Shannon: another adoption crazy.

[Toothfairy]

On Wednesday, February 01, 2017 at 10:11 AM, Jess said:

I really hate foreign adoptions. These couples all raise 20k+ to fund the adoption. When so often the children could stay with their family's of origin if that money was used to help feed and care for the child at home. I honestly wish more countries would ban international adoption or increases costs and give money to organizations that work to keep children in heir homes.

International adoption is popular because it's a big business. Orphan Sunday aka Christian saviors adopt for Jesus. And because nobody kisses their ass. Women don't place for adoption anymore like in the 60s and 70s. Foster care is free but the kids legally freed are older kids, siblings, kids with needs.  The first goal of foster care is reunification then kinship then adoption. People don't want to wait or they're picky. There are babies but they're not white or have needs

On Thursday, February 02, 2017 at 0:23 PM, ChunkyBarbie said:

Shannon even admitted that she is out for revenge against this boy. What. The. Eff!  She also basically  wants to look into his eyes and shame him and tell him how damages he is before he boards the plane back home.  Yeah, Jesus would totally love that Shannon.  I don't think I can keep reading her blog. 

I can't believe she was approved to adopt. Damn they take anyone

On Thursday, February 02, 2017 at 11:59 PM, Mercer said:

In addition to the reasons that have been mentioned, sometimes prospective adoptive parents who have some internalized fears of or prejudices about minorities in America imagine that transracial international adoption will somehow be a different or better experience.

It can be a pretty big shock to those adoptive parents when, for example, their cute little Ethiopian tot is not distinguished by society from any other African American young man after having grown up in the United States.

Obviously this doesn't apply to every adoption (and may or may not apply to Z, since there are multiple races in Ukraine) but it's a factor for some.

This. There were AP in a group I'm in say African kids are different than black kids here. Wtf? 

[Toothfairy]

14 hours ago, Anonymousguest said:

I have been in a community where there are lots of adopted kids, both domestically and internationally. A lot of the people I know adopted internationally to avoid having to do a home study with the state. I would say that's the biggest reason I've heard for people choosing to go international. Second would be involvement of the birth family. There were a whole bunch of people from church who adopted from Liberia several years ago. One family got 4 or 5 kids. It's been a nightmare for them. No one had birth certificates, so no proof of ages, and with the agency, or the country, someone was really pushing to get kids out of there. Once they got their kids home it turned out that they were probably closer to 20 than the 12-15 they thought. After some decent nutrition they gained weight, started menstruating, etc. They had trouble with drugs and alcohol, prostitution, etc almost as soon as they got then home. They were violent and dangerous and a that to the other kids in the home. They did at least get professional help and the parents stuck with them, but it's been very difficult and at least one of them ended up in an institution. 

I think the savior syndrome is strong. And I understand the feeling. I have SO much, shouldn't I share it with the Less fortunate? The whole adoption thing is often presented as a duty. I do sometimes feel guilty for not being willing or able to do it. Adopting older kids is really really hard, and I think most people (at least ones I know) going into are completely unprepared for how incredibly hard it is. Even if you adopt a child from your own state and don't have the language barrier they likely aren't going to see you as a self sacrificing saint, opening your home to them. In many cases you are part of the enemy, part of the system that took them away from their parents. Even kids who are fairly young when they are adopted still go through this later. There are some great stories out there, but most I know would say it's the hardest thing they have ever done, even the ones who were prepared and receive counseling and have great support. And some of the families I know won't even seek help because they are afraid of mainstream psychology. They won't go to a counselor or child psychologist because they don't want to be told not to spank their kids. Or things are so bad they are afraid cps will get involved.

 

There's no regulations there. It's a business. Go look up Christian World adoptions. How much corruption there is. The reason whyinternational adoption became popular was due to women not placing their babies with infertilecouples. So they went to China and Guatemala. You could get a baby in months. This lead to kids being stolen. The majority of countries who were open are now closed. China has a wait list up to ten years long for healthy kids over 2. It's rare to get a baby now

[Foudeb]

It *is* rougher to learn a foreign language as an adult. It's little things like having to force yourself to catch pitch and intonation where young children mimick it a lot more easily, or remembering a word - it could take several goes as an adult where a child's memory "muscles" are more robust.

This said all it really takes to do it anyway is time and motivation. You're having trouble hearing the difference between two sounds? Listen to tapes in a loop. Not remembering a word? Learn it again, and again. Etc.

And adults have more resources than kids. Financial - if a textbook or teacher doesn't work for you, you can just pick another (it'll still be a tiny fraction of what you paid for the adoption). Discipline - a child wants to play not sit in front of a book. Focus and concentration - where a child would reach saturation point and needs a play break  in a matter of minutes you can last for hours. And more importantly, experience, especially if you've learned a language before. You don't need to go through the building blocks of this is a noun, this is a verb, this is how to construct a sentence, and can skip straight to how it works differently in the target language.

I think English is actually pretty easy to learn (no declensions, no noun genders, hardly any conjugations). The difficulties are, imho, pronounciation (it's not spelled phonetically), spelling and use of prepositions. Nothing insurmountable. I'd feel sorry for a child denied the opportunity to speak their native language in favour of English, which they probably would have learned in school in their home country anyway. Denying them the opportunity to speak their native language is depriving them of a huge intellectual asset.

[Lurky]

@Mercer I hope you're right.  On the one hand, I wish it WAS a fake, but there really are crazies out there, but on the other, as you say, it's all a bit too much - from the ludicrous set-up to the fact the kid is apparently in and out of prison for assault, and hasn't had the social services involved....

[older than allosaurs]

A friend of mine did the home study for an international adoption that ended up going badly wrong.  She worked for a private, nonprofit agency with a somewhat religious slant:  as in--the founder saw it as a ministry but you didn't have to be religious to adopt through them.

She said that the pressure was financial, that the director only wanted to pay for one home visit during the home study. If she did a follow-up, it was on her own time and brought her hourly rate down below $10/hour. My friend  is an adoptive parent who was able to handle two very challenging placements and get those kids raised, law-abiding and self-supporting, and I think she tends to err on the side of optimism. With this family, she took assurances at face value that should have been investigated further, and the result was tragic.

[freedom_for_all]

I do feel like I have to stand up a bit in defense of international adoption, although obviously I had no choice in the matter since I was 7 at the time (bio kid with adopted sister, who is my sister as much as any sister with the same genetics would be. It would be impossible to love a sister more than I love my sister. I am a bit defensive on that point, but I am a mama bear type) .

Now, my family isn't Christian and I don't believe that we adopted through a Christian organization. We (my parents) had to do a lot of paperwork, get character references, have home visits, etc. Even after we adopted my sister we had visits from someone through the adoption agency for the first few years. They didn't adopt my sister due to some weird savior complex. I am not sure why they went for international adoption, but my family is from the area my sister was born in and that may have been a factor. For the first few years we did go to a group of families that all had adopted children from the same area but then a major natural disaster hit and everything kind of fell to shit. My sister was adopted as a very young child (just turned 1) and for all intents and purposes English is her first language. She is still young and has shown some desire to learn the language of the country of her birth but right now her main focus has to be school due to a learning difference. For the record, I also have learning differences. Bio kids are not guaranteed to be "perfect." We have always intended to go back to her native country to visit once she was older but due to the political climate at the moment things aren't exactly hunky-dory for American's there. Especially American Jews. 

I am rambling a bit but this topic is very near and dear to my heart. Not all adoption stories end up being a shit show like what happened to the poor child that was obviously adopted by people who had no businesses adopting. That poor boy has 100% of my sympathy. But I worry that stories like this scare people away from adoption. Yes, adopting a child is risky but so is having children. You can do everything right and still end up with a terror as a (bio) child. There are no guarantees in life. Yes, my sister does still have some anxieties stemming from being in an orphanage for the first year of her life. But I also have a whole bunch of problems from different unforeseen circumstances that happened in my childhood. Things that my parents couldn't have prevented. All I know is, while my sister can be a handful sometimes so can I. 

[Mercer]

I'm not per se opposed to international adoption. Working in children's mental health, I absolutely believe that a functional family unit is critical to child development, and sometimes international adoption is legitimately the best/only way to provide that for a child.

I just think that because being adopted to a different country and culture is so disruptive and so hard on identity formation, international adoption needs to be a last possible resort for a child who is not able to find a suitable placement in their own country, not a way to supply children to fill the desires of prospective parents in wealthier countries.

In my view, the options for child placement should be (in this order) : Reunification with the biological parents. Reunification with the extended biological family. Placement in the home community - not just hoping someone steps up, but actively recruiting foster or adoptive families and providing the resources they need. Placement within the home country. And if none of that works after a good faith effort, then yes, international adoption needs to be on the table, because kids need families. It just shouldn't be the default go-to option for any child who is orphaned or displaced. 

Too often the systems seem to get it backwards and base the decision on the child's desirability for adoption in terms of age and health, rather than on what's actually best for the child.

[Black Aliss]

On 2/4/2017 at 3:09 AM, Toothfairy said:

 There were AP in a group I'm in say African kids are different than black kids here. Wtf? 

There are people who want to adopt Ethiopian Amharic children because their skin may be dark but they don't have negroid features. Which is, I think, how Kidist Asrat distinguishes herself from people of color--she considers herself Caucasian because she is not Negroid.

[MsSaylor]

Holy fuck i havent thought of kidist for a minute! What the hell is that crazy bitch up to?!

[Anonymousguest]

15 minutes ago, Black Aliss said:

There are people who want to adopt Ethiopian Amharic children because their skin may be dark but they don't have negroid features. Which is, I think, how Kidist Asrat distinguishes herself from people of color--she considers herself Caucasian because she is not Negroid.

I had a friend in high school adopted from Ethiopia and she said the same, that she is Caucasian, and is what she checked on race. She's the only person I've ever known to say that, I don't know what she says now.

[Black Aliss]

19 hours ago, MsSaylor said:

Holy fuck i havent thought of kidist for a minute! What the hell is that crazy bitch up to?!

Oh, just the usual. Snarking on celebrities, railing against Those Who Are Destroying Western Civilization, re-telling the story of her life, grieving the demise of Larry Aster, and this week experiencing severe butt-hurt over some conservative online-publication (how is that different from a website?) having rejected an article she submitted to them, a long, pointless rant about everything that is bad about Sarah Jessica Parker.

[Mercer]

Digging a little bit more into this blog, Shannon is 1.) extremely easy to locate online based even on the small amount of information on her blog, and 2.) asking for money.

I still don't believe her, and I think she's trying to spin a good story to gain sympathy and attention, and maybe gain some cash on top of it. 

[FeministShrew]

If you can manage to find her Facebook page and scroll back a few years, the boy appears in family photos. They even had a "Gotcha Day" photo shoot, and she was posting about how wonderful adoption is, and all about opening your heart & home. All public posts, so she didn't bother to scrub him from her FB.
It appears Z really does exist, and that she really adopted him. She's just a horrible, vindictive person.

Also, she doesn't mention her husband as being very involved in the decision to adopt. She thought the kid was cute, God spoke to her, she decided to adopt him.
 

[heidi]

8 hours ago, Mercer said:

Digging a little bit more into this blog, Shannon is 1.) extremely easy to locate online based even on the small amount of information on her blog, and 2.) asking for money.

I still don't believe her, and I think she's trying to spin a good story to gain sympathy and attention, and maybe gain some cash on top of it. 

She's all over social media. I wish I hadn't looked. Ugh. She comes across as self-righteous, angry, bitter and vindictive. She feels personally wronged and she's taking it all out on a child. What a sick woman. 

[laPapessaGiovanna]

On 4/2/2017 at 4:43 AM, desertvixen said:

@Mercer, I agree with you om the language.  I learned Russian as a 19-20 year old (with classes for 6-8 hours a day) and it was rough.  However, it also taught me that if you aren't a native English speaker, English is NUTS.  It's ridiculous, like the letters are made up and none of the rules REALLY count.   But that these people can't even learn a little bit, just to help the kids along - that's ridiculous.

As an ESL I agree with @Foudeb that English isn't overly difficult to learn as an adult. English grammar is pretty basic compared to other languages. BUT your pronunciation non-rules are NUTS, I mean how can you write "cough" and read it "cof"? It's as if coughing you aspire a bunch of letters and then throw out only half of them and badly mangled too. I think that it may be a problem for older adoptees who learned to write and read in a phonetic system. Spelling isn't considered difficult in my language for example, we don’t have spelling contests, there are few pronunciation rules and children get the knack of it pretty quickly. 

[Black Aliss]

3 hours ago, laPapessaGiovanna said:

 BUT your pronunciation non-rules are NUTS, I mean how can you write "cough" and read it "cof"? It's as if coughing you aspire a bunch of letters and then throw out only half of them and badly mangled too.

"aspiring a bunch of letters and then throwing out only half of them" kind of describes French, too, at least my attempts to learn to speak it. Except that at least the pronunciation is consistent.

There is a poem that begins:

Quote

I take it you already know,
Of tough and bough and cough and dough?
Others may stumble, but not you,
On hiccough, thorough, lough and through?

 

[laPapessaGiovanna]

44 minutes ago, Black Aliss said:

"aspiring a bunch of letters and then throwing out only half of them" kind of describes French, too, at least my attempts to learn to speak it. Except that at least the pronunciation is consistent.

There is a poem that begins:

 

Exactly,  it's the lack of consistency that I find baffling. The pronunciation difference between cough and hiccough  is a good example. 

[Terrie]

One thing that really bugs me about this story is that she ignores the way the adoption system treated this child as a commodity and lied to him. There's no anger for the people who lied to him and forced him to say he wanted to be adopted, only anger at a child and wailing about her, her, her. She's running around on social media, begging the government to deport children(!) whose adoptions don't work out, trying to portray them as fraudsters who are trying to scam citizenship. You're an adult, lady. You had the power. Not a 13 year old child.

[Fundiewonder]

Her friend Kathe's blog is equally frightening. The woman adopted four teenagers from the Ukraine and then wondered why there were major problems.  I'm disgusted that an agency would allow this, and I'm disgusted that the parents didn't have the common sense to realize that such an adoption was doomed.

http://simplymyopinionbykathe.com/category/ukraine-adoption/

[PopRox]

51 minutes ago, Fundiewonder said:

Her friend Kathe's blog is equally frightening. The woman adopted four teenagers from the Ukraine and then wondered why there were major problems.  I'm disgusted that an agency would allow this, and I'm disgusted that the parents didn't have the common sense to realize that such an adoption was doomed.

http://simplymyopinionbykathe.com/category/ukraine-adoption/

I just read the posts on the first page and all I can think is "What the f--- did I just read?!?"

[laPapessaGiovanna]

4 hours ago, PopRox said:

I just read the posts on the first page and all I can think is "What the f--- did I just read?!?"

She's crazy.

Spoiler

It’s overwhelming reading the responses to my last several postings.  Over 1K shares on FB alone and many, many times re-posted within social media.  Change is definitely needed in the area of adoption of older children and teens.  There are too many broken families to keep things the same and this has hit a nerve in the adoption community.

Some of the stories you’ve read are our own personal experiences.  Others I’ve written about were told to me by mothers and fathers devastated and with no where to turn to make things right in their families.  This has got to change.  We need to step up to safeguard our families.

And remember these are good families.  Families that have put everything on the line to bring one, or more, children/teens into their family.  They’ve gone through the gamut of social worker visits for home studies, had FBI background checks and invasive medical examinations of the entire family to ensure they are healthy; physically, mentally and emotionally in order to adopt.   And they have invested tens of thousands of dollars and racked up enormous debt, both for the adoption and for post-adoption care including counseling and court costs.

At that point all investigating goes out the window.  None is done on the potential adoptive child/teen.  In fact, in many cases when it comes to international adoption medical and emotional issues are kept hidden, medical records are non-existent and adults in control lie about the attributes in order to make the child/teen more appealing.

For one of our teens we got a bio that said something like the following:  loves to cook, garden and do crafts.  Dearly wants a mom to do things in the kitchen with.  She is so loving and affectionate.  Getting that teen home they have not once in 16 months helped out in the kitchen or garden unless pressured.  And we’ve been told countless times that everyone, including the teen, lied in Ukraine in order for them to be adopted and how much they hate our family.

Some have commented that I sound angry.  I wonder if those who state that would be willing to walk in my shoes for awhile?  And please get this, I am not angry at the teen, I am angry at this broken system.  A righteous anger that needs to happen in order to make a difference.  And we should ALL be angry that even one family is going through what we have. We should ALL want to make a difference.

I will state once again that I know there are some good adoptions.  Some great stories of redemption and amazing futures for adopted children/teens. 

This idiot didn't adopt one Ukrainian teen aging out, nor two, nor three, but FOUR. And *shocker* there were enormous unforeseen issues. But it isn't her fault for being a fucking idiot with a saviour complex, no can't be that. It's the wicked SYSTEM! They lied to her poor woman! 

Now, I have no doubt that she was lied to regarding the kids situation, but only an idiot would think that FOUR older institutionalised teens wouldn't have had BIG issues. 

Let's suppose that "the system" didn't lie and told things as are, how many teens on the verge of aging out without issues and shiny perfect for adoption does she think there are? 

And don't get me started on the "great stories of redemption"! *rage fit

[Foudeb]

Quote

Getting that teen home they have not once in 16 months helped out in the kitchen or garden unless pressured

Hands up anyone who's known a teen anywhere at any point since the beginning of time who has ever done anything productive without being pressured into it.

Newsflash, if you want a gardener or a cook, you hire a gardener or a cook. You don't adopt a teen.

[LilMissMetaphor]

9 hours ago, Fundiewonder said:

Her friend Kathe's blog is equally frightening. The woman adopted four teenagers from the Ukraine and then wondered why there were major problems.  I'm disgusted that an agency would allow this, and I'm disgusted that the parents didn't have the common sense to realize that such an adoption was doomed.

http://simplymyopinionbykathe.com/category/ukraine-adoption/

Among other disgusting things...she refers to her kids as "the Ukrainians" and separated the boys from one of her biological sons' room so bio son wouldn't "have to hear Russian all the time".  

[crawfishgirl]

2 hours ago, laPapessaGiovanna said:

For one of our teens we got a bio that said something like the following:  loves to cook, garden and do crafts.  

Sounds like something from a dating site.  And of course everything on a dating site is true..  

This just makes me sad.  Sad that it got to this point, sad that she is so incapable if seeing her own mistakes as well, and sad that she is not trying to just do her best instead of expecting sympathy from strangers on the internet.  I truly think that these people don't do any research before they move forward with such a life-altering decision as adoption, and that they knowingly put blinders on and turn off their common sense while going through the process.

[Lurky]

17 hours ago, laPapessaGiovanna said:

Exactly,  it's the lack of consistency that I find baffling. The pronunciation difference between cough and hiccough  is a good example. 

Cough, hiccough, bough, bought, dough, drought etc etc - I really loved learning Spanish for not only the straightforward "say it like you see it" pronunciation, but also the super-clear rules on where to put the stress in a word - with accents for anything that broke the rule!  Simple!