Why You Should Not Adopt

We welcomed a new kitten into our home just recently. All animal lovers will tell you that once you decide to add a pet to your family, you have the responsibility to look after that pet for the rest of its life — unless you are dealing with truly exceptional circumstances and go about finding a new owner in a responsible manner.

Pet shelters make sure that a person's commitment to their new pet is more than just verbal. New pet owners sign a contract that specifies exactly how the animal should be taken care of. The adopter agrees to “always provide proper and necessary care and treatment for the animal I have adopted, including but not limited to humane treatment, shelter, food, love, and veterinary care.”

That's just the start. New pet owners may contractually be obliged to provide the pet with a microchip and may even have to agree to random visits from the animal shelter's staff to ensure the pet's well-being. If the pet is found to be neglected, the pet will be taken away and the owner will be liable to pay an owner release fee.

In the West, we care deeply about pets — more so than we do about human children, it seems in many cases. In England, the Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals was founded before the similar society that aimed to protect children. That only became established once someone took a child to the RSPCA for the simple reason that there was nowhere else to turn.

Adoption: Not Forever After All? If You Don't Like Your New Child, Advertise Him Online?

People adopt children for many reasons. Though almost all adoptive parents will hear comments about them being selfless saints, a biological urge to have children has got to be the number one motive. Prospective adoptive parents must go through rigorous checks before they are able to bring a child home; checks that are much more rigorous than those that animal shelters conduct before allowing pet adopters to welcome an animal.

Though adoption makes adoptive parents the legal parents of a child, it seems like these children are seen as disposable far too often, for whatever reason.

Reuters Investigates shocked America and the rest of the world with their report “The Child Exchange — inside America's underground market for adopted children” in October 2013. The news agency revealed how adoptive parents are seeking to “privately re-home” their adopted children on the internet, passing them off to total strangers much in the way pet owners who decide they cannot handle the responsibility sometimes do. Many of these children were adopted from abroad, only to end up being passed around from home to home without any government intervention.

The report makes for fascinating if utterly shocking reading. The one online child advertisement that immediately caught my attention was regarding a girl adopted from China who had been in her new “home” only days: “We adopted an 8-year old girl from China […] and felt from the beginning that her needs were going to be more than we could manage, but we just couldn't send her back to the orphanage. […]”

The ad goes on: “[She] is a sweet, happy child with a beautiful smile that lights up the room. However, she needs intensive speech therapy and occupational therapy as she is functioning at the level of a 4-5 year old.” At the end, the adoptive parent urged the reader to share the ad with “anyone who might be interested.”

You'll find transcripts of hundreds of similar ads if you read the Reuters report. Many specify disorders that are not uncommon among adopted children, while others don't give an excuse beyond “we are older parents and can't cope”. Couldn't they have thought about that before adopting a child?

Parents who engaged in private re-homing also share their stories. "The judge had a chip on his shoulder […] and threw the book at us," one such person shared. "He said, 'I'm not going to let people like you take kids into this country and then dump them into the system.' […] We lived with fear." How did the adoptive child feel? That was not relevant to the new "parents", I guess. 

The child whom the woman who provided this quote adopted is now grown up and living alone. But she still feels love toward her initial adoptive parents, even after a re-homing ordeal. This “mother” goes on to say: "[The adoptive daughter] says,'Tell dad I love him. When are you going to come visit?' I say, 'That's not possible right now.' She has a fantasy about our family."

Time To Face Reality: Parenting Is Hard, Especially If Your Child Has RAD

What kinds of families go through all the applications, the home-study process, and pay all the fees that are required to bring home an adoptive child — only to relinquish that child to strangers on the internet without any form of control soon after they do so? I'll have to refer you to the Reuters report to answer that awful question. 

Not all terrible adoptive parents choose to re-home their unwanted adopted children, of course. There are also those who neglect or abuse their children, instead, sometimes to the point that they die. Thirteen-year old Hana Williams, who was adopted from Ethiopia, was beaten, starved and then left outside in the freezing cold to die as a "punishment".

In some cases, "adoption" is nothing but a euphemism for modern-day slavery or human trafficking. In those cases, adoption has nothing to do with providing a loving home to a child in need. Were all of the people who posted on the aforementioned online platforms looking to "re-home" the kids who thought that had found their "forever family" monsters, though?

Shortly after the Reuters investigation was published, parenting forums around the internet exploded with comments about what happened. In more than one place, comments from adoptive parents whose children had attachment disorders appeared.

Adopted children, particularly older children who were moved around a lot or who were institutionalized in poorer countries, can come with with all kinds of challenges.  

Reactive Attachment Disorder (RAD) is the most serious of these challenges. Children develop RAD as the result of the trauma of separation from parents or caregivers and often also because of severe neglect and abuse. These children do not bond with their new adoptive parents and can act out in various ways. RAD children can be extremely withdrawn or very aggressive, and they try to push caregivers away to the point the child is rejected. 

Life is hard for the RAD child and everyone around him. The condition lasts a lifetime and can be managed (with varying degrees of success) with excellent therapy, something not all adoptive parents have access to. In many of the ads Reuters published as part of its investigation, RAD was specifically mentioned as a reason for "private re-homing".

Oppositional Defiant Disorder (ODD), a disorder in which the child is defiant, angry, and refuses to respect authority is another possibility with adopted children. These children may be aggressive a lot of the time, and cannot obey rules. 

Adoptive parents also complained about speech delays, developmental delays, and physical disabilities — things they were not aware of before completing the adoption and bringing the child home. In some cases, the children these people adopted were much older than they were led to believe. 

I say this not because I wish to offer an excuse for the crimes these people committed; there is no excuse. No person should advertise their child on the internet to pass him off to complete and often criminal strangers, regardless of the difficulties that child is dealing with. 

I choose to shed some light on the hardships that adoptive parents can encounter only because the challenges adoptive parents can face are extremely real, and can create despair in even the most sane, loving person. These challenges may be manageable with the help of good therapy and excellent community support, but when that support is lacking life can be very difficult indeed — for the whole family. 

Adopting a child does not automatically result in "happily ever after", for any of the involved parties. Adopting a child is not just a more expensive way to create your own family. 

Did any of the parents who posted on the re-homing groups set out to advertise their adopted child on the internet, often within a year or two of the adoption, when they started thinking about adopting? I doubt it. Are you hoping to adopt a child in the future? Make sure you don't become one of them.

Explore the dark side of adoption thoroughly, and be honest with yourself. Do you think you might have difficulties with a child suffering from attachment disorders? This is always a possibility with an adopted child. If you are not willing to walk down that hard, never-ending road, do your potential adopted child a favor and do not adopt.

Judging others is easy. Imagining yourself at your very worst and being completely open to exploring what you might be capable of in your darkest moments is not easy, but it is necessary.