Proposal Invites Quantum Leap In Foster Parenting Fiascoes

I’m an adoptive father and I believe in adoption. Our 24-year-old daughter is doing great. However, my wife and I knew what we were doing and we adopted a child who, although she blew through two foster homes and was in residential treatment for two years, appeared to be reachable. She was.

There are 500,000 children in foster care. President Clinton has a goal of doubling the number of adoptions of these children by 2002. Departments of social services are paid by the head to adopt these kids, who the public is told are “languishing” in foster care “without loving families willing to adopt.”

While adoption is meant to bring joy into the lives of hapless children, the truth is that it often brings heartache and destruction to many families. And it will bring destruction to more families as they are encouraged to adopt with little preplacement training, knowledge or understanding.

The heartache and destruction will occur because the half million children are not languishing. They are in trained foster homes for a very good reason. They are emotionally disturbed children who may have been born to alcohol- or cocaine-abusing parents. Many have suffered early abuse and neglect. Some are the offspring of parents with fragile genetics, retardation or sociopathic traits. And the fact that genetics has a profound effect on the behavior of children is a politically incorrect subject that is not even whispered to prospective parents.

In a country with minimal treatment facilities, these hundreds of thousands of severely disturbed children have no place to go but trained foster care. This, while far less expensive than the treatment centers the children need, is still much more expensive than simply adopting the children out to unsuspecting families that falsely believe their love will be able to reach severely disturbed children.

Parents are absolutely unprepared for children who:

Do not respond at all to love.

Constantly disobey and ignore loving requests and demands.

Lie, steal and cheat.

Engage in cruelty to or killing of animals.

Threaten other children.

Sexually abuse younger siblings.

May smear feces and urinate in all parts of the home.

Certainly, one reading this might think parents would never adopt such a child. Of course they would! They desperately want a child. They are told and believe that this child needs and will respond to love.

They are told, “John needs help with basic daily needs” and they think that means they have to remind him to go to bed, not that he would smear feces! They are told “John has trouble sleeping” not that he jumps any smaller child in the middle of the night. They are told “John may settle right down after he knows he is really your forever child and adoption is finalized.”

It’s very difficult to disrupt an adoption. And if parents do manage to disrupt, they are labeled “dump and run” parents. This is not true, of course, of the wife who divorces a husband who threatens to stab her at night. It is true of parents who are threatened by a child in the middle of the night.

Americans have no conception of the hell that certain children give parents. And for the parents, there is no way out of the hell. Therapy to help, when there is any, is inordinately expensive. The social service agencies have no funding to help, even if they have the inclination.

Friends and neighbors don’t understand that the family is horribly isolated - as is the wife of an abusive spouse.

Worst of all, all the responses that could be helpful are considered abusive. They cannot ask the child to spend the night in a heated or lighted garage. They cannot afford the trained baby-sitter the child needs. They have no respite. They can use no physical techniques. They cannot used locked quiet rooms. They cannot use a blanket wrap.

In essence, the average family that adopts is unprepared, is lied to about the needs of the child, has no effective tools and techniques to reach the child, has little or no help with the child, and puts siblings and family members at risk. Parents end up hopeless, frustrated, rage-filled, depressed and broken.

Americans must understand the pain that exists in so many thousands of families and put some of the responsibility on the leaders of a nation that pays unwed, drug-addicted, emotionally and cognitively disturbed women, by the baby, to have more children, then provides no treatment facilities for their offspring, and pays by the head to place these impaired children into unsuspecting families.