Perspectives on Challenged Family Building

I don’t typically write blogs about current adoption news stores. However, the story that has come from Oklahoma is certainly troublesome. I can’t stop thinking about the Good Morning America segment that launched the story of the Wescott’s and their 11-year-old adopted son to the national spotlight.

I think what bothers me most is that coverage seems to zero in on the parents and their desperate decision. The question looming seems to be the rights and responsibilities of birth parents vs. rights and responsibilities of adoptive parents, or that a “parent is a parent.” When we focus on the parents, we lose track of the main issue. The main issue is the child and the child’s mental health issues.

I can’t help but wonder when we are going to “get it” as a community. Certainly, many professionals in adoption and mental health are learning about complex trauma. Yet, many remain dated in their knowledge. At this time, there is overwhelming evidence that abuse, neglect, residence in an orphanage, pre-natal drug/alcohol exposure and abandonment can and does have life-long effects for many children adopted from foster care and via intercountry adoption.

I can’t believe that the state of Oklahoma is able to “heal” every foster child in its custody. Residential treatment facilities exist for a reason. The reason is that there are some children who have needs beyond a family’s ability to manage. In these situations, the child can reside in a facility that provides 24-hour care. The fact that residential treatment facilities exist means that we acknowledge, to a degree, that there are children with extraordinary needs. Children with these needs don’t just live in foster care. Many of these children have been placed into adoptive homes. Yet, when these families come back for help, or as in the case of the Wescotts, feel they can no longer manage on their own, society immediately begins to condemn the family. Instead, we need to look at the child’s mental health issues.

I am quite suspicious of the statement that a year of treatment is reported to have alleviated the child’s problems. I would be curious to have the facility make clear the rate of relapse after children leave their facility. It is not uncommon that children do well in an institutional environment,yet, once discharged and placed back into a healthy family, the child deteriorates. The old patterns of behavior return.

Why? The intimacy level of the family is a trigger. That is, many traumatized children fear intimate relationships. Children adopted from foster care and from institutions frequently enter the family with a pre-conceived notion that the adoptive family will abandon them as did their birth family When the intimacy becomes too much, the behaviors escalate. Negative behavior is the traumatized child’s irrational way of preventing further hurt. That is, the child thinks, “If I push you away first, it won’t hurt so much when I leave.”. Many of us can relate to this, “Is it easier to be ‘dumped’ by a boyfriend or girlfriend, or to be the one to end the relationship.”

As for pre-adoptive families being warned about the possible needs a child may present beforehand, let’s think about this. Certainly, there are some agencies that go to great lengths to provide a thorough pre-adoptive training program. Perhaps Oklahoma is in this category; I don’t know. However, I do know that any pre-adoptive training is virtually a drop in the bucket of necessary knowledge. We go to college for two, four or more years to prepare for a career. We go to pre-adoptive education classes for 20, 24, or 36 hours to prepare for parenting a child who has experienced many insults to his development and beliefs about the world. In essence, we receive less training to carry out the most important job undertaken by adults—parenting! Additionally, the prospective family is frequently receiving complicated information having had no prior experience at all with children who have been traumatized. Much learning will occur “on the job” after the child has arrived in the family. That on the job learning needs professional support and additional opportunities to acquire tools proven to work with these kids.

This post is meant neither to excuse nor to defend the Wescotts or any other family making similar decisions. In this day and age of the “information highway,” families have a wealth of information at their fingertips! All they have to do is access it. Yet, often, the belief that “love will be enough” prevails and families are blinded by their optimism.

Again, we must return to what is best for the child in question.

• Should he live with a family that is clearly stating they cannot manage him? How is this helpful? Ms. Poteet certainly needs to excuse herself from further comment or any involvement in this case. She clearly lacks the objectivity needed to discern the best placement for this child.

• We also need to ask ourselves, “Would we be prepared to live with a child who hides knives under his mattress?” Before we comment on Mr. and Mrs. Wescott at all, think about what we are asking them to live with. How does anyone prepare for this type of behavior? How much help will we be giving them? Would you like to have this child over for a sleepover?
• If the Wescotts were birth parents in a reunification process, it is highly likely that they would receive more help from the system than they are receiving as adoptive parents. Isn’t this ironic? You can abuse and neglect your birth child and receive more services than those parents who have taken on the enormous job of trying to repair the aftermath of the beatings, rapes, and so on in a birth home.
• What about the running away behavior? How long does the child leave the home? Where is he found? What harm can come to him during these periods away from home? Is his behavior safe for himself?

Without doubt we know that moving children from family to family creates another layer of trauma for that child. Certainly, adoptive families and professionals do not set out to do greater harm to a child. Yet, there are instances, such as this one, in which we must ask ourselves, what will actually be the greater harm—placing a child in a home ill-equipped and having lost forever the optimism with which they began, or locating a new home that feels more well-equipped, and supporting that new home and family?

Related Blogs:

A Summary of a Study of Eastern European Adoption Dissolutions

The Development of Realistic Expectations Pre-Adoption: Myth or Reality?

This is not the Brother or Sister I Expected: The Need to Prepare the Typical Children