Why the Russian Adoption Ban is a Disaster in Slow Motion

    By now most of you have heard about the adoption ban put into law in Russia.  It all began with an attempt by our United States government to rein in human rights violations in Russia.  President Obama signed the Magnitsky Act, which provides sanctions against Russian citizens deemed by the US to have violated human rights.  Prior to this, the Russian government was concerned about the abuse some Russian children have received at the hands of their adoptive parents in the United States but had only recently, in November, 2012, signed a new treaty designed to provide greater access for Russian officials who desired to review the treatment of adopted children.  This new agreement was only in place for eight weeks before the adoption ban was signed by President Putin.

    The Russian government claims that the adoption ban was necessary because they were not getting access to the documents that the new treaty was supposed to give them and the American government claims that the whole thing is just retaliation for passing the Magnitsky Act.  Whichever is true, it is neither the American nor the Russian government that is the big loser.  The big losers remain the children who will remain in Russian orphanages instead of in loving homes.

    I know something about this.  Our family includes two children who were adopted from a Russian orphanage.  The trauma that they suffered in their first year of life has been a real education.  Before we witnessed it firsthand, I never would have believed that children could be so damaged in their first year of life.  We were always told that “Love heals all wounds,” and “Love conquers all,” and things like that.  We genuinely believed it when people told us that all we had to do was take them home and love them.  But sometimes love isn’t enough.  Thankfully, the problems that our children have, though not insignificant, are not nearly what other parents, whom we’ve met, live with every day.  Some of the neurological, emotional and psychological problems that grow out of living in an orphanage, even for a few months, are frightening. 

 

    While I could not ever condone abuse, I have seen enough to understand how parents of some of these children could reach a point where they simply don’t know what else to do.  Many parents do not abuse these damaged children but recognize that they cannot cope with the behaviors of their children and choose to dissolve or disrupt the adoption.  That means what it sounds like; they go in front of a judge and declare that they are no longer the parents.  This frees them, but makes the children orphans yet again and turns their care over to the state in which they live, or to yet another set of adoptive parent and cause still more emotional and psychological damage.

    Children from former Eastern bloc countries (primarily Russia and Ukraine) bear a higher risk for behavioral problems and eventual adoption disruption.  We don’t completely know why, but although similar problems are seen in children from other nations, these children see higher rates of disruption than any others.  I cannot quote any particular sources but I have heard estimates as high as 10-20 percent.  That means that even with the resources of wealthier American parents, even with parents who love them, even with access to modern medical and psychological care, between one in ten and one in five of these kids have real, serious problems.   Do the Russians have a right to be concerned about what is happening to their children?  Certainly.  But what happens if they don’t come here, don’t have parents, and don’t have access to care?  Russia does not have a history of adoption.  Adoption is not a part of their culture.  While adoption does happen, fewer Russian children are adopted by Russians than by Americans, and we are just one country among many who has, until now, been able to adopt from Russia.  Children who remain in Russian orphanages are likely to stay there until they “age out,” until they are old enough that the Russian government turns them loose on the streets with no support whatsoever.  The majority of children who age out of Russian orphanages will end up dead or in prison within two years.

    Yes, these children can be scarred and damaged by even a few months in an orphanage.  Yes, we should strive with all that is within us to do a better job than we are doing.  No.  No child should suffer abuse at the hands of their parents regardless of their behavior.  But the Russian government needs to look in the mirror as well.  Our system may not be perfect, but an adoption ban that prohibits these children from coming home to loving parents doesn’t fix the problem and in reality only makes it worse.

As usual, when grown-ups fight, the ones who lose... are the children.

Second homestudy visit/thoughts on "The Process"

    Yesterday, we had our second visit by our social worker, Jennifer.  Once again we answered a bunch of questions but, again, none of them seemed to be terribly intrusive (more on that later).  We answered questions, filled out a few new forms and we gave Jennifer a copy of our floor plan/fire escape plan as well as our fire inspection that we completed last week.  After completing the paperwork portion of our meeting we gave her a brief tour of our home despite the boxes and ongoing evidence of packing for the move to our new home at the end of June (only four weeks left to pack - Yikes!).

    The first time that we had a homestudy, probably fifteen or sixteen years ago, I remember thinking that the process seemed extraordinarily intrusive.  I remember thinking that many of the questions seemed very personal and that I was very uncomfortable giving out highly detailed private financial information.  A decade and a half later it doesn't seem to be that big a deal but I am not entirely sure why.  I suppose that, in part, as a society we have become accustomed to having a little less privacy than we once did.  Combine that with out constant exposure to Facebook, Twitter, cell phones, text messages and other immediate news sources we, perhaps, feel that more people already know an awful lot about us and our private lives.  Mostly, however, I think it is simply that while fifteen years ago we had never given that sort of information out to anyone but our closest family (especially financial information) but in the intervening years we have given this information out many times for unemployment benefits, Medicaid benefits (while unemployed and underemployed), applications for state funded subsidies for counseling related to Reactive Attachment Disorder, financial aid applications, and employment related background checks.  While I am still not a big fan of giving someone (anyone) a detailed list of our assets and income, it doesn't bother me nearly as much as it did the first time.

    Still, be forewarned, if you are thinking of adopting or getting licensed for foster care, or if you have already begun that process, you will be asked to give out information about yourself that you may never have given out to anyone, even your parents or closest friends.  For us, it was not, and is not, a deal killer.  Uncomfortable?  Yes.  But the folks at Children's Services are decent, trustworthy people.  They have a real "need to know" this kind of stuff and they do a good job of keeping your private information private.  If I were you, I wouldn't let a little discomfort stop me from attaining one of life's most worthwhile goals.

    Trust me, despite all of the hassles and difficulties we've had raising our three kids over the last fifteen years, and despite all the trips to see counselors (and doctors, and orthodontists, etc.) there is nothing that I wouldn't do over again in a heartbeat.  Our kids are so awesome, and I am so proud of them, that I can never express it adequately in words.  If you are thinking of adoption, or if you have already started, do not let the process prevent you from reaching your goal.

Press on.

Persevere.

It will all be worth it in the end.

Why Now?

The next obvious question to address is "Why now?"  Why, with three children, who will all be in high school in the fall, would we want to add to our family now?  Simply put, the time seemed right.  From the beginning of our marriage more than twenty years ago we discussed how many children that we thought we might want.  I came from a family of six (with three brothers) and my wife from a family of five (with one brother and one sister) and as we discussed what we wanted in a family we thought that four or five was probably about right.  At the time we were married and starting a family, one of my brothers had seven children.  There’s nothing wrong with that and I have always admired his ability (and his wife, of course) to pull it off but we both agreed that seven, for us, was probably too many.  For us, five seemed like the right number.

    So what happened?  Why stop at three?  It is apparent to anyone who meets us that we only have three children.  We started our family and then suddenly stopped two years later.  Why?  There are several answers.  The first is simply what parents around the world have discovered throughout the centuries, that boys are harder than girls.  If our boys had been as easy to parent as our daughter had been, we probably would have had six or seven children by now but that isn't the way it happened.  Parenting boys turned out to be much different, and far more difficult, than parenting one daughter.  The numbers contributed to this as well.  When we decided to adopt a second time, we began by contacting an adoption attorney.  There, we created a life book for potential birth-mothers to look at and, hopefully, choose us as adoptive parents and then we waited.  I don't remember how long we waited but I'm guessing that we waited for about a year with no nibbles of interest.  At about the same time we became introduced to a woman who had adopted from Russia and was launching a new adoption service in Medina, Ohio.  Although it took another year to grind through the process and the paperwork to go to Russia, we chose to stop waiting for a birth-mother and go that route (although these two avenues overlapped for a while).

    I said that numbers contributed to stopping at three and they did.  We chose to adopt two children from Russia at once rather than trying to fund two trips overseas.  We applied for, and expected, a boy and a girl six months to a year apart in age.  Instead, after we applied we were told that twin boys were available and we were asked if we would consider adopting both of them so that they could stay together.  We had entered the process of adoption not only as an adventure but also as something of a spiritual journey.  During that time we saw God's hand in some amazing ways, but for this story it's enough to say that we had asked, and expected God to lead us to the children that he had in mind for us so when we were offered twin boys, after a few short prayers we gladly accept their offer and felt that God's hand was in it.  The part that numbers played was simply that not only are boys more difficult to parent than girls, but twins are way harder than one child alone.
It took a while, but we discovered something else.  For a long time the thing didn't have a name but it was still there nonetheless.  All we knew at first was that parenting these boys was harder than it should have been.  We eventually noticed that many of the 'normal' parenting advice and 'normal' parenting methods just didn't work on these little guys.  Everyone said that kids who had lived in an orphanage would have delays but if you just loved them enough, they would catch up and eventually thrive.  Some of that was true, but in other ways something just wasn't right.  We found our way to counselors and went that route for quite a while but it didn't seem to be making much of a difference until we heard about Reactive Attachment Disorder (RAD).  I'm not exactly sure how we found them but we eventually discovered Dr. Gregory Keck and the Attachment and Bonding Center of Ohio.  From the moment we found their website we knew we were onto something.  The sample questions that they had on the application sounded more like our boys than anything we had ever seen.  When we finally met Dr. Keck and talked to him he asked us questions about the boys that he couldn't possibly have known, and yet he knew things about them and about their behavior that were dead-on accurate.  Finally, the thing had a name.

What had happened was that, as much as we loved our boys, they were more than just a handful to raise.  They absolutely consumed all of the energy we had available to parent them.  During this same time, my wife was going through some significant health challenges.  Taken together, for a bunch of years, three children was all that we could handle.   After several years of counseling and after many of my wife's health problems had been overcome, we finally felt like it was time to grow our family again.