Fostering Families and Adoption Today

Since 2013, media attention and legislative responses have focused on “re-homing” through advertising adopted children brought to the U.S. from overseas. Americans have vilified these adoptive families, comparing their decisions to return children to the system to the act of returning a defective product to a store. Re-victimizing an already vulnerable and innocent child is certainly difficult to justify. However, the actions of the adoptive families and the reactions of many Americans raise very different questions for me. I practice as an attorney for children in one of the busiest family courts in the country. Unlike the adoptive parents who were publicly vilified, very little to no attention has been paid to the many children who are a product of the foster care system and who return to family court through its revolving doors after achieving so-called “permanency” through adoption.

For any young person who has experienced a broken adoption, this powerful and traumatizing experience shatters a child’s dream of a forever family. This experience—of yet another adult giving up on them in a world where they already have experienced so much grief, pain, loss, and trauma, makes the child resentful not only towards their adoptive parent but also the world at large.

I know because I was that child. I was taken away from my biological parents. My adoptive mother promised my biological mother on her deathbed that she would always take care of me. But she didn’t. At 13, my adoptive mother gave up on me. To be taken away from my adoptive mother felt like a repeat of losing my biological parents again. I internalized this experience and blamed myself for everything.

These powerful words were spoken by 21-year-old Demetrius at the “Beyond Permanency: Challenges for Former Foster Youth” Symposium held in New York City and attended by over 250 people in person and over 800 via live webcast in 46 states, the District of Columbia, Canada, and Australia. The symposium drew on a range of expertise including, most importantly, youth who experienced a broken adoption, in order to explore the laws, regulations, and policies affecting broken adoptions and to identify ways in which the foster care system can work towards true permanency for youth.

Every child should have a safe and permanent family. However, the numbers of broken adoptions revealed at the symposium tell a different story. The Children’s Law Center (CLC) has seen over 150 adopted children during the last few years enter into the care of a custodian other than their adoptive parent. Since September 2014, the Advocacy/Legal Services Department at Covenant House New York, a homeless shelter for youth, has seen at least 99 youth who reported they were adopted. CLC has represented children in child support cases as the adoptive parents continued to receive the adoption subsidy even though they were no longer providing any care for the child.

In 2014, Lawyers For Children (LFC) actively represented approximately 150 children who experienced broken adoptions, including 132 cases in which the adopted child had been voluntarily placed back into foster care. LFC represented children in around 725 voluntary placements, with broken adoptions constituting 15 to 20 percent of their cases. In 73.3 percent of the cases LFC examined, the adoptive parent either wasn’t actively planning for the child’s return, or was ambivalent about planning for the child’s return. Fifty percent of the children had no contact with their adoptive parent. Despite the adoptive parent alleging that many of these children could not be maintained in the community, over 43 percent were placed in regular foster boarding homes after returning to foster care.

These numbers are just a part of the picture, and all stakeholders need to collect data in order to determine not only how many children are no longer living with their adoptive parents, but why. The first question that must be asked is this: Are the adoptive parents unconditionally committed to the child and, if not, why not? As Demetrius asked, “I didn’t give up on you. Why did you give up on me?”

Undoubtedly, some families are confronted with teenagers who present with significant mental health and emotional issues. However, CLC learned through its work that in some cases, what may have been normal adolescent behavior was seen as problematic, and adoptive parents appeared unequipped with sufficient knowledge of adolescent development or lacked the patience to properly address the behavior. Or, while many of the adoptive parents were aware that their children had a pre-existing physical, mental, or emotional disability prior to the adoption, they appeared unable or unwilling to handle the resulting behaviors as the child got older, resulting in, or contributing to, the broken adoption. Ultimately, their commitment to the child was conditional. Jaquan, another panelist who suffered a broken adoption, described the emotional repercussions:

It is sad that I suffer with trust and knowing how to love, all because it was never given to me. Can you imagine being constantly reminded you don’t belong? I feel love has a limit. If you never got it young, you will be confused when you get older. You will be questioning everyone’s motives and feel they want to bring you nothing but pain.

So, how do we avoid broken adoptions? Decisions to move forward with an adoption should always be with an eye toward ensuring that the adoptive parent and child are bonded and attached to each other. As an initial matter, adoptive parents must be prepared with knowledge about the child that they are adopting, including the child’s trauma history. Not only that, adoptive parents should be educated about trauma and its effect on children and development. As a result, when children present with symptoms of confusion, withdrawal, sadness, anxiety, fear, depression, anger, hostility, and self-blame, the adoptive parent can be better equipped to understand and work with them through their unresolved feelings of grief, anger, and loss, and questions about who they are and their place in the world.

It must also be acknowledged that adoption is a life-long process and parents need quality ongoing supports and services well after the adoption occurs. To effectively serve these children and their families long after the adoption finalization, service providers must be identified who understand the developmental impact of neglect, abuse, and interrupted attachment on children and the emotional and mental health needs of children who have been adopted. More needs to be done to advocate for and fund such services in every state.

Pre-adoptive and adoptive parents should be provided with ongoing support and training on how to address not only normal adolescent behavior and development, but also children’s physical, mental, or emotional disabilities, especially in relation to adolescent behavior and development. Where there is biological family involvement, families and children should be provided support and services to understand and navigate new or ongoing relationships.

A best-practices approach should be created to address adoptions that are in the process of destabilizing, with case and social workers’ provision of supportive services. These case and social workers should receive training on attachment and emotional issues related to adoption, and should help adoptive parents understand the dynamics of adoption from the child’s point of view, as well as the child’s feelings and behaviors. This will help the adoptive parents understand the impact of genetics and negative life experiences on the child and parent to the child’s needs.

Finally, children need unconditional love and acceptance.

*** This article was published in the online journal Beyond Permanency One Year Later: Looking Back, Looking Forward. For more information concerning these issues read the online which contains new research and perspectives as well as links to videos and materials from the 2015 Broken Adoptions Symposium. https://www.nyls.edu/diane-abbey-law-institute-for-children-and-families/wp-content/uploads/sites/136/2015/10/Beyond-Permanency-Journal-2016-Final.pdf