Do you fucking know how to read?
I think your point was somewhat obscure but a good one.
It would be better if it were at all possible for the foster parent to sue the state for the missinformation, and use that to help provide the problem child with as much help as possible. I susspect the foster parent realises this, and realises that the best thing for the child would be a foster home, and that is something she cannot provide (due to her other obligations to other children).
Maybe by disolving the adoption she is giving the child a chance to be adopted or put into a scheme that will protect him and protect others from him.
Sadly, that doesn’t appear to be the reason she’s doing this at all. In her very own words (though bolding is mine):
Yeah, people get hurt alright. Like a terrified and emotionally damaged little boy who used to make her soup and rub her feet when she was sick, who freaked out whenever he heard an ambulance, until he found out his mother was OK. Like a little boy who is likely going to be far more damaged by the first real mother he’s ever known actually fighting in the courts to terminate her motherhood of him in order to prove a fucking point.
The state fucked up big time. They committed a gross fraud upon this family and ought to have to pay for their negligence. Unfortunately, Mrs. Briggs elected not to pursue that avenue, hoping her son could come home when he completed his treatment. Well, the doctors said he couldn’t – he was too dangerous. I understand that she had no choice in the matter.
But what that woman owed him was to reassure him that she loved him unconditionally even though he couldn’t live in their house anymore. Then place him into whatever type of facility or environment will best suit his illnesses, encourage recovery, and still allow her access and oversight as his parent. That’s what a mother should do.
Instead, now he knows that if she had known how sick he really was when he first came to her, she never would’ve taken him in the first place! What a horrible, horrible thing for a child to have to believe.
That is just jaw-droppingly mortifying to me. If we were talking about an adult psychopath, maybe. But we’re talking about a brain-damaged, physically and emotionally abused little boy here. She has likely destroyed any hope he ever had of rehabilitation, let alone any kind of joy or happiness he could’ve gotten out of life. He’s the one I’m truly heartsick about.
He deserved better.
Well how much molesting could he have gotten up to if the diaper was still on?
I am so going to hell for laughing at this. Damn you (too)!
When I was in high school, the mother of my boyfriend at the time had to legally emancipate her 16-year-old daughter because the girl’s behavior was completely out of control. How is this any different?
Hang on, where should she keep the kid other than in her home? What is she supposed to do? Rent a second house to keep this one kid in?
I took Shayna’s statement to mean that the woman, as a parent to this child, should take the responsibility of paying for his continued care in a hospital or other “safe” facility. I rather agree with that.
Life isn’t always nice. Neither is parenting, I imagine. The boy’s problems are kind of extreme, but abandonment (to make a statement! :rolleyes: ) would probably not* help his [potential] recovery.
*IANAD, you are not (nor is he) my patient, etc.
Maybe you missed this part of the article:
She can either take him into her home and try to raise him, which means she has to abandon all the other children in her care, and never see her grandkids again. Or, she can do as you suggest she do (and, indeed, as she is doing right now) and keep the kid in a hospital where she is not allowed to so much as see him, let alone act as his mother. And pay $400 a month to keep him there, plus court costs.
Frankly, I very much doubt that recovery is a possibility at all for this kid. He’s raping two year olds, for fuck’s sake! How the hell do you rehabilitate that? Mrs. Briggs made a very hard choice, but it was the best one available to her. She can’t help that kid. She can help the kids who are still in her care. She chose to help the kids who still have a future. It’s awful that this other kid takes it in the teeth because of that decision, but ultimatly, that’s not Mrs. Briggs’ fault. It’s the fault of the people who abused him when he was younger, and the state for lying about his condition. Punishing Briggs’ other foster children for that mistake isn’t fair. Forcing Briggs to continue to pay for the sick kid’s hospitalization after she was essentially tricked into assuming responsibility isn’t fair to her or to the other children under her care.
It’s an absolutely impossible situation this woman has been put into, and it takes some Big Brass ones to judge her for making the best out of it that she can, and maybe doing something to prevent other people from being trapped into it the way she was.
A know a lot of people who have given birth. Some of those kids turned out, some of them were disasters, even though the kids were bio. Some had birth defects, some learning disabilities, some were just problem kids. The kids are certainly lucky to be born, but its been hell on the parents.
Having kids is a crapshoot no mater how you get them. We have fewer problems with my adoptive son than with my bio daughter (they are both pretty good kids, he is just much easier).
Yes, BrattiAtti, that is exactly what I meant.
And maybe you missed the part you quoted that says,
Hmmm, gee, ya think maybe he might become violent and angry on the 3 measly times she’s bothered to grace this child with the honor of her presence because she has abandoned him? They aren’t refusing to allow her to see him because of some policy or red tape or departmental procedure. They’re doing it because it’s unsafe for the child. I contend Mrs. Briggs could’ve mitigated that response by her continued support and presence in his life. Then she wouldn’t be suffering all of the responsibilities without any of the rights of a parent.
Mrs. Briggs had 2 years after she learned of the child’s true condition to take action against the state. She CHOSE not to. She took on the responsibility of a special needs child that she knew was on medication and had behavioral problems. That they turned out to be more severe than she bargained for does not relieve her of her moral, ethical, and yes, financial responsibilities to take care of her child. If she didn’t want to have to support him through whatever trials life brought along with him, she (a) shouldn’t have legally adopted him, and/or (b) should’ve sued the state when she had the chance.
I am very sorry for Mrs. Briggs. After all her good works, she got dealt a very bad hand. But I think she made a mistake in how she handled that hand, and now a child is suffering more than he might have had to, had she not reinforced his notion that he is unloved and not worthy of belonging in this world.
I hear what you’re saying, Shayna, but I don’t understand what you think the alternatives were.
He molested other family members. Therefore, he cannot remain in the home. She has turned him over to the state, which is the only reasonable course of action. She has visited him (I didn’t get a sense from the article of how far apart her visits were), and it was so upsetting to him that she’s been asked to stop seeing him. At the same time, the state is asking that she continue to support him. This is the same state that lied to her, repeatedly and over time, about the boy’s history.
As far as I am concerned, the state played a dirty trick on her and now both she and the boy are suffering for it. She is asking that the state be held accountable, in at least small part because she can no longer reasonably be a parent to him. I don’t see this as any different than any other parent seeking to terminate their parental rights when they can no longer effectively care for a child. It’s sad, but it happens all the time.
No, actually, I don’t think that. As I read that part of the article, his violent reactions started because she refused to abandon the other children she’s responsible for in order to bring him home. The article doesn’t make it clear what the order of events here is, but I think if any situation calls for giving someone the benefit of the doubt, it is this one. If, indeed, he reacts violently around her not because she’s trying to dissolve the adoption, but because she won’t release him from the hospital, would that change your perception of the appropriateness of her actions?
Hmm. I think the two year gap between becoming aware of how damaged the boy really was, and her decision to sue speaks well of her. It indicates that, rather than trying to cash in on a slam-dunk lawsuit, she intended to fulfil her responsibilities to this child before circumstances made it clear that it was simply impossible for her to do so.
There are ways to control some of the risks, I’d hate to say this but if your adopted child is a source of headaches, the knowledge that this isn’t your child makes a difference for a lot of people. I see some adoptive parents love their problem children unconditionally and I see others who wish they could turn back the clock. I am at the age where a lot of my friends and acquantances have adopted children. A lot of them use adoption “consultants” to help them with the adoption process. Most of them end up adopting girls from China because the “one child” policy has flooded orphanages with the unwanted female children of otherwise perfectly normal healthy parents who want a son. On the whole these kids are all fairly healthy and do as well as their peers in school, they don’t look quite like their adoptive parents but there are so many adopted Chinese girls at these private schools that it doesn’t really become an issue. One friend wanted to adopt a white child to make things easier on themselves and they tried to find some pregnant teenager from the midwest that wanted to give up her child but they couldn’t locate one, so they adopted from Eastern Europe. It turns out that the boy’s mother drank a lot of alcohol during pregnancy and has severe disciplinary problems (he has been kicked out of school because he routinely beats up other kids at school (sometimes pretty severely) and never pays attention in class). When we get together, you can tell, these parents wish they could make their adoption decision over again and go for the Chinese girl.
Its sad that some kids are just broken, but they are. When they are your flesh and blood, you go to the ends of the earth and ruin yourself financially and emotionally pursuing the slim hope that you can fix them. When they are not your flesh and blood, its harder to forsake all else for this one child.
The article doesn’t really make it clear as to what she is suing for. It seems to me that she is asking the courts to dissolve the adoption. The article doesn’t say anything about her asking the state for damages.
I’m sad to say that it sounds like this kid is always going to be a danger to himself and others and that there is nothing that can be done about it.
Right, I don’t get that sense either. I think she’s trying to terminate her parental rights (and responsibilities) on the grounds that the state didn’t adequately notify her of what she was getting into. I don’t think she wants money from them.
It’s unclear that the boy’s victims were family members, but that’s irrelevant – he can’t be in the home with other children regardless. As for the state asking that she continue to support him, in spite of them having been the ones who lied to her initially, I still don’t see why that absolves her of her financial responsibility to this child. Should a man be let off the hook for child support if he can show that the mother lied to him about being on birth control and intentionallly tricked him into getting her pregnant? I think most people would say no. He took the chance when he did the dance and now he’s responsible, regardless of the woman’s duplicitous role in events.
Same here. Mrs. Briggs was the victim of a lie that, because she relied upon it, put her in a position of now being financially responsible for the care of a child. As a long-term foster parent I believe she knew there were risks involved with adopting a special-needs child, and she got more money from the state for taking him in as a foster child.
Once she legally adopted him, she stopped getting state money for his care, which means all his food, clothing, medicine, school supplies, etc., were coming out of her pocket. She understood and accepted that burden. Why should she now have to stop paying child support just because “the bitch (state) lied”? She still has a child that she took on legal responsibility for and I contend that she should live up to that obligation, even if she can’t continue to raise him in her own home. Frankly, I think the dollar amount would probably work out to less than what it would actually cost her to raise him under her own roof, so finanically, she’s really getting off easy.
No, not at all. For starters, see my above reply to Beadalin. But in addition to believing she remains financially obligated to this boy’s care, I think that “unadopting” him is clearly having extraordinarily damaging effects on his emotional stability, which was already extremely fragile to begin with. Even if his outbursts are the result of his mother not being able to take him back home, and that fact wouldn’t change even if she wasn’t “unadopting” him, what could possibly change is the boy’s perception of himself as unloveable and unwanted by the one mother who ever loved him in his entire miserable life. Even if he can’t go home, “the boy. . . wants Briggs to be his mother forever,” and I think she should be.
I don’t dispute that we’re talking about a generally good woman here. And I commend her for everything she did to try to help this child. But I don’t think her responsibility to him is fulfilled, just because the state lied to her and he turned out to have more problems than she anticipated.
The very least she should do is not send the message to this child that he’s unwanted, which is exactly what dissolving the adoption does. In reality, she doesn’t ‘not want’ him; she simply can’t have him in her home. I don’t pretend to know whether his behavior and rehabilitation would improve had she stood by him as his mother, but it’s clear that the adoption dissolution has been to his emotional detriment.
She long ago gave up the right to pursue the state financially for their fraud. So if she wants to “change the system,” she could still do that by lobbying her congressional representatives to enact stricter legislation, or extend the statute of limitations on fraud claims, or any number of other avenues that wouldn’t involve further damaging a young boy’s life in the process.
One of the nice things about adoption is that you have the opportunity to control some risks that you couldn’t control otherwise.
But there aren’t guarentees with children, not with bio kids, not with adopted kids. This kid isn’t a condemation of all adoptees. Every time something like this happens it becomes a “well, you know…adoptees…”
(Yes, some kids are broken. Some get broken by their histories, others are just borken. Our son was adopted from South Korea - better prenatal medical care than China, better diets, less coersion, better system, great medical care, wonderful one on one (generally) foster care pre-adoption, very little alcohol abuse by women, children are generally in their permanent home before one year…all in all chosen to limit our risks.)
Nitpick: I don’t know how it is in Virginia, but in Massachusetts a foster parent who adopts a child in his/her care continues to get some degree of financial support for that child, so I’m told by a good friend who’s a foster mother for severely handicapped children. A sensible policy, it seems to me, since it offers an incentive to adopt.
I stand corrected in my assumption – thank you. And if it is the case in Virginia, and Mrs. Briggs continues to receive financial assistance for this boy’s care even after his adoption, that brings up the question as to whether she’d still be receiving it even though he’s no longer in her physical custody, and while she’s being charged $427 a month by the state for his support.
Either way, I still hold the same position; she accepted full parental responsibility for this child, knowing at least to some degree that he came with a set of serious emotional, psychological and physical problems. Now that the worst has played out, even though she must institutionalize him because of his problems, she is not absolved of her parental responsibilities.