This week I am spending three full days, one in each of three Cities in Washington, talking with a group of people about disruption.
Disruption as you most likely know is when parents take a child into their home with the intent to adopt the child but change their mind before heading to court to finalize the adoption. It differs from adoption dissolution which is a family voluntarily terminating parental rights and "giving the kid back" to the state after an adoption in finalized.
I have a unique perspective in dealing with this difficult topic because I have seen it from many different sides very personally. I have been a social worker when a disruption takes place. I have been friends with people who have had to disrupt. And I have been a parent who has had to make the decision not to disrupt or dissolve a disruption when not doing so meant facing investigations and charges by the county we were living in. And so I don't just get up and talk to professionals from one angle.
DIsruption is probably the most difficult piece of the adoption puzzle. There are a myriad of issues that are wrong with "the system" that aren't solvable in a days conversation. Some kids are simply not able to live in family settings but they are placed there anyway. That doesn't mean that it has to disrupt, but those kids should be given services, including residential, offered to the family throughout their childhood.
Workers fear disrupting to the point that they won't place kids and then kids don't have a chance to even try. States, fearing disruption, either won't approve ICPC or won't allow placements to occur. Many children are placed in a home with several professionals not believing that the kid will make it, and thus the parents don't believe it either. And then there are times when some foster parents can sabotage placements.
So today I get to wrestle with these issues and get people talking about them. I need to have them own their own feelings about the topic, to see why things happen, and then to accept responsibility to be the one that makes things happen.
The biggest problem with the system is that there is always someone else to blame. Until each person assumes full responsibility for the success of a placement, we aren't going to make much progress.
I am not sure that the messages I deliver are ones that people want to hear, but I attempt to do them compassionately and with integrity. I try to look at each situation from the perspective of all involved. There are a large number of social workers who do invest countless hours in doing the best they can with the resources they have available to them to make a placement work and yet it doesn't. There are parents in the same boat. And it's hard stuff.
I ended yesterday feeling fairly energized though. Am hoping that lasts through the week. It's tough, heart wrenching stuff with great emotional undertones and it can make everyone exhausted. But we need to talk about it. And so we will.
7 comments:
You do great work, Claudia, stay faithful to your passions!
we were very close to dissolution with our daughters. It was very emotional and overwhelming. Our girls adoption was finalized in their home country. Inspite of our deep deep pain, somehow we also knew on a deeper level that by doing that we would be causing greater injury to these girls. We also had the strength of our families to hold us up, and they insisted that they would help us find help for the girls. We were lucky and blessed. We hope we have done right by our daughters, at times we have wondered if perhaps their would've been someone better able to deal with their disabilities than us and we question if we did the right thing. We can't go back now, that time is long gone, we can only move forward and do the best we can. So we pray for all our futures.
I am really glad you're doing this. Years ago, I had a child placed with me who had a history of residential placement. Sure enough, after a few months she realized that we were enjoying her and she was fitting in (too scary!) So she escalated to the point that I accessed a treatment program. Aaah... Fresh Meat! She had every opportunity to (falsly)accuse to her hearts content. Social services came and informed me that they were sending her back (to her sending agency) - and If I chose to disagree, they'd make it really hard and would be running my home for me... and that I probably wouldn't like that much, would I? Given the terror that some of my other children had of social workers, that was too high a price to pay.
How different it would have been to have even a tiny bit of support for the placement. Thank you for your hard work!
I love that you see the many facets to this, Claudia. As someone who disrupted, I grieved for a long time. Despite successfully parenting other children, I felt like I was a huge failure. I had promised a sibling group a forever home and had delivered that for only a portion of the group. Later, extensive evals from a myriad of professionals came to the conclusion that my daughter could not live in any home setting and would always need the high level of supervision structure and safety that is found in an RTC. She is presently in a most excellent setting and despite the fact that we are not legally family, she is still my daughter and we have regular and frequent contact.
I was curious which cities you'll be visiting :)
This is a very hard topic. We have not had to live through it although we do have a child that is in need of services that the department is not offering. We as a family are left to flounder. From what I know our needy child has already ungone a disrupt and that in itself has caused a lot of confusion for our son. I don't know that this issue was ever explained to him. Maybe that is for the best.
We are now preparing to adopt another young man who is only placed for adoption due to a disruption. The hard kind. The kind that is not his fault but you wonder how he will feel. The family is getting divorced and therefore adoption is no longer an option. He has been with this family for months. In the system for years. I am again faced with a child that will have issues with attachment and really big feelings I don't know that I can explain or help him express. Services for sensitive things like this should be a priority.
Everyone gets caught up in the "happy" of adoption. The honeymoon fades for all parties involved.
I think you talking about this is a great thing. It is not a comfortable subject. Getting an adoption matched and finalized alone is a feat. Disruption is not something anyone wants to have to think about.
We never in our wildest dreams thought we would ever disrupt or dissolve an adoption, but we've now done both. The system fought us every step of the way. They would NOT offer us services or even a residential placement to help us continue to parent these children. We had social workers and foster parents sabotage all of our efforts and even lie about us in court.
But when it's all said and done, I think we did the very best we could and I'm not going to feel guilty or accept blame for these situations. It is what it is and it's not the end of the story yet. Indeed, one child that we dissolved our adoption on is now in frequent communication and I still consider that child very much a part of our family.
Talk straight to those social workers. Even if a child cannot stay in your home, a FAMILY connection is much stronger than being a legal orphan in the foster care system. It's that steady connection that a child can always turn to that's going to be the most important in the end. Fight hard for it Claudia!
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