The thread on adopted vs biological children got me thinking. Adoption has always been something I’ve been willing to do. The world is crowded. Less diapers. Lot of ups IMO. Anyway, I’ve often wondered what if you don’t like the child you’re given/adopted? Or something happens that makes keeping the child very burdensome and/or costly? I can’t remember the details, but I read about a woman who adopted a child and give it back and the shit storm it caused.
Do you think adoptive parents morally have the right to give back the child?
We aren’t USED FUCKING CARS!!! :rolleyes: I’m adopted, and disabled, this double whammy makes me damn near impossible to place.
No, I don’t. If you adopt a child you’re taking it for your own, and accepting whatever problems, expenses, and personality clashes come down the road. Just like having one of your own.
I don’t think you should be allowed to ‘give back’ your child. I am a little biased since I have adopted children, of course.
Now, that said, we got to pick our children (though Child Services has final approval, of course). We chose what we thought we could handle (dealing with the public system so many children have issues, are disabled and/or are developmentally challenged). We got to meet them and hang out some before they were told we were it. We recieved all the information (medical, school, assessments) about them beforehand. If they got here and we couldn’t handle it during the placement period (before the adoption was finalized), we could have “given them back” but that would pretty much be the end of us ever adopting another child.
Aside: when you give birth to a child there are even LESS guarantees about costs and burdens. Nothing is known about the health of that child until they are born.
You generally have to be pretty motivated to go through the adoption process.
In practise its pretty unlikely unless some serious personality issues are present or the like, in which case it might be worth considering. Its not uncommon to worry it will happen, not so common in practise.
We also got to meet our child and spend time with her before we said yes, so its not like there wasnt time to back out if it didnt feel right.
Otara
But you do have more control over what happens to the kid. If you adopt a child, someone might have abused it or taken drugs during pregnancy, or just left it alone in a crib for hours at a time. If you’re giving birth to your own child, you make sure that it at least gets a good upbringing.
I used to work at an adoption agency. There’s a lot of parents that come through who aren’t gems themselves. One co-worker told me it’s like selling used cars…all they care about is the mileage and the color.
Adopting is not about perfection. It’s about opening your home and your heart, regardless of the faults.
Do you think bio parents have the right to give up parental rights simply because it gets tough?
BTW, when you adopt a child as a baby, you get to make sure it gets a good upbringing too. And you get to make decisions when you adopt…like “I want a child no older than a year” or “I want a child who has no known birth defects” and even “I want a child from a birthmother who didn’t smoke.” Granted, make your list too long and too perfect and you won’t find a placement (there are not that many white, attractive, athletic, Ivy League undergrads who don’t drink or smoke putting up babies for adoption.) I have a friend who did everything right in her pregnancy (in terms of the 'don’t drink, don’t smoke, take you prenatal vitamins), and her labor went horribly wrong and her daughter has CP.
Biological parents do it all the time, its called adoption.
Here the thinking is more that theres more parents wanting to adopt than children to adopt. You dont get to do it after a year or whatever, but if things turn out to initially be not what people thought, they do get handed back sometimes, because there are much better options available than keeping going with someone who is ambivalent. The idea always is whats best for the child, not teaching the parents a lesson as such.
It all comes down to the individual circumstances.
Otara
Yes, as infants. When you give up your parental rights sometime later, its usually considered child abandonment.
There is a process to go through to give up parental rights of a child. Basically the state needs to declare you unfit - or you need to take it upon yourself to find someone to sign parental rights to.
There are not more parents wanting to adopt than children available. There are more parents wanting to adopt healthy infants than children available. Older, disabled, non-white, and - especially - emotionally challenging children languish in the system. I’m sure you’d have little issue turning over a healthy infant if you got back to your social worker and said “well, we thought we wanted to be parents, but we were unaware of this diaper changing, lack of sleep stuff.”
However, with many of these older child placements, they encourage being a foster parent first. Foster parents do get the “get out of jail free” card of “well, we decided we don’t want to do this anymore.” Adoptive parents and bio parents, signing over parental rights is a much bigger deal.
I live in Australia (hence the ‘here’), so we’re probably talking about different processes.
My point is there isnt a universal law on this issue and countries vary on their views on how to handle it. Here it can be considered better that the child remain in foster care rather than a bad placement occur for instance, regardless of health etc.
Otara
Certainly, that is the case here, but once the placement has been made (i.e. the social worker has done their job), you have become the parents and are responsible for the child. It would be rather unlikely in most states (each U.S. state has different requirements) to pass a homestudy if you were so cavalier about your child as to consider giving it up.
Thats not the case here.
DHS remains the legal guardian of the child when the child is initially placed, and while that is more intended for them to take back the child if theres problems, it also means that people arent obligated to view the child as ‘theirs’ legally until guardianship is passed over to them, which takes about 8 months to a year normally after the child has gone home with them.
As you say, in practise its rare due to screening, but it does happen on occasion.
Otara
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What thread?
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What? I adopted a girl. It’s my kid. I can’t(and wouln’t) ever give up on her and shouldn’t be allowed to legally.
This OP makes me want to puke.
Uh, what if you don’t like the child that is born to you? I work with a person who fights a lot with her biological daughter. To the point she can’t stand her some time. But it’s her child. Same with adoption.
Other people have biological kids that are disabled and become expensive. Same for adoptive parents.
True–I didn’t mean it was an excuse to give up kids. Just that you do have more control in some regards. Also, I was referring more to kids who get adopted later in life. Someone who adopts a kid who’s older and who’s had a horribly abusive childhood may not know what they’re getting into and probably wouldn’t have that same experience if they were getting a baby (either their biological baby or an adopted).
Perhaps this is the story to which the OP is referring? It is pretty horrific – an American woman sent her adopted child back to Russia, alone – but it also isn’t hard to believe that the woman was honestly mislead about the boy’s mental problems.
Good friends of mine adopted a four-year-old boy from the Ukraine and it has been… I don’t want to say devastating (god forbid they ever read this), but, after two years, if they had it all to do again I’m not sure they would. Their marriage is all but done, they’ve spent a ton of money on the adoption itself and therapy afterwards, and their other son, two years older, has pretty much withdrawn from neglect. The little boy is lovely in many ways, but when people talk about the fundamental first years of a child’s life, and parental bonding (his birth mother was apparently an alcoholic – as was the birth mother of the child in the article, at least according to authorities), it’s really, really tough to not at least have the words ‘lost cause’ flicker in your mind.
I’m reminded a bit of those ‘safe haven’ spots set up for people to drop off unwanted children, mostly at hospitals (I think the idea was for newborns but a few teenagers got dropped off). I’m torn on the issue, so I guess adoption regret fits there, somewhere.
ETA Upon rereading, I apologize if I come off sounding like I support shipping adopted kids back to their home countries, or that there won’t be difficulties to work through, or anything like that. I really don’t know enough about their situation, first-hand, to describe it as well as I’d like to.
Cat Fight, along those lines, when I wrote my post I was also thinking of that disturbing case where a couple fostered/adopted three boys who had been so horribly abused that they were just beyond all help. They would try to attack/kill their foster parents, manage to break into each other’s rooms at night to have sex, all kinds of insanely disturbing things. At some point you may have to say that this probably wouldn’t have happened if you’d raised the kids yourself from birth on.
I was an older foster child; I like to say I was well past my ‘sell by’ date when my mother went to prison.
There are older children with severe issues that can tear apart well-meaning, loving foster/adoptive parents. There are also kids like I was, abused and neglected but sane and loving. You must forgive me if this is a personal cause of mine – but I feel like foster kids who are over the cute toddler stage are unfairly tarred as utterly damaged. We are unwanted, and there’s even some stigma once we’re fully grown adults and try to tell people about our experiences (I have good friends who have counseled me not to tell people about being an older foster child, because they say people will “judge” me). I am not trying to pooh-pooh the experience of parents who find themselves with disturbed and unmanageable children, but some of us are still children, still worthwhile, still loveable, still loving.
In my mind, once you adopt a child they’re your kid. Just as much your biological kid (and damn, I hate that way of putting it–what’s an adopted kid, a cyborg?) would be.
Even with kids you yourself gave birth to/contributed half the DNA of, though, sometimes you can’t handle parenting them anymore. That’s where the foster care system comes in. But the idea that giving up an adopted kid should be any less difficult or life-changing than giving up a non-adopted kid…no. That just makes me see red.
I’ve complained in the past about how long and difficult the adoption process is–I’ve got friends who’ve wrestled with it for years–but threads like this make me see the reasoning behind it. I think a lot of care should be taken kids go to the families that suit them. You don’t want to place a child with someone who’s not 100% sure they can be their parent.
(Also, hey, if you can throw someone out of your family for not ‘liking’ them, I’ve got a few blood relatives I’d like to get rid of…)
Go look up the definition of “adoption”.
Closing thread.