Religious Adoption Failings

[martian]

http://freejinger.org/forums/viewtopic.php?f=8&t=14297

Here's the original thread on Linzi and Christie the bitch.

She is all proud of herself for having taken Kendalan as a disrupted adoption, so she figures she gets to give Linzi away, and since China is being all mean, maybe another family will disrupt and give them their kid! And this makes total sense in her head! She will finally have her egg roll. :angry-banghead:

That child doesn't even sound that bad for pity's sake. Especially not considering the upheaval she's going through with leaving her culture and the only home she's ever known. And they started talking disruption by two weeks? Gah! How do these people even pass home studies?!

I'm afraid the U.S. deserves every bit of side eye other countries give us over these adoptions. And if our government can't be arsed to give better protection to or even bother to track the vulnerable children being brought here, well, maybe everybody should close their adoption programs to us.

[Guest]

I've been following her since before she brought her sons home. As much as I disagree with her about a lot of things, I find her pretty likeable. :)

I feel the same thing. I think she's my pet fundie, and it makes me feel bad :shifty:

I'm also Catholic, although I'm far from fundie, and some things I read and I'm like "good grief..." but then there are other things that she writes about that I really like (Like her recent post on Pat Robertson). She also isn't too far down the rabbit hole- her husband is college educated (and she began college, but didn't get far before she got pregnant and dropped out), so I have hope that she will send her children to colleges, especially if they're Catholic, and she definitely drinks and watches TV. (You know you've been reading FJ too much when you think that is liberal...) She's one of those that I think goes overboard with her religion and is a mild baby collector, but is not destroying her children for life.

[Lillybee]

I have been watching the Little Couple on TLC. They have just adopted a little people child from China. It looks like they are doing it right. There is a big thread in Worldly Distractions about them.

[lilah]

And then you have the baker's dozen crew has three liberian adoptees who are away at job corps and want nothing to do with their family. Might be mutual.

[chaotic life]

We have five biological children and four adoptees, one of those from a disruption. I like to think our family is a success story, but sometimes success is not measured the same way with children who have been through what some of these kids have been through. We lost one son last summer to Cystic Fibrosis which as devastating. He was much like Linzi and while he was exhausting, he was MINE from the day I made the commitment to him to the day he died in my arms. He died surrounded by a family that loved him and grieves him deeply. Unlike Mama, we accepted that people who were supposed to protect that baby broke him in ways our love could not heal, and we protected him from any further pain and brokenness as a family.

My child from disruption has a long journey of healing still ahead of him. He may not heal all of the way. But, he will know he is loved unconditionally and that he will always be my son, no matter where his life takes him in that healing journey.

I will say in all honesty that sometimes Job Corp can be a viable compromise when a teen and their adoptive family really don't want to live under the same roof anymore. It gives a child more autonomy at 16 instead of having to wait for the magical age of 18. It gives them education, which often is what is missing more than anything else in these situations. It allows adoptive parents to still be an influence and advocate for a teen, but doesn't push the intensity of family life that often teens who never attach to their families resent. Sometimes when you come into a family life as a teen after a lifetime of being independent and having to take care of yourself, you do NOT like having someone bigger trying to have authority over you.

My son told me hen he got here that he knew FAR more about surviving and making it than we could EVER teach him. I told him that he was an expert at surviving and that's how he got so far in life on his own. But, he didn't have a clue how to LIVE instead of survive and our home as his chance to learn how to LIVE instead of always just SURVIVING. I didn't want to insult him, because he is amazingly strong to have made it 14 years without anyone loving and protecting him. However, to transition to a normal life, he has to come out of survival mode and learn that it's okay to accept authority and rules. For him, Job Corp was and still is a viable option. Some teens cannot and will not accept family life. That is OKAY. It is better to be a safety net and advocate for them, to continue to love them unconditionally and provide a safe place to land BUT give them that independence and autonomy that is the only world they feel safe and comfortable in. Sometimes that is the compromise to launch them into a successful adulthood and frankly I wish more fundie adopters would consider Job Corp a better option than the stupid RTCs and group homes they keep dumping their older teens who cannot conform into.

It doesn't appear my son will do Job Corp. After a year of realizing that we GIVE respect and that is how we EARN respect, he has decided that while he still isn't sure he wants to be here, he sure LIKES family life and the respect, privileges and love we give him here. However, if he were to need Job Corp, I would not consider that a failure. I would also not throw him away there but would continue to be his mother but step back to give him the early autonomy over his life if that is what he needs to feel safe and try to overcome.

While there is not one formal network for rehoming kids, there are informal religious networks for moving these kids and most in these circles can quickly figure out how to tap into those informal networks. Part of it is this mentality so many of them ascribe to that sometimes God uses the first adoptive family to facilitate getting a child to the US and their forever family comes later. It's a HORRIBLE outlook on adoption. It centers on this constant "rescuing" they see adoption as. They fail to understand how devastating it is to a child to be brought to the US and then rejected. They just don't CARE what it's doing to the child when they rehome though. They only care about undoing what they did to their OWN lives.

[bananacat]

John and Christine Reed of Smilesandtrials have six bio children and 11 adopted children. Three of their daughters were from disruptions. The other eight were either older or have disabilities. They have done an amazing job integrating their children into the family from what I can tell. So at least two stories.

These stories are better than disruptions, but honestly I'm not that thrilled by them. I have a lot of problems with international adoption in general and while I don't think it's always universally wrong, our attitude about in this country is problematic and too often condescending and selfish at the same time. Each country has its own situations, but with Ethiopia, adoptive parents like to pretend they're white knight heroes rescuing a poor little pet from a horrible life, but really in most cases it would help the children more to give money to the orphanage to allow the child to be raised among their family, and also we directly contribute to the poverty in these areas in various ways. And all this goes double when adopting a child with special needs from another country. It's really hard to not come off as condescending even with the best of intentions. But yeah, I could rant about this trend for pages so I'll leave it at that.

I still have a big problem with adopting 11 children at all, especially with special needs, regardless of where the children came from. That added to the bio children is 17 and I just don't believe that two parents can adequately care for that many children at once. It's no different than the child hoarding that Michelle Duggar does. No matter how much attention those parents claim to give to all of their special needs children, there's no way they are giving them all enough attention. Surprise, sometimes blog post aren't actually and accurate representation of their lives.

I don't like the way these kids are like trophies for these people, and getting praise from others only encourages them. It's like they're trying to score points for taking on the burden of the most unwanted children. I guess it's 1 point for a poor kid from a different country, 1 point for special needs, and 2 points if they're both?

[Koala]

Ruthie and Abbie were the same girl... I guess after a year or two of Ruthie not really fitting in to the family they changed her name to Abbie to see if that would make a fresh start. There was a boy, Jerome, who left earlier. I think there was some s*xual acting out with him and he was out of there. You can search under 'Jerome' on their blog.

Oh, you are right! It's been so long since I read it, I was totally mixed up trying to remember

[Koala]

When you click that, it does break the link, but just in your post. When someone quotes you, the link is live in their post. Seems silly, but that's how the software rolls.

To break it, all you have to do is remove "http://www." and leave the rest alone. Easy peasy.

Thanks for asking!

Thanks! I'll make sure to break them from now on :)

[Val78]

Not fundie as much as some, and not abusive but maybe one of the most condescending ones I've met (though no disruptions, and the kids *seem* to do well enough) is Brent Riggs. The ego on that man is amazing...

Besides adopting to save the kids and martyr himself, it's because his kids have a wish? Unbelievable. No disruptions, I don't know what he'd do if faced with some of the more extreme issues some families go through .

[patsymae]

Not fundie as much as some, and not abusive but maybe one of the most condescending ones I've met (though no disruptions, and the kids *seem* to do well enough) is Brent Riggs. The ego on that man is amazing...

Besides adopting to save the kids and martyr himself, it's because his kids have a wish? Unbelievable. No disruptions, I don't know what he'd do if faced with some of the more extreme issues some families go through .

I just looked at his blog and he's saying that he's in danger of losing both of his adoptions, and believes that's a prevalent problem where he lives, because of OTHER PEOPLE being involved in fraud, baby selling and scamming. Assuming he's talking about real , concluded adoptions (and not the the fantasy ones in which entitled people talk about losing "their" baby who is actually someone's else's fetus), how is this possible? He says his attorney is ethical, and yet he wound up adopting illegally twice? If he and his attorney are so effing ethical, how come they didn't take steps BEFORE an adoption to make sure that no one was scamming, selling the baby or committing fraud? Because they are too stupid? Be because they didn't care? Because they feel entitled and never believed they would get called on anything? And now HE is the victim?

This is why it doesn't reassure me when people say that no ethical agency will approve an adoption by scumbags, so don't worry. While that may be true, IMO maybe 10 percent of the adoptions in this country (with the possible exception of from foster care) are ethical. I find it hard to believe that all throughout his region tons of ethical people just happen to be scammed (or tricked into buying a baby, which is really hard to imagine how that happens) as they go about collecting children. He also has ads on his site for "adoption opportunities," complete with pricetag, available through his lawyer. One is for a Marshallese family that has no other problem but poverty, but why should Christians help the families when they can just purchase the kid. While it would be illegal for the lawyer to advertise babies for sale, call yourself a fucking ministry and you can sell all the babies you want, apparently.

This whole nasty industry needs a major overhaul.

[lilah]

We have five biological children and four adoptees, one of those from a disruption. I like to think our family is a success story, but sometimes success is not measured the same way with children who have been through what some of these kids have been through. We lost one son last summer to Cystic Fibrosis which as devastating. He was much like Linzi and while he was exhausting, he was MINE from the day I made the commitment to him to the day he died in my arms. He died surrounded by a family that loved him and grieves him deeply. Unlike Mama, we accepted that people who were supposed to protect that baby broke him in ways our love could not heal, and we protected him from any further pain and brokenness as a family.

My child from disruption has a long journey of healing still ahead of him. He may not heal all of the way. But, he will know he is loved unconditionally and that he will always be my son, no matter where his life takes him in that healing journey.

I will say in all honesty that sometimes Job Corp can be a viable compromise when a teen and their adoptive family really don't want to live under the same roof anymore. It gives a child more autonomy at 16 instead of having to wait for the magical age of 18. It gives them education, which often is what is missing more than anything else in these situations. It allows adoptive parents to still be an influence and advocate for a teen, but doesn't push the intensity of family life that often teens who never attach to their families resent. Sometimes when you come into a family life as a teen after a lifetime of being independent and having to take care of yourself, you do NOT like having someone bigger trying to have authority over you.

My son told me hen he got here that he knew FAR more about surviving and making it than we could EVER teach him. I told him that he was an expert at surviving and that's how he got so far in life on his own. But, he didn't have a clue how to LIVE instead of survive and our home as his chance to learn how to LIVE instead of always just SURVIVING. I didn't want to insult him, because he is amazingly strong to have made it 14 years without anyone loving and protecting him. However, to transition to a normal life, he has to come out of survival mode and learn that it's okay to accept authority and rules. For him, Job Corp was and still is a viable option. Some teens cannot and will not accept family life. That is OKAY. It is better to be a safety net and advocate for them, to continue to love them unconditionally and provide a safe place to land BUT give them that independence and autonomy that is the only world they feel safe and comfortable in. Sometimes that is the compromise to launch them into a successful adulthood and frankly I wish more fundie adopters would consider Job Corp a better option than the stupid RTCs and group homes they keep dumping their older teens who cannot conform into.

It doesn't appear my son will do Job Corp. After a year of realizing that we GIVE respect and that is how we EARN respect, he has decided that while he still isn't sure he wants to be here, he sure LIKES family life and the respect, privileges and love we give him here. However, if he were to need Job Corp, I would not consider that a failure. I would also not throw him away there but would continue to be his mother but step back to give him the early autonomy over his life if that is what he needs to feel safe and try to overcome.

While there is not one formal network for rehoming kids, there are informal religious networks for moving these kids and most in these circles can quickly figure out how to tap into those informal networks. Part of it is this mentality so many of them ascribe to that sometimes God uses the first adoptive family to facilitate getting a child to the US and their forever family comes later. It's a HORRIBLE outlook on adoption. It centers on this constant "rescuing" they see adoption as. They fail to understand how devastating it is to a child to be brought to the US and then rejected. They just don't CARE what it's doing to the child when they rehome though. They only care about undoing what they did to their OWN lives.

Chaotic life- thank you for your insights into Job Corps for adoptees. I just get the impression that Baker's dozen just doesn't really care for her older kids in job corps as much as her younger bio and adopted as babies kids.

I find the notion of blaming a country for not properly explaining a kid's behavior issues is pretty abhorent. You can't expect kids growing up in an institution to always have the same acess to medical care or behavioral psychologists or hild development experts who can diagnose the children. Some times orphanages get it wrong. I have a freind who adopted a daughter from china and her kid was described as someone who loves listening to music. As it turns out the child was profoundly deaf! The mom didn't whine about how China sold her a bad bill of goods, she worked with her kid to get speech therapy, cochlear implants and lots of extra help and interventions and now the kid is an honor roll student and is doing really well!

And as I understand it, in China there is are a lot of stigmas around having a disability. Disabled children are told they are unadoptable, that no one would want them. Ironically though with the slow down on adoptions that has led more parents to persue special needs adoption. But there is still a lot of social incentive for orphanage workers to not identify children as being special needs in case that makes them unadoptable.

[Val78]

I do believe our adoption was ethical. I stay in (good) touch with the birth mom, and she was in a bad place where a baby wouldn't have helped, adoption being the best choice probably. We ran into plenty of situations that did not sit well at all and many countries that would didn't sound right. The Marshall Islands have a lot of problems, people wanting to save them and such.

[DarkAnts]

I remember Linzi's aborter talking about how her siblings did not like her because she did not play their games the way they wanted to play them. She also would not sit still and play video games. My first thought was did anyone ever try to teach Linzi how to play a game? My second thought was who cares if she cant sit still to play a video game. Kids play too many of those anyway.

Some kids need instructions on how to play. Its not a natural thing for kids who grew up in an institution. Also, there are language issues. She should not be expected to learn to play a game in a split second. Its going to take time and patients to teach her.

It just sounds like she was cast aside because she was not perfect from the start.

[moodygirl86]

Adopted or not, and whatever their nationality, this bitch needs to start treating her kids like human beings.

[adayinthelife]

She already has five daughters. How could you focus on being angry over China rejecting you when you already have five? Focus on them and being their Mom! The drive / need to always add another seems like something mental that needs to be addressed.

[fundiefun]

Does anyone remember treading the waters it was a blog run by a woman named Cori who adopted children from Africa. They had to place their son into a residential treatment center due to him sexually abusing the younger daughters. Even though he was no longer in the home she wouldn't stop campaigning for her son to have a second chance and to find a family and she still continued to visit him. She has no closed up shop but she wouldn't stop fighting for him even though he could no longer be safe in their home. I always wonder if he found his forever family, but I applaud her for still fighting for him to have the family that could meet his needs.

[Cheetah]

Does anyone remember treading the waters it was a blog run by a woman named Cori who adopted children from Africa. They had to place their son into a residential treatment center due to him sexually abusing the younger daughters. Even though he was no longer in the home she wouldn't stop campaigning for her son to have a second chance and to find a family and she still continued to visit him. She has no closed up shop but she wouldn't stop fighting for him even though he could no longer be safe in their home. I always wonder if he found his forever family, but I applaud her for still fighting for him to have the family that could meet his needs.

I think you are talking about one that I used to read, Watching the Waters and the kids were from Haiti, no? She had like 1 bio kid and something like 5 adopted Haitian kids. Not fundie. She actually started some weekend get-togethers in Florida for 'trauma mamas'. She seemed really like she was doing everything possible for him.

[fundiefun]

I think you are talking about one that I used to read, Watching the Waters and the kids were from Haiti, no? She had like 1 bio kid and something like 5 adopted Haitian kids. Not fundie. She actually started some weekend get-togethers in Florida for 'trauma mamas'. She seemed really like she was doing everything possible for him.

Yes that's her she wasn't religious for fundie in any way and was rocking a "chicks marry chicks get over it" shirt at some of the photos from the get together. Her get together has expanded and grown and many women attend in Florida every year. I think she did it right as much as she wanted to keep her son she knew she wouldn't be able to keep her girls safe or provide him with the therapy needed so she made it her job to find him a forever family.