And yet another week of a school vacation and no child care. I can only ignore the kid for so long before parental guilt sets in, so most work (including blogging) will happen in the evenings. The mute kid will be dragged along to the gym, the supermarket, and other assorted chores. Perhaps he'll get some video game time later in the afternoon, and I can get back to the computer.
In the meantime, here are some of the issues that we talked about this weekend:
My grandfather was born in Abruzzo, Italy in a small mountain village where everyone had the same last name — a last name that contains too many vowels. It's a gorgeous area of Italy and still untouched by tourism. Wonderful pork dishes.
Return to Sender. A seven-year old boy was sent back to Russia by his adopted parents in Tennessee, because they couldn't handle his psychological problems. He was put on a plane by himself with a backpack of candy. Russia is fuming and may end on foreign adoptions.
Unbelievable tragedy for Poland. The Monkey Cage asks whether any other country has ever lost so many senior political leaders at once.
Apt. 11d 
The number of fatalities (15 since 1996) among Russian adoptees does seem high compared to the number of total Russian children adopted by Americans (50,000 since 1991). However, given local prejudices against orphans and adoption and the fact that there are something like 800,000 children in Russian orphanages, it isn’t realistic to think that there is a domestic answer to the problem of Russian orphans, who can expect to graduate directly from the orphanage to the street. Also, given the size of the typical Russian apartment, there is probably a much better chance that a sibling group would be adopted together if their adopted parents were Americans.
In the case of this particular child, I’m sure that a lot worse things than being put on a plane by himself have already happened to him. One thing I wonder about is the fact that his adopted mom gave him a new name, even though he was already 7. That’s got to be pretty weird for a big kid like that. The story said that the adoptive mom said that the orphanage had not been forthcoming about the kid’s psychological issues. I’m very curious how much time she spent with him before the adoption. For older children, I would think it’s pretty important to spend a lot of time getting to know each other. I remember hearing about an organization called Bridge of Hope that does summer host family placements with US families in the NE for older children, after which the families have the option of adopting the child. I don’t know if the program itself is as good as it sounds, but I think the model is sensible.
http://www.cradlehope.org/boh/background.htm
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I have no idea of this particular child or this particular woman, so it’s really bothering me how quick everyone is to judge this situation.
She was obviously in over her head. I don’t know if that was from her lack of prep. Just going from no children to mothering a 7 year old had to be huge-let alone a child who very likely had RAD and a whole bunch of other emotional problems-just from being an orphan.
And yes, I totally think she could’ve been lied to. Whether the adoption agency would do it to help a child or to make money I don’t know. Or they could’ve been completely upfront and she just heard what she wanted to hear because she wanted this child so badly.
I believe that the boy likely did the things the family is claiming. I also believe that the mother may have not been equipped to handle them and reacted in the wrong way.
Parenting is not for the weak of heart and mind in the best of circumstances, in cases like these it must be overwhelming.
My heart breaks for everything this boy has suffered in his short life. But I don’t think all blame can be laid at the feet of this woman when we don’t know the full story.
As a mother, and an adoptive mother I cannot imagine returning a child. I cannot imagine dealing with this in some other manner and reaching out for support, but I don’t know the full story.
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I worked a very little bit with some Russian orphanages when I lived there, and some of my good friends worked with them a lot. (One of my best friends adopted two sisters that she’d worked with, age 10 and 12 at the time. They are now both in college.) Russian orphanages can be very bad, and there is very little domestic adoption. As Amy says, there’s very little future for such kids in Russia- they are almost always (not always, but almost) give sub-standard education, have no real chance of even going to trade school, let alone university, and so on. Many kids have psychological problems beyond those that could be expected for someone raised in such situations. Many (though not all, of course) are the children of alcoholics. Foreign adoptions are a business, with lots of payments made to different people, both to smooth bureaucracy, and just to get anything done at all. It’s almost impossible to do w/o cash payments. I rather doubt that any psychological problems or bad history was told to the mother- it would get in the way of a payday. All this said, the giving a new name was pretty dumb and a bad sign, and whatever problems the woman had, there were better options open to her. She certainly deserves some scorn for treating the kid like trash, whatever his problems were.
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One more thing–the article said the boy was from near Vladivostok. There’s a medium-sized town about an hour out of Vladivostok called Artyom that was named for a Soviet revolutionary. I’ve been there, and there’s a bust of Artyom the revolutionary as you drive into town.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artyom
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As best as I can see from reading the newspaper stories, the boy was not sent back by his “parents”; he had been adopted by a single woman. My reading of the story is that, in adoptions, wealthy married couples are given preference, and get the “best” children (infants with no evident health problems), while less desirable parents get less desirable children. Which is sort of perverse, that those least suited for parenthood get the most difficult children, but that’s the way of the world.
Incidentally, my sister adopted a Russian baby, at a time when she was single, but she is well-off and spent quite a bit of money (like $40,000) to ensure that she got a “good” baby (female, under one year, healthy). I am guessing that the mother in this story, a R.N., didn’t have that kind of money.
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“it isn’t realistic to think that there is a domestic answer to the problem”
Not that this is likely to play much of a role in policy formulation.
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“Not that this is likely to play much of a role in policy formulation.”
Indeed.
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There are measures for adopted children and parents to have a safety net once they are home. You pay your agency for a homestudy, you have to have follow ups with a social worker, most states have EI for adopted children which are free, come to your house and can provide many good options.
The last resort, which has happened on the down low for years, is disruption. The child is taken from the adoptive home and placed with a foster home or another couple willing to adopt the child. Something no one is mentioning is that the child most likely became a US Citizen as soon as he landed and went through immigration.
At the very least it is neglect, abandonment and potentially trafficking (since she let some stranger meet and take the boy from the airport. He could have killed the child, sold etc.)
Alot of people who have never experience adoption or have friends make alot of assumptions which are just not the case. I have twins from Vietnam, adopted. I have friends with Chinese Kids, Russian Kids, Koreans, African Children, South American children, no process is the same.
I have friends who had little money and a diabetic and got a young “healthy” baby from Russia. Your agency has alot to do with preference, not all agencies work with the same orphanage. I have friends who hosted orphaned Russian children in a summer program hoping to adopt them and they were adopted to another person, while her paper work was processed. Adoption is hard but the point of the Hague and All this paperwork/FBI background checks, social work visits is to prevent someone putting a Child who is a US Citizen on a plane and returning them Postage paid. It is absolutely despicable and I hope she suffers some consequences.
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This is a wonderful post about the subject from Dawn at thiswomanswork. http://www.thiswomanswork.com/2010/04/12/talking/#comments
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