The Changing Face of Adoption

Parenting the Hurt Child : Helping Adoptive Families Heal and Grow
by Regina M. Kupecky, LSW, Gregory C. Keck, Ph.D.

When a child is adopted, he can arrive with hurts from the past-pain that stunts his emotional growth and your family's life, too. At some point your parenting dreams can fall apart, and raising a hurt child becomes more like a burden than a blessing.

But don't give up. With time, patience, informed parenting, and appropriate therapy, your adopted child can get over what seems insurmountable now. From insights gathered through years of working with adopted kids who have experienced early trauma, Gregory C. Keck and Regina M. Kupecky explain how to manage a hurting child with loving wisdom and resolve, and how to preserve your stability while untangling their thorny hearts.

"We hope that what we share will give you strength, courage, and commitment," write the authors. "We hope you will tap into your own resources and creativity to become the parent you've always wanted to be."

If you've adopted a child, whatever the circumstances, you'll find hope and healing on these pages-for you, your family, and especially your adopted child.

PLEASE NOTE: In order to prevent confusion, we have chosen to use the masculine gender when referring to generic situations throughout this book.

The face of adoption continues to change. Gone are the days when the policies of social-service agencies forbade foster parents to get close to their foster children, and when nurturing was to be reserved for the yet unidentified adoptive family. Gone are the days when the accepted belief was that withholding love and attention from an infant or child would serve him well.

As the winds change course through the adoption and child welfare world, children no longer have to be subjected to imper-manence or frequent moves from foster home to foster home while awaiting the phantom magic of reunification. They can finally reap the sensible rewards of a fact that we have known for years: children need to be in one place with loving, protective, and nurturing people - whether birth parents, foster parents, adoptive parents, or kinship parents.

Today foster parents are encouraged to "keep" the children they have. So widespread is this updated belief that youngsters in foster care are now more likely to be adopted by their foster parents (64 percent) than by relatives (14 percent) or new adoptive families (21 percent).

The Adoption and Safe Families Act of 1997 goes a long way toward addressing the many shortcomings of the earlier system. This law finally recognizes the critical need for permanency in a child's life and mandates that states move more expeditiously to obtain permanent homes for foster children. As a result, the number of finalized adoptions from foster care has soared - from 28,000 in 1996 to 42,375 in 1999.

And the numbers will continue to grow. Irresponsible parents can no longer spend year after year ignoring the reunification expectations of their case plans, while their children move around the foster care system like endless chain letters.

No longer do agencies have to wait until the birth family does something injurious to an infant or child before removing him. If there has been a clear pattern of parental irresponsibility with other children, the state may now proactively protect a newborn. Social workers are freed from old laws that protected the rights of the birth parents while simultaneously endangering the lives of their innocent children.

The trend toward change is far-reaching. It is estimated that 16,396 children were adopted internationally by American families in 1999 - an increase from 7,093 in 1990.3 Many people pursue this path in an attempt to adopt a child who has not been hurt or damaged, but the child may be as hurt as a child from foster care. Most adoptable children from other countries share the same traumas as those experienced by children in our own system. The abandoned children found wandering the streets of Moscow most assuredly have not had good lives. In all probability, they were subjected to abuse, neglect, and sexualization, as opposed to nurturing, stimulation, and security.

Abandoned infants everywhere in the world have had identical experiences, and the motivation for the abandonment is irrelevant. Whether the child's mother left him in China due to sociopolitical reasons - or if he was dumped in a U.S. high school bathroom because his mother was terrified to tell anyone about her pregnancy - the end result is the same: the infant was abandoned by the woman who gave him life.

While we are not suggesting that people avoid inter-country adoptions, we simply want to make it clear that most adoptable children - regardless of their country of origin - have experienced trauma. We also want to point out that the fear of a U.S. family reclaiming a birth child is not a sound sole motivator for seeking an international adoption. For the most part, there are very few situations in which a birth family regains custody of, or contact with, the child. This is particularly true of children adopted from the foster care system.

As changes in the adoption world continue, we are pleased to see the formal recognition of kinship placement. While this practice has always existed informally, families related to a child are now able to adopt him and receive the same kind of support - subsidies, medical care, and so on - that nonrelative adoptive families have always enjoyed. This movement opens up significant options for many children and negates years of undefined, nebulous existence in the foster care system.

Certainly, kinship families should be considered when they offer the child a chance for a secure, protective, and nurturing childhood. However, one should not assume that a new trend equals a solution for every case. Kinship placements may be superb, but they can also be abysmal, because there is not always a positive relationship between a biological tie and quality care. Kinship placements must be evaluated, utilizing the same factors as those employed in nonrelative placements. An aunt who is unknown to the child is more of a stranger than the foster family with whom the child has been living for two years. We think it is unwise to move a child simply because a blood relative has surfaced and indicates an interest in adopting him. This kind of thinking does not take into account some common-sense factors, even though it may flow with the current trend.

As we celebrate the numerous, positive changes that have occurred for hurt children, we must remain focused on a commitment to keep this process moving. Perhaps one day, a child who is removed from an abusive home will be able to have his first out-of-home placement as his final placement. While this may be a lofty goal, it may help the system refine its practices to enable children to "get where they're going" as quickly as possible. What's more, it will ensure that the child has the potential to experience continuity in his development. And that alone will reduce the lifelong difficulties for parents and their hurt children.

© 2002 NavPress. Used by permission of NavPress Publishing. All rights reserved.

About the Author

Regina M. Kupecky, LSW, has worked in the adoption arena for over twenty-five years as an adoption placement worker. She is currently a co-therapist with Dr. Gregory C. Keck, Ph.D., at the Attachment and Bonding Center of Ohio. Mrs. Kupecky authored a resource guide, Siblings Are Family, Too, which is available through the Three Rivers Adoption Council in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. She has presented at local, national, and international conferences on a variety of adoption topics and holds a Master of Arts degree from John Carroll University.

Gregory C. Keck, Ph.D., founded the Attachment and Bonding Center of Ohio, which specializes in the treatment of children and adolescents who have experienced developmental interruptions. In addition, he and his staff treat individuals and families who are faced with a variety of problems in the areas of adoption, attachment, substance abuse, sexual abuse, and adolescent difficulties.