about this whole thing all wrong. The kids who are in need of adoptive homes – are NOT ordinary people. They have, in their young lives, gone through enough loss and sorrow to render them extraordinary. My profession likes to call these kids “special needs.”
So why do social workers look so hard for “ordinary” parents. Maybe we need to look for “extraordinary” parents. Maybe average parents aren’t good enough and we should be looking for parents with “special abilities” to parent “special needs.” And by average parents, I mean that being white, middle class, and having a house with a picket fence and a two car garage just isn’t enough to entitle someone to adopt a child.
And I certainly don’t mean that having lots of money or connections is good enough either.
Some of the best adoptive parents I’ve met have very, very modest means. They don’t have the cleanest houses, the wooden play set in the back yard, or a nice minivan with sliding side doors. Their living quarters are cramped, cluttered and chaotic. And they’re perfect for parenting kids whose lives have been messy emotionally and mentally. They don’t expect their adopted children to be some perfect living doll up on a shelf. They know their kids will be messy for years to come. And instead of being upset that these kids don’t live up to their expectations, they’ll be right there in the mess with them.
There is just no way to predict how prospective adoptive parents are going to be as real-time parents after the finalization occurs. Just as there’s no way to really predict how the children are going to be. We’ve all heard the horror stories of the children who seem like quiet little angels and once home turn into abusive, antisocial, reactive-attachment-disordered hellions. This is why prospective adoptive families must do their homework. It’s just not going to be excusable to be naive any more. Too many people are getting hurt.
So what does an adoptive parent do if they feel they were wronged by adoption and their child turned out not to be the lovely little doll promised by the agency? Good thing there’s this guy. He’ll help you get your justice – even after 40 years, it’s not too late to take action against a wrongful adoption.
Of course, what recourse does the child have, if she was unlucky enough to have parents who misled her into believing that they would be her “forever family?” Ah, she’ll just get relegated as a “bitter” adoptee.
Jae Ran Kim, MSW is a social worker, teacher and writer. She was born in Taegu, South Korea and was adopted to Minnesota in 1971. She has written numerous articles and essays and is most recently published in the anthology “Outsiders Within: Writings on Transracial Adoption” from South End Press. Jae Ran’s blog, Harlow’s Monkey, is at http://harlowmonkey.typepad.com/
I’ve been following the ambassador-adoption story off and on, and my initial reaction is abhorrance – how can you not bond with a child you’ve cared for for 7 years?
[easy answer - they didn't].
The only “excuse,” and even then there are better options, that I can fathom is if there is something else going on with the child that is not being publicly revealed, either for her protection/privacy or for the family’s – such as a mental/behavioral disorder that makes her impossible to care for in a family setting …
But some accounts negate that possibility, making me just shake my head at anyone with OPTIONS and PRIVILEGE giving up a child they’ve taken care of for so long, biological or not.
“The kids who are in need of adoptive homes – are NOT ordinary people. They have, in their young lives, gone through enough loss and sorrow to render them extraordinary. My profession likes to call these kids ‘special needs.’
So why do social workers look so hard for ‘ordinary’ parents. ”
I have to believe that in your simple inquiry lies a path to the answer. The curative LOVE that Amerians mythologize as being inherent and innate to the family unit does not seem to triumph in instances such as these, where adoptions are dissolved.
There is so much work involved in raising a family- and the bonding and modeling issues that one does not think to be deliberate, quite often must become a real work.
How to determine if a couple has the muscles, the emotional and psychological preparedness for such a task is…perhaps not ever able to be done.
Where one might score high on some quantitative assessment of possessing the right amount of married time under their belts, living space, funds, carseats, cousins and good schools in a district, one could so easily fail a qualitative assessment of emotional readiness to parent.
How much of the screening process is responder-to-survey (self-assessment) type of data? I would think limiting the weight so that it represents a small, albeit necessary, part of any determination of who is fit might be necessary.
Serious question: are siblings of prospective adoptive parents ever involved with the agencies – questioned for their observations on the adult sibling who wishes to adopt?
You ask some really important questions, Kim. Home study processes vary from agency to agency. There is no governmental regulation for this. States determine somewhat through their policies and laws and it’s up to the individual agency to interpret and implement. Thus, even a home study worker’s interview(s) of the family and the different “check-lists” they might have would be different from agency to agency.
As for your last question, the answer would be “no” in the sense of a *requirement* although at my agency there were two siblings of a prospective adoptive parent who attended the training solely to learn about the issues of foster care adoption. They do not intend to adopt themselves but wanted to support each other. We are a public agency however. I have no idea how often – if at all – this occurs for prospective parents doing international or domestic infant adoptions.
“Serious question: are siblings of prospective adoptive parents ever involved with the agencies – questioned for their observations on the adult sibling who wishes to adopt?”
Oh dear, i hope not! Or at least, i would hope it wouldn’t be mandatory. I understand that having other perspectives on an adoptive parent can be helpful in many ways–i did welcome my social worker to interview my friends and acquaintances–but sometimes the siblings are the ones with the real issues, and interviewing them can just upset the applecart unnecessarily, if you know what i mean. I am a single adoptive mom of a child of another race–my only sibling has bipolar disorder with psychosis and i had to ban her from seeing my son because she is unsafe to be around, lies, and has an extremely distorted perspective on things. Though she could pass for “normal” for a couple hours if she had to. It frightens me what would have happened if she were interviewed for MY adoption. She “seemed” normal enough, and then tried to physically attack me and threatened to have my son taken away from me several weeks before he was forever in my arms… while she was helping me finish getting my house ready for him.
All of that being said, i do agree that way more needs to be done in screening parents who plan on adopting, and especially transracial/transcultural adoptions. My observations of other adoptive parents in Guatemala were that
(1.) most didn’t seem to know a hill of beans worth about attachment–basically treating the baby just placed in their arms the same way they would have if he/she’d been with them from birth, even though he/she wasn’t–and
(2.) i was almost the only parent i saw on either of my trips who spoke any Spanish. I know that doesn’t necessarily mean that the other prospective adoptive parents weren’t interested in their child’s birth culture, but honestly, i think that in way too many cases, they weren’t. They just wanted an infant.
It worries me that so many parents are either not being pushed enough by their homestudy agencies, or are getting away with “saying the right things” so that they can have a baby.
Not long after i returned to work after maternity leave, i mentioned to another (white) coworker who also recently became a parent (through birth) that i have my son (then 15 months) in an extremely diverse, bilingual preschool, and despite all of the problems I personally have with the administration of the place, it is the perfect place for my son and its so important to me to preserve this part of his culture for him. My coworker’s immediate reaction was to tell me that my son could take a spanish class later but that what he needed right now was to assimilate (to u.s. culture). I was shocked–this man and his wife almost adopted a baby from Guatemala! I just thank God they got pregnant before they took their “last resort: adoption from Guatemala” and contributed to seriously screwing up a transracially adopted child. Of course, they later mentioned to me that part of the reason they plan to homeschool is to protect their son from hip hop culture… i can’t even address that.
It worries me that so many parents are either not being pushed enough by their homestudy agencies, or are getting away with “saying the right things” so that they can have a baby.
While I know my questions were more emotionally based than holding to any objective criteria that has been determined to be crucial in the approval process, I think the above statement best sums up the core of my concerns.
Jae Ran – I have to imagine it is always a shock to find that your solicited views on the subject of adoption are met with negativity.
After such encounters in my own life, I always wonder if a little of what I said made an impact at all, got through. I have to believe that in the quiet moments in peoples’ lives, when the static of the discomfort is lowered, the unpopular opinion does take its place in the mind of anyone who really listened. It may not be embedded there, but strains of the other perspective linger.
How could it not be so?
It’s unfortunately common for parents to relinquish their rights in order to force the state to pay for mental health care for children who end up with serious disorders that they cannot afford themselves. I mean, parents want the best for your child, and if that means they have to give their children up, then that’s what they have to do.
Researching this has led me to information on H.R. 687: Keeping Families Together Act of 2007 (apparently this one has been in and out of congress for several years). It sounds like a good idea. Does anyone know anything about it?
Wow, I never heard this story before. I never thought it possible to return an adopted child like you would a defective appliance before the warrenty expired.
It’s amazing that an adult, who adopts a child, would not think or remember that everyone is different and that means children too. I’m honored that my adoptive son stills calls me daddy and that he loves me as I do him. Through all the trouble we’ve had together I never thought of giving up on him.