I saw an article today in my in-box by a mother who “abandoned” her son in order to get him mental health care. Which reminded me too much of the awful predicament of another blogging parent I’d read last month. I have felt a bit squeamish up till now about participating in discussion of adoption and mental health issues. Because it is so common for people who find out you are adopting out of foster care to ask why you’d want to take “those kids” with “all those problems.” And I know that I am adopting the young people I want to parent just because these are the young people I want to parent. And that my life is richer for having them in it, despite the sometimes frustrating difficulties. And kids don’t usually end up in the foster system for anything about them but because of their parents problems, so it doesn’t seem fair to fit them into neat little categories. And because kids are in a system that is focused on “treatment”, so all of them have files that contain lists of their many disorders, and that many of these so-called disorders are normal reactions to an abnormal situation. What I like to call Failure to Thrive in the Foster Care System Disorder or FTTFCSD. .

The harsh reality, however, is that most kids in the system do have significant mental health problems. Whatever their parents did to them to get them removed certainly had an impact and sometimes a permanent one. Pre-natal drug and alcohol use can result in a variety of permanent disabilities, including damage to one’s brain. My daughters both have ADHD as do I, but mine is likely the old-fashioned inherited characteristic and theirs is most likely a result of prenatal crack exposure. And that is just the beginning. The best word I’ve heard lately that seems appropriate is “traumatized”. These are traumatized kids. I was also a traumatized kid, I know about these things and the lifelong impact that results from what you do to a baby or child.

And whatever you don’t enter the system with, it gives you. Some kids do enter the system coming out of reasonably adequate or sometimes good homes. Children may have had a parent who was not caring for them and perhaps not able to care for them according to certain standards, but where they were nonetheless loved and nurtured. Or where they were basically OK and had other people in their lives who made their lives work. One young woman I know was removed at age 13 from what had been a good home for her because of abuse by a father against a sister only to be placed in the homes of people who really did beat and rape her. Many kids like her suffer abuse in the system and at the hands of foster parents that is much worse than what happened in the homes they were removed from. And we know that just not having a permanent home or parents, being bounced from place to place with all one’s connections in the world ripped up over and over is very damaging. So, what we have is a system for taking kids who have been through hell and putting them through more hell. Of course they have psychiatric problems.

One of my daughters does have significant mental health issues. And I don’t think she is getting appropriate help for them. The other does not although she had just as long a list of disorders in her files. She might have earlier in her life, I am not qualified to say, but all she has now besides the ADHD are delays resulting from her life in the system and lack of education and experience. Both are survivors – when you take kids when they are already in their teens, the ones you meet are the ones who have survived and managed fairly successfully in the world.

All that said, it’s been heartbreaking for me to read the stories of really good adoptive parents, doing the work of parenting the most traumatized of our children, who are unable to get the help they need to properly care for these kids and instead are often punished for it. The public does not generally know that parents sometimes have to legally abandon their children and face charges of neglect to get them the level of care that they need and that will keep them from harming other children in their homes or their parents.

When I was taking required parenting classes, I did them with an organization that specifically looks for permanent homes for “tweens” and teens. We were told over and over that the one thing you never do is tell your kids they no longer have a home if they do specific behaviors. Because the critical thing we have to offer is permanency, someone who has a lifelong commitment to them. That telling them they have a home and then abandoning them back to the system is the worst thing we could do to them. We were told that we need to think like parents, not foster parents. If a foster parent has a child go to jail or end up in a hospital or residential placement, that connection is severed. If a parent has a child go to jail, they have a child in jail. If they have a child in a residential facility, that is still their child in the residential facility.

Which is all well and good, but it seems we are not giving parents this opportunity. In order to get their children into appropriate care, parents are looking at no choice besides legally dissolving their relationship to their children, or legally abandoning them. This is very very bad and we need to change this if some of our most traumatized children are to have good families and a shot at the best possible future.