Category Archives: ADOPTION & PARENTING

Parenting Is A Bit Like A Taffy Pull

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Have you ever been to an old-fashioned taffy pull?  Probably not, since people don’t do that much nowadays but my family was once invited to one years ago.  It was a lot of fun, but lately when I think about taffy being pulled every which way, I think about parenting my adult kids.

As you wrap up this first day of the work week, I hope you are reviewing your past weekend and that you have some nice memories of good times and/or  pure relaxation.  I hope you are saying to yourself,  ”What an amazing weekend I had!”    Mine  didn’t quite  turn out as I had hoped and planned.  It seems that life usually has its own ideas and we must roll with the punches.

I had expected to catch up on writing , reading, grocery shopping and a few phone calls.  My husband, a cardiology R.N., had to work all weekend, so it felt like a great time to play catch-up on things that have eluded me, including some craved-for quiet time for myself.

A man named Orlando Aloysius Battista, once said, “The best inheritance a parent can give his children is a few minutes of his time each day.”  I always thought so when my kids were growing up.  There were certainly days when I would have preferred to immerse myself in projects and creative pursuits that were beckoning to me. but I truly believed at that stage of my life, that my kids’ needs came first.  I felt that the time I spent with my children was an investment in their futures and that we were making memories for that future.    I still enjoy seeing my kids, but my perspective is different now.  I consider my personal time to be precious and spending it on myself feels like an investment in me. . I have already invested heavily in my four kids and even though I love them , I believe it is high time that I “diversify”

Inevitably though, when I look forward to a stretch of time to luxuriate in quiet and bask in the joy of choosing to do whatever I wish, one of my kids ends up needing something.  It’s not as though I jump at every whimper, but it does feel like crises have a way of occurring in bunches and as my mother once told me, “You never stop being a mother”, so it is difficult to ignore a cry for help when it feels sincere.  We do raise our kids with the hope that they will become self-sufficient adults and some of mine are, or some of mine are some of the time anyway.

As long as everything is going smoothly, or they perceive that it is, they seem to manage.  Mom is then an invisible commodity to them. The story changes when something explodes (figuratively) at the job, when unexpected bills come pouring in, or when a little one is ill and there is no babysitter.  My adult kids are pretty spread out in age.  They are all very different and their needs, lifestyles and priorities are pretty disparate.  When things are going smoothly, they don’t seem to need my support. That is understandable.  In fact, they usually don’t want my opinion or involvement at all.  Most of the time that doesn’t phase me as I am a  busy person and I prefer not to offer advice that I am pretty certain is going to be ignored anyway.  That is not to say I don’t often have some strong opinions, but they do tend to act as though I am a relic from the Ice Age.   I normally  try to keep my opinions to myself, though this does take self-control and I am not always successful in doing so.

The weekend is over now and the crises have passed, for the moment.  I never did catch up on the tasks I wanted to. I never got to take that long soak in the bathtub with a glass of wine nearby and a book that has been beckoning to me from the shelf in the living room. I didn’t really get more than a few minutes to myself, to be honest.  I am making plans for the next stretch of time that will be available for me to indulge in some solitude and self-focus, because I know how important it is and that I must never give up on this.

I remember that taffy pull so many years ago.  I can still hear the  giggles of the children and our warnings not to touch everything with their sticky hands.  There were six or seven kids there and at first they were pretty wild and loud.  We parents thought that perhaps the activity in which we were engaged was a mistake and that the children were too young.  I remember how the taffy was a big messy blob  when we began to work on it and how it gradually took shape . Finally we all settled down happily to cocoa, cookies and our finished product–the taffy, which was enjoyed by all.

I do have times when I feel that I am being tugged and pulled every which way and that my life resembles more of a sticky, crazy mess than I had anticipated it would at this stage of the game.  I am working on it though.and several times a week, I ask myself, “How would you like your life to look and to feel? What steps, Iris, are you taking, to bring your vision into greater alignment with your reality, without sacrificing your deeply held values of being there for those who are important to you?” (Yes, I talk to myself sometimes!)

It’s all about balance and self-care. These have become buzz words but there is a reason and we need to pay attention to them. I hope you will make it a point to think about that when you feel yourself being pulled in too many directions.

Vulnerability of Prospective and New Adoptive Parents

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Vulnerability of Prospective and New Adoptive Parents.

  ..My Surprising Refresher Course During My Search For A New Scottie Dog

 

     I don’t know about you, but I believe that everything we go through teaches us some type of lesson.  I was recently reminded of this in a big way. If you are an adoptive parent or prospective parent, before you read on, please don’t get offended at the early focus in this article on our search for a new Scottish Terrier. I love Scotties but am a lifelong child adoption advocate too, and I am going somewhere with this. Are you willing to indulge me a bit and to read on?  I hope so!

     Some of you know that our dear Scottish Terrier, Danny, died in January of this year.  Our initial reaction was, of course, that no other dog would ever find a way into our hearts again and that we were done with pets.  We missed him so much, though, that it didn’t take long before I registered on Pet Finders, hoping that some other furry creature would capture my emotions.  My husband wasn’t quite at the same place, which was fine, but when he began to spend a good part of his days off from work looking at Scottie videos on You Tube, I knew the time had come to begin our search in earnest. We thought about a Rescue pet, but worried about how one with a difficult history would adapt to our toddler granddaughter who visits frequently.  It seemed natural that I, an adoption professional for many decades and a seasoned adoptive mother, would be drawn to dogs who really needed a loving home, so we planned on attending a large Pet Expo held in Hartford and cleared our calendar for that day, eagerly looking forward to it and hoping we might find just the right dog for our family.  Fate intervened and my husband was ill with a stomach bug that day.  We never made it there.

     I found myself perusing every Scottish Terrier website I could find and we both admitted that we were pretty much hooked on Scotties. As much as we like and appreciate other breeds, after having owned two Scotties, no other would do for us, we felt.  My husband was quickly on board, so I pulled my 14 plus year old file (You didn’t know I was THAT organized, did you?  Neither did I!). I found detailed information about the trail I had followed before we got our Danny Boy.  I began calling and e-mailing Rescue Coordinators and was told that there were not often older Scotties available.  I was told that the ones that come up from time to time usually have difficult histories and might not be suitable for a home with a very young child or grandchild.  In fact, some felt strongly that Scotties never did well with young kids. Since that had not been our experience, having raised kids and Scotties together, I did not concur and some breeders to whom I spoke also disagreed and said that it depended on how a dog was socialized and taught as a puppy. That made sense.  I had never had a puppy, though, and I wasn’t so sure I wanted to undertake all the work and many weeks or months of sleepless nights that a young pup would require.

        I began to scour the earth (It felt like I was reaching that far) for just the right slightly older dog. A few long time friends remarked that they remembered me with this fervor when I was looking for another child to adopt.  I left no stone unturned.   We got a call about an available dog, but unfortunately the call came the same day I returned from a dentist appointment, having learned that I had another large financial undertaking in store.  We declined this offer after thinking it through logically and tried to try to settle into being Scottieless for a while.  Well that didn’t last long, as we kept on looking at Scottie videos, websites, and of course, being true devotees of the breed, our home is filled with Scottie accessories and trinkets. Scotties are in our line of vision pretty much all the time.  When I wasn’t working, I would find myself back at the Scottie Search.   Friends kept sending me photos of other dogs needing homes but it just didn’t feel right.

     Once again, we revisited the question of a puppy versus a slightly older dog and decided that we could handle a puppy after all and that in spite of other imminent expenses, our quality of life wasn’t the same without a spunky little independent “diehard” of a dog.  The search was resumed and I spoke to what seemed like a multitude of people. Some of the breeders whose names I had on my old list were retired but gave me leads and names of people they recommended. Others were not planning to breed for quite a while, and still others knew of puppies that were expected.  One name came up several times and I was referred to a woman who had gotten a puppy from this breeder, in another part of the country. She got rave reviews.  I was apprehensive about having such a young puppy travel by air or by ground, but spoke with people who had done this and said all had turned out well. I spoke at length with this distant breeder who quizzed me about our home, our family constellation, our work, our work schedules, our general finances, our lifestyle, and who sternly informed me of a multitude of policies which we were expected to honor.  Several others sent extensive applications and wanted photos of us, our home, yard and family.  I quickly began to feel like we were undergoing an adoption homestudy and compiling a dossier to be scrutinized by government officials. I am normally an open book, but some of the buried, very old feelings I remembered from my days as a prospective adoptive parent began to surface.  I identified myself beginning to feel “exposed”, “ defenseless”, “not up to par” and resentful because I knew we were a great family and few could love Scotties the way we did.  We decided we would ask for a puppy from one out of state breeder, because we weren’t at that point finding any nearby.  We had a few pleasant phone conversations and exchanged some friendly e-mails. We were told that since we wanted a male and most of her waiting list wanted females (Those of you involved in child adoption work will recognize this similarity) we would almost definitely get a puppy before long because she had a couple of pregnant females. 

     Just like most prospective adoptive parents, we were starry-eyed and excited and started to peruse pet product catalogues and to browse in pet stores.  I imagined the best places in our house to keep our new puppy, and thought about redoing the computer/work corner in our living room and putting a dog pen,  crate and toys in that space, moving the work area elsewhere. I set to work creating a storybook about a new puppy for my youngest granddaughter.  I began to notice puppies everywhere and went out and purchased several interesting books on raising and training puppies. (Does this sound familiar, all of you adoptive parents out there who are waiting for a child?)  As the weeks passed, I made a list of questions to ask the breeder as things occurred to me. She seemed so knowledgeable and approachable, so imagine my shock and surprise when I subsequently received a communication that was quite cold.  She indicated she had suddenly reviewed her waiting list and had many, many more on the list than she had realized. She said we would not be getting a puppy for a long time.  She suggested rather strongly that we look elsewhere and then resisted my attempts to open up communications and ask what the problem was.  My heart sank and I ran into the other room to inform my husband, whose face quickly revealed his own shock and hurt. We checked online and saw that she was still advertising that she had puppies available.  Apparently we had asked “too many questions” though we had been told that it was perfectly fine to do so.  We had also expressed an interest in maybe taking a dog for obedience training and, IF the dog had the right temperament, we were interested in looking at further training as a therapy dog, for senior citizens or ill people.  I did not say that was a requirement or that we had to have a dog capable of this, but only that it was something a good friend had gotten me interested in. 

     This sudden and unexpected turnabout took me back about 40 years, reminding me of a rapid attitudinal change in our first adoption social worker, who was initially delighted with our family and was our staunch ally during the homestudy process, until we told her I was interested in re-lactating and breastfeeding our adopted daughter-to-be.

     While we had been told earlier by our worker that our wait would most likely be short, delay after delay suddenly cropped up.  Years later, when we had proven ourselves as adoptive parents more than once, the social worker revealed to us that my desire to breastfeed our adopted baby had “alarmed her”. She reported that she had chosen to deliberately slow the process a bit so that the child who had been potentially  matched with us would probably be too old to accept the breast after having been bottle fed.   I was shocked at this admission so many years later, but was happy to tell her that the re-lactation was successful and that our daughter had nursed well for a while in spite of the workers bias and delays.

     I know that reputable dog breeders care about the well-being of their dogs and also about betterment of the breed, so I accept that there should be some questions and a certain amount of screening.  What was hard to accept was the closed-mindedness and rigidity I seemed to encounter, with a few happy exceptions.  Some breeders were very friendly and helpful, but others made value judgments and seemed to believe that there was only one type of “ideal family”.  Having worked as an adoption professional for so many decades, if I have learned anything, it is that it takes all kinds to make the world revolve and there are no perfect homes and no perfect families. In fact, I had a sign to that effect on one of the walls in my office at the adoption agency, to make sure I never forgot that fact.  To this day, I also still encounter adoption social workers who speak these words, yet make plenty of pre-judgments about what constitutes a good family.   In my Scottie search I heard too many times how Scotties must have a lot of exercise and absolutely need a fenced-in yard.  While this might indeed be the most perfect situation, I remember when we got our very first Scottie dog nearly 40 years ago, we had read in dog books that Scotties were then considered very suited to apartment living.  It was thought that they could get exercise taking long walks and were content to race around the house playing ball or with other toys.  We owned a home at the time, as we do still, but we never did have a fenced yard and our two previous Scotties were well loved, loving, happy and lived long lives.

     There is a happy ending to our family’s recent story. While at first there seemed to be no potential Scotties, we suddenly found ourselves with several to choose from. It began to rain Scottie possibilities.  A very lovely and reputable breeder had puppies to be ready in mid-July.  Another truly helpful person had a new litter to be ready around the same time.  I located a gracious and intelligent woman in a nearby state whose dogs were soon to be bred and she said she would stay in contact.  Finally, we learned of a very young female Scottie who seemed to have a good temperament and who had won some puppy trial prizes, but who wasn’t turning out to be as good of a show dog as her sister.  We felt torn because by this time we had sold ourselves on the benefits of a having a puppy, but we weighed all of our options carefully.  Since we were involved in a time-consuming and emotional relocation of my husband’s mother to a dementia care facility near our home, we decided that a new puppy with housebreaking needs and likely to disturb our sleep at night for at least a couple of months was probably too much of an undertaking for us at the time.  We went to meet our little Emily at the end of June and the rest is history. She is quickly becoming a delightful and integral part of our family. We expect that my mother-in-law will love her as much as my toddler granddaughter already does. These two are best buddies and follow each other around everywhere.  No, we still don’t have a fenced yard, but once we get my mother-in-law properly settled in, we are planning to build a fenced play area for Emily and for us too.

     During my 29 years of directing an adoption agency, I have witnessed the unification of countless prospective parents with babies and children needing permanent homes.  For the most part our agency was blessed with a wonderful group of families.  Still we were obligated by law and by ethics to assess the families carefully and there was and is an extensive vetting process for prospective adoptive parents in the State of Connecticut and in most other states in the U.S.  This is as it should be. Adoption professionals are, nonetheless, in a strange position of holding power over people’s lives. It is so important for them to be sensitive and understanding of how the majority of prospective parents and brand-new parents are feeling.    Most professionals want the very best for the children they will be placing, or whose adoptions they will be facilitating.  Many genuinely care about the families with whom they work and want to do their jobs well, with the most positive outcomes possible.  There are some who get caught up in the trap of abusing their power and control, but thankfully these people are in the minority.  I think what happens most often is that workers either don’t understand or just plain forget how vulnerable and frightened most prospective or new adoptive parents really are. 

     I am a seasoned adoptive parent of adults and have a long history of working with adoptive families and a reputation in this field for being sensitive, caring and open. In spite of this,  the recent search for a Scottie awakened a lot of the old feelings and memories for me.   Among clients in my coaching practice, are also some adoptive parents and waiting parents.  I do a lot of listening without making judgments, as coaches are supposed to and help clients plan for what they want  to do and to achieve their own goals, without imposing my own needs or values on them.  I have personally been through multiple adoption and foster homestudies in the past and know how it feels to have every aspect of your life and your inner thoughts bared for the world to see before you are approved and deemed worthy of adopting a child.  While there is more to the homestudy process than just the investigation layer, and a good adoption service provider focuses on education and preparing parents to do the best job they can once they have a child or children places with them, it is so important to be client-centered during this process.  Many agencies believe the client is only the child or children, but I have always believed that we could not help to build happy, well-functioning families without caring about the needs of all concerned.

     That is the story of how my Scottie search reawakened and sharpened my sensitivity and awareness to the needs and feelings of those going through the child adoption homestudy, or those who have just had children placed with them and who want their agency’s help but are frightened about saying or doing something that could jeopardize their standing with the agency.  While I don’t think I ever really lost that understanding, now I simply remember it more clearly.  I believe this is a useful lesson for me, and one that other adoption professionals should review in a “refresher course” from time to time in order to best serve their client population.

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Artyom From Russia-An Experienced Adoptive Parent & Professional Speaks Out (Long, but hopefully worthwhile)

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 (An Unknown Sad Child)    

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     The adoption world, the media, and outraged citizens from many countries are reacting with horror at the news of the single adoptive mother from Tennessee who put her 8 yr old Russian-born son on a flight all by himself with a note that she no longer wanted him.   As the story has unfolded it has become quite evident to me that there has to be much more to the tale than we are as yet being told.  Still there is all sorts of speculation.   I hope that the pieces of the puzzle soon become known.   As tragic and astonishing as this woman’s actions were, and as understandable as it is to me that Russia would be very wary of placing more children in the United States, there are simply too many wonderful, healthy, dedicated American adoptive families who do not deserve to be lumped into a negative category with this woman from Tennessee.  There are also far too many needy children who deserve permanent, loving homes.  It is, however, imperative that all parties in all countries involved in placing the kids conduct themselves with transparency and full disclosure about the children’s psychological problems and past histories.  This is the only way to ensure that the most qualified adoptive parents are found for the children.

   Today I read a comment from a well-meaning woman who wrote on one of the adoptive parent lists to which I subscribe, that she has adopted several children and two of them, also from Eastern Europe, have significant problems. While she was by no means condoning what the Tennessee adoptive mother did, she was saying that if we have not walked in the shoes of someone living with a very disturbed adopted child, we cannot possibly know the state of mind in which this mother found herself and should not judge her.  This is difficult for me to accept and grasp, though, because the act of putting this child on a plane back to his homeland demonstrated a total lack of concern or compassion for the child.  I would indeed consider this child abuse and at the very least, risk of injury to a minor.  In addition, it demonstrated that the adoptive mother had little or no grasp of the disastrous effects her actions would likely have on countless other children and waiting parents.  In spite of the fact that international adoption is a very costly, time-consuming and rigorous procedure with many pre-requirements to be fulfilled nowadays, this adoptive parent of the Russian boy failed to have her consciousness raised during the pre-adoption process.  I do not know whether this was because she did not receive sufficient education and preparation, or because she was in some way oblivious to the realities and chose to focus on her own unrealistic fantasies and needs.  It is also possible that the pre-adoptive screening failed to uncover some more serious pre-existing situation that surfaced under the pressure of parenting a child with probable serious emotional disturbance.  

     I am not in any way suggesting that people who find that they have to disrupt their adoptions are dreadful people, or that it is an unforgivable act.  Such an attitude would be more likely to come from someone who has not lived the life I have and who has no idea of how intense and often impossible it is to meet the needs of some severely disturbed children placed at an older age.   I have lived a life of constant involvement in, and dedication to the world of adoption for nearly 40 yrs.  I believe in my heart that adoption is forever.  Yet, though I have successfully parented and raised to adulthood, four children, three of whom were adopted, I am someone who was sadly faced with having to make  the horrible decision to disrupt an intended adoptive placement a very, very long time ago.   Not only am I an adoptive parent, but I also have had almost 29 years of experience on the front lines while running a full service domestic and international adoption agency.  I have worked in the past with WACAP, the placing agency from the State of Washington involved in the adoption of the Russian boy, and have known them to be a competent and reputable agency.  I do not know the local agency in Tennessee that evaluated the single mother of the Russian boy, or what kind of post placement support and help was available to this parent and to the rest of her family, or if the adoptive mother took advantage of it.

     I do know that some prospective families are incredibly naive in their thinking that love can erase the effects of years of abuse, neglect, birth family dysfunction and institutionalization.  Still it is the job of adoption professionals to thoroughly screen, educate, prepare and support the parents who undertake adopting children with such special needs. There is NO such thing as adopting an older child (beyond infancy) with no special needs. I don’t care how pristine and fairy tale-like the information provided on a child may appear.  I also don’t buy as a justification for someone doing such a selfish and inhumane thing, that the parent was not fully informed of the child’s needs and therefore, was not prepared, or was simply overwhelmed and “not thinking clearly” when she decided to return this boy, alone, to Russia.   Believe me I know that adoptive parents do not always get the full story and background on the children, particularly from other countries.  I know too, that some older children can take years  to make a true adjustment to a new home and family, while some never do adjust and carry with them very serious issues for the rest of their lives.

Our Family’s Story:

     Over 30 years ago for a full year, my late first husband, our two other kids (at that time) and I, lived with and did our absolute best to love, a severely disturbed 10 yr old we  were planning and hoping  to adopt.  After a short time in our home he began to act out in violent ways. He often went into a trance-like state and did not know what was going on around him.  We found him sleepwalking a number of times, with hands poised around the throat of our sleeping 7 yr old.  He broke whatever was in his path and blamed the other children.  He acted out sexually at times and was always flashing me and being suggestive when nobody else was nearby to see it.  He had a fascination for knives and matches, had horrible mood swings, drastically changing his demeanor and sometimes in a matter of minutes, went from smiling sweetly and playing quietly, into violent rages where he threw things and threatened anyone and anything in his line of vision.  He urinated and defecated in our other kids’ clothes hampers and toy boxes, told the school we did not feed him to get them to give him an extra lunch and on and on and on. We found out that the agency in another state had lied to us about the reasons he had not been able to remain in his other homes.  We were his ninth family, but we were manipulated into believing that the others were not as capable or as caring as we were and had other deficits.  When we later did some homework and contacted a couple of families he had been with  (against the wishes of the placing agency) we learned that we had been duped and that these families had actually been very loving and competent people with considerably greater experience with troubled kids that we had at the time. We learned that the placing agency had clearly withheld information on past violent behavior. We learned that he had harmed and threatened several kids and a teacher at his former school. Our lives were a nightmare while he was in our family and the restrictions and monitoring he required changed the entire atmosphere and flow in our home. Still we, who had been active advocates for parents and kids in our state, had written legislation, run groups assisting agencies with parent recruitment and counseled prospective adoptive parents, felt like failures and even like bad people.  We were absolutely heartbroken that we could not parent this 10 year old the way he needed. We just could not perceive of ourselves as people who could give a child back, but we really began to fear for all of our lives. When the third therapist we took him to said he would most likely never adjust to a family and needed to be residentialized for treatment as quickly as possible, we presented to the agency that we would  be willing to continue being his family, would visit him, support him through his treatment, but he could not live with us at the time, based on all of the professional recommendations.  They refused and said it was ALL or NOTHING.  WE worked on his life book with him, took him to the therapist to help him try to understand why he could not stay without scapegoating him, talked to him, comforted him, cried with him, and did our best to nurture him through the next weeks.  The worker avoided our phone calls, nobody else from the agency responded to us and the worker did not keep her promise to come to prepare him for the leave taking. It was a call to an attorney, or so we believed, that finally prompted an appointment to be set for the pick-up of the child.  We did all of the work of helping him say goodbye and transitioning him to the next move in his sad life.  We would never have dreamed of putting him on a bus or train or driving him to NY to the agency and dropping him off.  We would sooner have lopped off our fingers with a meat cleaver. We took turns standing guard at night, to ensure that he did not wake up and try to access knives or matches.  We sometimes watched him as he slept, both of us crying with pain for him and with fury at the system that created all that had had happened to him to damage him so severely.  We felt about as bad and initially as guilty as anyone could feel about the terrible thing we had to do to him and to our kids by disrupting the placement.  Still we knew that we could not go on and were finding ourselves drained of the ability to manage his behaviors and to help him, let alone to meet the ongoing needs of our other children.

      It took us quite some time to heal.  It took the support of our friends, family, our adoption community and a family therapist to deal with what had occurred. It nagged at us that we were the healthy parties in this awful saga and we were haunted by the probable additional damage to this boy we had once hoped to call our own. Yet, as we saw how quickly our family returned to “almost normal”, we realized that we had made the only decision we could have made.  We were able to once again engage in family cuddles and other fun sharing times that had been almost impossible when the other child was with us, because of the hyperactivity and at times, rage, and other behaviors that these times created.  We received a couple of very confusing and thought-disordered letters from the boy after he left, but we were not permitted to send him letters or to inquire about him or his progress. This caused us much grief.  We consulted several attorneys, but my husband had lost his job and we just were not in a position to take the situation further legally. We needed to move on with our lives and this we did, later adopting another child prior to my first husband’s diagnosis with multiple sclerosis.  (I later adopted a fourth child after I was widowed.)

      Therefore, I would be the last person to easily condemn or judge the family in Tennessee for determining that they ill-equipped to parent the Russian child.  I do question just how long they had expected it to take for him to adjust and to feel secure in their home. Six months is really a very short time in most cases.  We expected at least a few years of ongoing therapy, and knew that the past issues of our child would recycle at various times, maybe forever, even after he had settled in to our family life.  We simply did not expect to have such a violent child placed with us and that was something we had already stated was not an appropriate match for us, since he was joining us as the eldest child.  There are some naïve people out there who immediately presume the worst things about a family that chooses to disrupt or dissolve an adoptive placement.  I know that there may be good reasons in many cases.  However, it is just beyond my ability to comprehend that any family could be as cold and uncaring as to ship a child back to his home country, all alone with a note they don’t want him any longer.  I don’t take seriously that the child seems “normal” to observers thus far, and even to the psychologist in Russia because kids with attachment disorders are quite adept at putting on an act and sensing what kinds of responses are expected of them in settings where they are not under pressure to conform to the structures, routines and affection of a family.

       I sincerely hope there is a complete investigation into the circumstances surrounding this case and this adoptive family. I pray that the Russian Government will consider all of the successful placements of happy children who have found loving homes here in the United States.  Some of these families are people I know well, having personally worked with them and their Russian adopted kids in the past, during the pre-adoptive and/or post-adoption periods.  Mostly I pray that young Artyom, or Justin, as he was called here, gets help and that he is not placed too quickly into a family that also has unrealistic expectations for him.  I don’t know that this child can take another disaster.

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Tool for Taking Responsibility Like Warren Buffett

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       I heard a piece on NPR a while back that mentioned how Warren Buffett makes a practice of disclosing to his shareholders whenever he makes a mistake.   He tells them what his mistake was, takes responsibility, tells them what the cost or consequences will be and what plan he has to take action and change the situation.

     This isn’t something we see much or hear much about nowadays. It made me ponder if this model could be used more broadly.

      Maybe we all need to take some lessons from Mr. Buffett.  How often do we stumble across people who are even willing to admit their mistakes, let alone do the rest mentioned here?

       I would love to see such a plan made available to parents as training for modeling behavior to their kids.  Maybe it has application for pre-teens and teens?  What if this could be a tool to use in relationships with a spouse or significant other?   With friends?  At our own workplace?    Perhaps there might be a folder of blank forms in a place accessible to family members or co-workers? I envision something like this:

My Responsibility Tool

Name:______________________________________

What I believe I did, said, or what went wrong that I am willing to take on as my responsibility?______________________________________________

______________________________________________

_________________________________________________

On who or what did my words or actions have the most effect?

__________________________________________________

__________________________________________________

__________________________________________________

____________________________________________________

What happened as a result of my words or behavior?

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Are there any future negative or hurtful implications (things that haven’t occurred yet but that this has set in motion) that could be changed or stopped?

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When did this occur?___________________________________

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Was it a one-time thing or did it occur repeatedly?

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If this is something I say or do often, what might some of the reasons be that make me keep doing this?

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How does it make me feel to acknowledge that?

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What I think I would like to do to make amends or to change the situation

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Who, or what do I need (if anybody) in my corner to help me and support me in making amends or changing the situation for the better?

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When will I set this in motion and what will be the first thing I plan to do to rectify or change things?

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How will I/others know that I am adhering to my plan?

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What about my life, peace of mind, comfort level will feel better whenI change or correct what has happened to the best of my ability?

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What if……It is not really possible to change the situation I have caused, created or have been a catalyst for?  How do I forgive myself and move on from here?  What are my lessons and takeaways?

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     P.S.  Would you like to join my Faceboook Group? Vision Powered Coaching-http://www.facebook.com/#!/group.php?gid=327487069105 

 I would love to have you become a member.  This is interactive and you will find other tools, reflections, questions and discussions. The goal is to get readers/members to join and participate.  So please do!  You may share your thoughts with the group at times, or may write me about something that is on your heart and mind that you would like some quick, free e-coaching about.  Write to iris@visionpoweredcoaching .com

     Also watch for my new site, coming soon– Expert Adoption Coach-  www.expertadoptioncoach.com , a branch of Vision Powered Coaching.

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PARENTING: IS THE EMPHASIS ON PRAISE & SELF-ESTEEM SUCH A GOOD THING?

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      I suppose I will make some enemies with this post but it never stopped me before from saying what I thought.  My home has never been “inside of the box” anyway.  I have always been perfectly happy and cozy cuddling up with a blanket and pillow somewhere far away from the box, knowing that the box is boring and confining and I have the stars over my head and the birds chirping around me, and all of the other non-box dwellers milling about in my world making it a more interesting place.

       I am not the first one to say this, but it is by no means a popular view among today’s parents. Believe me I am a big proponent of encouragement and positive reinforcement for both kids and adults.  However, I have watched a lot of kids grow up thinking the world really does revolve around them and that everyone outside of the home will revere them the same way their parents did or do.  This begins in daycare nowadays, when the teachers squeal, “Good job!” every time a kid makes a little squiggle on a piece of paper or puts a block back into the bin and if you spend any time at all with young parents, you will hear ”Good job!” repeatedly. 

      Maureen Amberg from www.kidsedgeonselfesteem, who says a lot of good things with which I do agree, takes a different position on this issue.  I don’t disagree even a drop with her saying that we must avoid criticizing or attacking our kids as people and need to give them praise. We have all heard that we must love the child, but not the behavior and that is so true and so important.

      However, I definitely don’t go along with the statement of “Always give them praise when they’ve accomplished something big or small”. Of course we should acknowledge them for what they do well and for their efforts, but I have seen too many parents carry this to extremes.  I doubt the gym teacher is going to say to them, sweetly, in a melodic and kind tone, “I would appreciate your taking your filthy clothes and three week old sandwich out of your locker and thank you for doing that”.  I also doubt that the boss who needs a project done in a timely fashion and done correctly, is going to mince words or act charitably if his or her expectations are not met and if the job is done sloppily. Can you imagine this scenario?

            “Thanks Janet for getting this to me only a week late. I   
             understand and appreciate that your kids were sick for a few  
             days and that you and your significant other had a  party
             you just couldn’t bear to miss.  You still worked hard.  
             I see you tried to proofread the final report, but probably
             just didn’t have time to finish.  Thank you for wiping off as
            many of the cocoa stains your son got on the documents
            as you were able to.  Good job, Janet!  Keep up the great work.”

     Maureen Amberg tells us to think before we speak and I have no quarrel with that either.  That is good advice for us to heed in all of our interactions and not just with our kids.  She says, “These positive choices make all the difference in how our kids form their own opinion about themselves”.  I can’t help observing that too many kids and young adults I know appear to have overblown opinions about themselves and about how important their actions and thoughts are to the universe

        I also don’t see that a great many kids and young adults I encounter are taught to have high expectations of themselves, or to take pride in doing a job well and in fulfilling a responsibility.  I don’t think enough kids are taught that there are consequences to their actions (or lack of actions)  and that their parents won’t be standing behind them indefinitely, praising them no matter what they do and making excuses for mistakes or for less than adequate behavior. Nowadays I have heard about and seen way too many parents, even of college students and adults in their 20’s, defending their kids to teachers, professors and sometimes even to employers.  I have heard parents helping their kids rationalize behavior that they know isn’t appropriate or up to par. I have heard reports from friends and relatives who are college professors that it is not uncommon nowadays for parents to contact them to dispute the grades given their offspring, even though from the college’s standpoint these grades are confidential and the students are treated as adults.

       We have all heard of obnoxious  and disturbed parents who insert themselves into arguments at athletic events and of those who even lose control and inflict bodily harm on a child’s teammates or opponents, because they perceive someone did not treat their children fairly.  So when do parents teach the lesson that life isn’t always fair? How do we show them that not everyone out there loves them the way we do or thinks they can do no wrong?  Not everyone believes that every little action, word or deed of ours is incredibly wonderful and worthy of reward.

      We can and should show our appreciation and encouragement to our kids.  We can also do a little reality testing and can ask them questions that enable them to reflect on their work and their actions and to grow and improve.  We can teach them to develop standards that will serve them later on in life. We can be honest and authentic with our kids, without harming their self-esteem.  I just don’t think we need to give them praise for everything they do.  I also am not sure that kids need to be praised so much for doing things that are simply their responsibilities.  (You did your homework.  You took a bath. You cleaned up Mommy’s lipstick that you used to write all over the wall, even though I made you clean it.)   Everyone in society needs to pitch in if things are to work at all, and a family is, after all, a microcosm of the larger society.

      A book I recommend for parents is  50 Rules Kids Won’t Learn in School” by Charlies Sykes. Check it out. You will enjoy it and there is a lot of wisdom in it.

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SHOULD I ADOPT A CHILD OF ANOTHER RACE OR CULTURE

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      You want a baby or child so much.  You dream about it all the time. You have come to believe there really is a child out there in the world meant just for you. You have finally come to terms with the fact that your child doesn’t have to be created by you and genetically part of you.  You are ready to move on.   

       Perhaps you have gone through the turmoil and pain of infertility and have exhausted all avenues for a pregnancy. Perhaps you have been surprised at encountering  secondary infertility.  You may already have one or more children by birth but have suddenly hit a brick wall and haven’t been able to get pregnant again.  Or maybe you already have children, but are someone who is moved by the plight of all of the children, either here in the United States or in other countries, who wake up every day without the love and protection of a family of their own.  Naturally, the plight of Haitian children is at the front of our consciousness at the moment, although the majority of them are not available for adoption and the process of documenting who they are and where their relatives are is going to be a daunting one for authorities. 

      So, if your interest in adoption has been sustained for a while, you  have most likely started to do some investigation.  You go to the Internet, and begin to look at pictures of huge-eyed children who are just calling out to you.  Your heart is bursting with love and with free-flying feelings that you are now meant to give a home to one or more of these children, and maybe you believe that God is telling you to go ahead.

       As an adoptive parent for many decades, of a multi-racial, multi-cultural family, founder and director of a licensed adoption agency for 28.5 years,  and personal coach who works with adoptive families, I could share with you the stories of hundreds, perhaps thousands of people I know.  Interest in adopting  a child of another race or background has roots in varied personal beliefs and experiences.  We are not all alike, so people may come to this desire and decision in a variety of ways.  The typical client with whom I have dealt over the years may launch the journey to adoption with an intention to parent a child who is much like the one he or she would have had by birth.  Some of these people may then change their thinking if they learn that such a child may not be readily available or “easy to adopt”.  They may grow in their understanding of the children who truly need homes and in their own capabilities to offer a good life to those children.  Others may wish to provide the love and a home a parentless child needs because they want to  put something back into a world in which they have  already received numerous blessings.

       Over the years, starting right around the time my late first husband and I decided to expand our family through adoption nearly 40 years ago, there has been a lot of controversy around whether or not it is a good thing or a bad thing for people to break racial and cultural barriers through adoption.  The adoption of black children by white parents was called genocide  by a few groups and their alleged spokespeople, and some thought the children were better off in institutions than in white families. 

       Nowadays this debate is strong all over the world.    Some organizations support doing everything possible to convince countries to keep their kids, their most precious natural resource, and to avoid allowing them to be adopted internationally, or to create obstacles so that this is not likely to occur very much.    I  do strongly advocate making it possible for parents everywhere to raise their own children.  It is a terribly sad reality, though,  that poverty is most often the reason that parents in other countries relinquish their offspring.  However, the intention of keeping kids in their homelands may not be totally realistic in  countries with huge economic struggles and issues of survival that are many- layered. 

      One can’t help thinking then, that this recent focus on keeping kids within their own culture and in their countries of origin is one that meets the needs of adults, rather than of children growing up without love and commitment and with little but the absolute basics for survival (and sometimes not even that much).   In our country, for a long, long time, reunification of families was the focus in the child welfare system. No matter how many years it took for dysfunctional and often drug addicted parents to get their lives together, the rights of biology seemed to take precedence over the needs of the children.  They remained in the less-than-perfect foster care system, regardless of how many years it took the birth parents to turn their lives around. The majority never did. Nowadays, thank goodness, in the U.S. for the most part, courts and child welfare systems are more child-centric. They are more tuned in to making crucial decisions based on the ultimate best interests of the children.  The rights of the birth families are and should still be considered, and hopefully with less racial and cultural bias than has existed in our society, but at last, we have begun to think more seriously about the children and their right to security and love.

       Yet there are some pretty serious things that prospective adoptive parents must take into account if they are contemplating adopting a child of another race or background.   Here are a few of the many thiings to mull over:

        1. Let go of the “rescue fantasy”,  regardless of whether the child is coming from an excellent foster home, or from a war-torn or poverty-stricken land. 

 Children need to grow up knowing that we love them for themselves and are not some sort of do-gooder project for their parents.  Anyone who has raised kids to the teen years understands that gratitude is not one of the strong suits of adolescents and having such expectations will significantly hinder a healthy, open parent-child relationship.

      2. Think about the permanent changes to the composition of your family and if you and your extended family really understand the implications. 

We must accept and embrace the fact that our adoptive families will be literally changing for generations to come and we are consciously altering the gene pool that will carry on and represent our family name.  To me, this is a positive thing, but not everyone views it this way.  We must recognize that we will become part of whatever background the child is, as well as the child’s becoming part of whatever backgrounds we are from.  We must make a commitment to learn about and respect the culture from which our children come and not just by paying lip service. Some families think that by serving kim-chee or tamales, they have made a substantial effort. We must be ready to impart to our kids what we learn and to show our love of, interest in and respect for their cultures.

    3. Carefully consider what you have to offer to a child of another race or culture.

 We will never fully comprehend what it means to be a minority if we are not, but we will feel this about as closely as possible, if and when our children of minority backgrounds are subjected to discrimination and hurt.  That is why it is so important to think this all through before we undertake such an adoption.  Do we have the knowledge, sensitivity and experience to help our minority children survive and function in a world that may not be as kind to them as we would like? Do we have enough healthy and strong role models of the child’s background and of other minority backgrounds in our lives, who will be there for our child or children and help them grow up to be happy, successful adults?  I can’t begin to tell you how many times white prospective adoptive parents have said, “But we live in a tiny town. We don’t really know any black people, or latinos, or any other minorities.  How do we go about meeting them?” It is at that point that I ask them how old they are.  Have they had minority friends at other times during their lives, when they lived elsewhere or when they were in school?   Have they kept up the friendships at all?   I explain that one can’t create friendships in a contrived manner. Becoming a mixed family requires a commitment to a different lifestyle, and perhaps to moving to a more diverse community, joining a diverse religious congregation and making changes that will benefit the entire family.

4. Are you prepared to accept your child as a minority individual, not just as a cute baby or young child, but as a teen and adult? 

Many kids who are adopted into families that look different than they do, seek out friends with whom they don’t stand out as much. This happens even when the kids love their adoptive families and are comfortable with them.  If you do not live in a community with diversity, sometimes your kids will go to great lengths to seek out people who more closely resemble them but who may or may not be healthy role models, or who may have backgrounds or values that contradict those in which your family believes and has tried to teach.  I have found that adopted minority kids raised in multi-cultural families often tend to be able to move comfortably among different racial groups.  The question is, are you, the parents, comfortable with the fact that your cute little adopted baby may grow up to want to date or marry out of your racial group and may more closely identify with his or her own racial or cultural group?  Or, if you live in a non-diverse area, how will you prepare your child for the fact that there will be families in your town who might not want your son or daughter dating theirs? What will you do to help your child?

5.  When in your own life have you felt like a minority or felt you have been discriminated against in some way? 

Can you use the feelings that you remember and the learning you have incorporated as strengths to assist you in raising the child or children?   If you have lived a life in which you had not had such painful, but growth-producing opportunities, how will you begin to understand what your child of a race or background other than your own is going through?

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KIDS, GRIEF and PARENTING THROUGH the HOLIDAY SEASON

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The risk of love is loss, and the price of loss is grief – But the pain of grief is only a shadow when compared with the pain of never risking love. --Hilary Stanton Zunin

     If you have recently lost a spouse and have kids at home, you may wonder how you will ever get through the upcoming holiday season.  At times you can barely manage to go through the motions of handling the ongoing daily business of raising your family.  You want to be there for your children, but you often don’t know what to do to help them. You worry that they hear you crying at night and are uncertain if that is ok for them to hear. You want them to know you are there to protect them and to comfort them. You don’t want them to feel they have to be careful of expressing their own grief out of fear of upsetting you. Yet you don’t want to push them to talk if they aren’t ready.  You may have found your teenager hard enough to understand and often uncommunicative even before the loss of your spouse. Now he or she seems to have clammed up even more.   You fear that you will overlook important signs that the kids need help but are equally fearful of blowing out of proportion what you feel are probably normal grief reactions.  After all, they loved and miss their parent also.

     If your children are old enough to understand, talk with them about whether they feel they want to include all of the old family rituals that used to be part of the holiday season.  Is there a way to take pieces of those old customs and incorporate them into something new?   It may be very difficult for you to be a part of the familiar things that you used to take delight in planning and executing with your husband or wife, but right now you are the center of your children’s world.  They need you to maintain order and to perpetuate some of the things they find comforting and familiar, if you can manage to do it at least a bit.    At times, duplicating some of your old rituals but in a new setting, takes some of the edge off the activities.   Can you spend the holidays with a friend or relative or invite some people to come and share their own traditions with you?   If your kids are receptive, you can think about planning and implementing a new tradition.  Can you create a contest where each child gets a small prize for coming up with a simple new idea?  Sometimes a silly activity is just what everyone needs. Let them know that change is fine and things don’t have to be the same as they always were, unless they truly want them to be.  Perhaps each family member can pick one custom he or she absolutely wants to carry on, and then you can invent new things around your top choices.

     Sometimes a family photo night can be a way to prime the pump and open up feelings. As hard as it is, it is also wonderful and necessary to remember together.  Gather together a bunch of photos of your family at different special times and ask each child to write down one or two things he or she remembers about that day. If the child is too young to remember, have the child describe what he or she imagines was happening in the photo and what each person was feeling. Young kids can draw pictures or can dictate to you what they want to say.  If you save the little memory slips of paper and drawings in a specially designated and decorated jar or box, you can use this activity over and over. Young children may want to decorate the jar or box themselves.  Each person can choose a slip from the jar to read and talk about. You might create a special meal, snack or activity around the memory night. Perhaps each person can act out a memory or scene.

     Be proactive and know that the upcoming holiday season will be a challenge and that you may need to think ahead a bit.  Was there a cause or special interest your late spouse had a real passion about? Can you plan a project with your children to honor him or her and to make the holidays more meaningful?  Do your kids want to involve friends or other relatives, or is this a family project they prefer to keep private? 

     Find a way to reach out to someone else in need if you feel up to it. The first Thanksgiving after I was widowed in my 30’s and had three young kids, we volunteered to serve a meal at a local shelter.  Not everyone initially wanted to do this, so we worked out a compromise. It was a very positive experience.

     In our family, since we were/are a religiously and culturally mixed family, we had multiple traditions we had developed into our own brand.  It was very painful for me to read the Chanukah Gelt story by Sholom Aleichem that we had always shared with our kids. Although my late husband wasn’t Jewish, he delighted in reading this and acting it out with enthusiasm.  Yet, doing this with the family also brought back  great memories and opened up some lively discussion for us.  

     At Christmastime, after my husband’s death,  it was especially awkward and uncomfortable for me. My husband had truly enjoyed the rituals we built over time and some of them were those he had experienced or wished he had experienced as a child in his own family.  Although my kids were raised “multi-cultural with strong Jewish overtones” they knew that their father loved some of the  Christmastime routines.  Before going to bed, the kids gathered many of their favorite stuffed animals and arranged them around the tree. Once they were asleep, my husband and I repositioned the animals and put them in crazy places, such as hanging from the beams of our cathedral ceiling, or under a couch cushion, sitting on top of the toilet paper holder in the bathroom, or in a shoe under someone’s bed. Santa also left long, funny notes  for the kids and s gave clues about where gifts were hidden. Sometimes the notes explained how contents of stockings had spilled over and stockings had given birth to little stockingettes and could be found on the third step of the cellar hatchway.  Due to some unpleasant family dynamics, there was little contact with my late husband’s family and I suddenly felt very torn, confused and pressured about which customs to preserve. It felt fake and obligatory for me to continue the customs of a family that wanted little or nothing to do with me or with my kids.  They were not my own customs, though I had previusly adopted some of them. Yet they were comforting to my children. Little by little, with all kinds of help, I had to forge a new way of being, honoring the past and the old, but embracing our new beginnings.  While I wanted my children to have the gift of memory, security and continuity, I learned that it did our family little good as a whole if I were stressed, resentful and overwhelmed.  I had to be honest with my children, explaining but not over-explaining my feelings, on a level each of them could understand developmentally.  I gave them some choices, but big decisions were mine, as the adult in charge.

     The greatest lesson for me that I have shared with others over the years has been that one can’t fill anyone else’s buckets if his or her own bucket is full of holes and everything is leaking out.     Line up your support system in advance. Know that you may be hit hard at holiday time  and that you can use some extra support.   Can you ask a friend to spend time with the children while you have an adult evening out with someone else? What would you like to do? Give yourself a gift for the holidays too, whether something concrete or just some time to yourself, if that is what you crave.  Self care is twice as important when you are newly bereaved and when you are the main strength for your children.

Guest Blogger-The Dismantling of International Adoptions

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Today I have a guest blogger. Miriam Vieni is a New York licensed social worker who worked in the international adoption field for 34 years and is now retired.

 

 

The Dismantling of International Adoptions

by Miriam Vieni  L.C.S.W.

 

 

 

When we adopted our daughter in 1974, the field of international adoptions was on the verge of blossoming into an exciting range of opportunities for homeless children and would-be adoptive parents.  Up to that point, there were a very few large agencies (perhaps three or four) involved in facilitating the adoptions of children, mainly from Korea and more recently from Vietnam.  The large, more traditional agencies were uncomfortable about international adoptions because less was known about the health and backgrounds of the children, than what was known about the health and backgrounds of children born in the U.S.  Some of the agencies and groups that were helping families adopt children from Vietnam during the war, were new and small and they were operated by enthusiastic people who had, themselves, adopted children from Vietnam.  When adoptions from Vietnam ceased in April 1975, the people who had been involved in helping children from that country, find families, turned to other countries with populations of homeless children and they instituted programs in those countries.  Suddenly, a field that had been limited to a few agencies arranging adoptions from two countries, expanded into large numbers of agencies and parent groups, facilitating the adoptions of children from many countries.  Families were able to adopt children from Colombia, Chile, Guatemala, El Salvador, Peru, Ecuador, Bolivia, Honduras, and India.  Then, in the late 1980’s, there was a trickle of direct adoptions from China which, expanded and was formalized over the years, until thousands of Chinese babies were being adopted.  In the early 1990’s, the field expanded to several countries in Eastern Europe, and Russia, as well as a few African countries.  Little by little, the number of direct adoptions decreased while the number of adoptions arranged by agencies, increased.  Many of the agencies were small and were operated by adoptive parents.  They were flexible and they were committed to the children and families whom they served.  The majority of adoptions had good outcomes.  A very few had problems.  The majority of agencies and facilitators were honest.  A minority were not.  Larger, more traditional agencies turned to international adoptions because the supply of healthy Caucasian infants in the U.S. had decreased as more single mothers either chose to keep and raise their children or turned to abortion.  In order to stay in business, these larger agencies needed to attract adoptive parents and they discovered that in the 1990’s, middle class Caucasian couples were interested in adopting children of a variety of races and cultures from many foreign countries.  Middle class African American families also began to turn to international adoptions as it became more and more difficult for them to find healthy African American babies in the U.S.     

 

In 1993, we learned of a plan to impose an international treaty on the field of international adoptions.  The ostensible goal of the treaty was to protect the children by regulating the adoptions to minimize black market adoptions and to ensure that adoptions would be carried out in a professional manner so that the welfare of children would be protected.  The two people who set out to sell international agencies and adoptive parent groups on the treaty were Peter Fundt from the Department of State Office of the Assistant Legal Advisor for Private International Law, and Bill Pierce (now deceased), the executive director of the National Council on Adoptions (an organization of private adoption agencies).  He was also on the board of the National Council on Accreditation (a private organization which accredited private multi-service social service agencies.  Bill Pierce was a vocal opponent of non-agency adoptions.  In a letter to the member organizations of NCFA, he stated that he hoped the framework for agencies developed in the Hague regulations, would eventually be expanded to all adoptions. 

 

Some of us, attorneys, adoptive parents, social workers, and agency people, believed that the framework of regulations that was being proposed by the State Department, would be harmful to international adoptions as a whole.  We believed that it would cause small agencies to go out of business, cause countries to develop bureaucracies that would interfere with efficient adoption processing, and would add requirements and costs that would eliminate many prospective adoptive parents.  We believed that the government’s proposed implementing legislation (greatly influenced by Bill Pierce) would not actually protect children but would, rather, promote the primacy of large agencies.  It was difficult to communicate with others about our feelings because people were not using email and internet service at that time and because the State Department recruited people to travel throughout the country and to sell the Hague Treaty to adoptive parents and agencies.  They promised that Immigration requirements for children entering the U.S. would be made more flexible and they threatened that countries would refuse to send their children to the U.S. if the U.S. didn’t ratify the treaty.  However, we were able to initiate debate on the subject and to put pressure on the powers that be to hold public meetings in Washington D.C. on the treaty.  We developed our own proposed implementing legislation for the treaty which, we hoped, would satisfy the wish for more regulation while setting up procedures which would allow small and medium sized agencies to continue to function in the international adoption field.  The State Department people, however, were uninterested in our suggestions and our visits to senators and congressmen, during which we tried to explain the potential problems with the State Department plans, were ineffective.  The meetings proceeded, and promises were made to keep the fees low and to take the needs of all stake holders into account.  Committees were formed to provide feedback to the officials who were developing the implementing legislation for the treaty and the regulations connected to them.  Many of the people who were initially very concerned about the impact of the treaty, were reassured by all of this that the treaty would not impact negatively on international adoptions. 

 

The Hague Treaty went into effect in the U.S. on April 1, 2008.  Following, is what I have observed.  Our State Department has made demands on countries that did not initially sign on to the treaty, that they do so.  The U.S. State Department has indicated that adoptions from countries that resisted, such as Vietnam, Cambodia, and Guatemala, were flawed and unacceptable and these adoptions by U.S. citizens, have by and large ceased.   The adoption processes from countries that haven’t signed on and that have continued, have been negatively affected by new procedures imposed by our government.  In many cases, home study agencies and placing agencies are insisting on Hague requirements for non Hague adoptions.  These requirements make the adoption process more complicated and expensive.  Many agencies are applying the regulations across the board because they feel that this will protect them from criticism from COA. 

 

Adoptions by U.S. citizens from countries that have signed on, have decreased in number and are slower to complete.   U.S. Immigration procedures for potential adoptive parents adopting from Hague countries are more difficult and complicated than they are for those adopting from non Hague countries.  Home studies for people adopting from Hague countries are more complicated and difficult to conduct.  Although the legislation allows exempt providers (non accredited agencies and independent social workers) to perform them, in practice, accredited placement agencies are reluctant to use exempt providers. 

 

The National Council on Accreditation (one of two accrediting bodies and the accrediting body responsible for accreditation of most U.S. agencies), is charging large fees to accredit agencies.  It has recruited volunteers to make judgments as to whether or not agencies may be accredited.  Some of the volunteers have worked in international adoptions previously and some have not.  The  regulations are new and difficult for everyone to understand.  Therefore, the  volunteer accreditors have received brief training on how to implement the accreditation requirements from people who do not completely understand them.  So, the accreditation standards are being applied differently to different agencies.  Many small and medium sized agencies have been refused accreditation, and some of them have gone out of business altogether.  Some of our best small agencies have opted out of accreditation completely because they cannot afford the process and they, therefore can no longer provide international adoption services to families and children.  The actual regulations have little or no connection with the quality of services provided to families and children, but on paper, they satisfy the accrediting officials.            

 

So, the fears that we had back in 1993 have been justified.  Fewer people are able to adopt.  Fewer agencies are arranging international adoptions.  The agencies that have survived, tend to be the larger, wealthier agencies.  Children are arriving from fewer countries, and they wait longer in institutions before they can be adopted.  Most of the children seem to be coming from Russia, Korea, and a few African countries.  These are not Hague countries.  The wait for children and adoptive parents is longer. In the guise of improving the quality of international adoptions, our government has systematically been doing away with them.