Nurturing Adoptions

Creating Resilience after Neglect and Trauma

Deborah D. Gray

• Publisher: Jessica Kingsley Publishers
• Year: 2012
• Print ISBN: 9781849058919
• eBook ISBN: 9780857006073
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Developmental Psychology
• Index: Psychology

Adopted children who have suffered trauma and neglect have structural brain change, as well as specific developmental and emotional needs. They need particular care to build attachment and overcome trauma.

This book provides professionals with the knowledge and advice they need to help adoptive families build positive relationships and help children heal. It explains how neglect, trauma and prenatal exposure to drugs or alcohol affect brain and emotional development, and explains how to recognise these effects and attachment issues in children. It also provides ways to help children settle into new families and home and school approaches that encourage children to flourish. The book also includes practical resources such as checklists, questionnaires, assessments and tools for professionals including social workers, child welfare workers and mental health workers.

This book will be an invaluable resource for professionals working with adoptive families and will support them in nurturing positive family relationships and resilient, happy children. It is ideal as a child welfare text or reference book and will also be of interest to parents.

PART ONE

The Issues of Neglect and Trauma in Today’s Adoptions

In a survey by Harvard University and the Casey Family Programs, foster teens were observed to move into adulthood with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) at a rate that was five times that of PTSD in the general population (Pecora, et al., 2005). This surveyed group is similar to the group from which many parents will be adopting. The compounding effect of early neglect with other types of maltreatment seems to be potent in reducing resiliency in children. Part One explores these interrelationships that are critical to address when helping children.

Part One details the reasons why children need to be helped as quickly as possible after trauma. A “wait and see” attitude in seeking professional help for trauma defies research and experience. It plays to the illusion that children can get over and forget anything—especially since they are so young. On the contrary, children are especially impacted—because they are so young.

Nurturing Adoptions has been purposefully divided into two sections. The first section defines the problems of neglect, trauma, and complex trauma often seen in children adopted after multiple moves or from institutional settings, and details the reasons why children need to be helped as quickly as possible after trauma.

The chapters in the second half of the book will look at methods of working, given these interrelationships. Individuals whose learning style leans to learning the “how to” before the “why to” are welcome to turn now to the second half of the book, reading the two sections in reverse order.

CHAPTER 1

The Changing Nature of Adoption

A doption, both domestic and international, has changed dramatically in just one generation. Increasing numbers of children enter new homes after having experienced trauma and neglect in families or in orphanages throughout the world. Trauma and neglect are not adoption issues by themselves—indeed they are pre-adoption issues—but they are of special interest to the adoption community because of their prevalence in today’s adopted children. In the same way that triad issues were of special interest thirty years ago, resulting in new and developing literature at that time, issues stemming from early maltreatment1 undergirds modern, developing adoption literature.

Domestic Adoption in the
Early 21st Century

According to a 2006 report by the North American Council on Adoptable Children, about 140,000 children are adopted in the United States annually. About 10% of these children were infants whose parents made voluntary adoption plans. Semi-open or fully disclosed adoptions are more common than confidential adoptions (NACAC, 2006).

Contrast these numbers with 1970’s adoptions, when there were 172,000 children adopted in the United States. Almost all were infants whose parents made confidential, voluntary adoption plans. There were few children adopted after trauma and neglect, since adoptees were mostly newborns.

Since the 1970s AFCARS Reporting shows that the rate of newborn adoption has dropped steadily, while the adoption rate from foster care has surged. AFCARS, or the Adoption and Foster Care Analysis and Reporting System, is a federal data collection effort that provides child-specific information on all children covered by the protections of Title IV-B and Title IV-E of the Social Security Act. On an annual basis, all states submit data to the U.S. Children’s Bureau, concerning each child in foster care and each child who has been adopted under the authority of the state’s child welfare agencies. The AFCARS databases have been designed to address adoption and foster care policy development and program management issues at both the state and federal levels. About 50,000 children were adopted from foster care in 2003. The reporting of final numbers comes in slowly, but statistical sampling shows that that level seems to be holding steady. The average age of children being adopted from foster care in 2003 was 7.0 years and the median age was 6.1 years. Showing public policy commitment and hard work on the part of social workers, that number had climbed from 36,000 children adopted from substitute care in 1998. Of the children adopted from the foster care system, 87% qualified for a special needs assistance package.

There were 119,000 children waiting in foster care to be adopted in the United States in 2006. Their average age was 8.6 years, and the median was 8.7 years old. Today the number of children waiting for adoption is at a relatively steady level, with one child becoming legally free for adoption as another one child is adopted (AFCARS, 2006, pp. 3-10).

While poly-drug and alcohol abuse have always been issues for child welfare, the successive epidemics of cocaine, crack cocaine, and methamphetamines have escalated the rates of severe maltreatment in young children. Children, as a group, are entering the foster care system with more serious neglect than in generations past.

International Adoption in the Early 21st Century

There have been similarly dramatic changes in international adoption. About 23,000 children were adopted internationally in 2005. The number of internationally adopted children has tripled over the previous fifteen years.

These selected years show the trends in the number of international adoptions in the United States.

Table 1-1

Number of Children Adopted to the U.S. from Other Countries by Fiscal Year
FY 1990	FY 2000	FY 2004	FY 2005
7,093	17,718	22,884	22,728

During this same period, the countries of origin have also shifted.

Table 1-2

Top Six Countries from Which Children Were Adopted to the United States
FY 1990	FY 2005
2,620 Korea	7,906 China
631 Columbia	4,639 Russia
440 Peru	3,783 Guatemala
421 Philippines	1,630 Korea
348 India	755 Kazakhstan
302 Chile	441 Ethiopia

International adoptions, like domestic adoptions, show a trend towards children being adopted later in infancy/childhood. However, internationally adopted children, as a group, are markedly younger than children adopted from foster care. Of the total children internationally adopted, 10,113 children were between 1 and 4 years old and 3,537 were older than 5 years old. (The differences in the manner in which statistics were collected do not allow for an average age.) Additionally, the gender differences were remarkable, with about two girls adopted to every boy (U. S. Department of Homeland Security, 2007).

There are uncertainties about how the international Hague Convention Treaty guidelines and the 2007 implementation of those guidelines under rules set by the United States may impact the numbers of children coming to the U.S. through international adoption.2 The House of Representatives Hearings on International Adoption Guidelines held on November 14, 2006 revealed that agencies were quickly preparing for the new regulations (Barry, Scialabba, 2006). The trend towards adoption from countries without a tradition of family foster care and with third world health conditions continues.

Changes in Adoptive Families in the Early 21st Century

During this same period there have been substantial changes in adoptive parents. Social changes are prompting people to build families later. There is an increase in treatment options for older women, so that couples adopting due to infertility are significantly older than they were a generation ago. The rate of divorce and second marriages as well as the related increase in the age differential within married couples means that it is not uncommon for one or both potential adoptive parents to be in their late 40s and up to late 50s. Sometimes there are much older half siblings connected to very young adopted siblings.

Age can contribute to whether singles or couples choose to adopt independently as opposed to from private agencies, whether they choose to adopt internationally as opposed to domestically, and, when adopting internationally, can influence from which country they choose to adopt.

About 80% of families who adopt internationally do so after infertility (AFCARS, 2006). Families who are adopting internationally are building families. They will look at another option if opportunities for international adoption dip because of changes in the international guidelines. The probable result is that the number of families adopting domestically from foster care is likely to increase if international adoption opportunities decrease. About half of two-parent families adopting from foster care are doing so after issues of infertility. And, half of the parents adopting older children are first-time parents (AFCARS Report, 2006).

The trend toward kinship care, or placing at-risk children with grandparents, aunts, uncles and other relatives after they are removed from abusive or neglectful environments, represents about 25% of adoptions from foster care. This is another contributor to an older cadre of adoptive parents. This group tends to be less prepared or supported in facing the challenges ahead (AFCARS Report, 2006).

More singles are adopting than ever before. Notably, now over 30% of those adopting from the foster care system are single parents. This means that the support systems that include an automatic passing of the baton back and forth between two parents needs to be intentionally bolstered for single parent families

While there have been gay and lesbian people adopting for some time, most adopted as single parents in a “don’t ask, don’t tell” environment. Today more and more agencies are placing children in two-parent openly gay and lesbian families.

Changes in Adoption’s Impact on Child-Placing and Mental Health Professionals

The statistics from both domestic and international adoption give a clear take-home message for professionals working with adoption issues:

•The children being adopted include many older children who have had and lost parent figures. They will have grief issues, having lost attachment figures.

•These children’s rates of neglect and maltreatment are higher than rates in past decades.

•Many of today’s adoptive parents are single parents. They need more intentional supports built into their parenting plans.

•Many adopting parents will have par...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Praise
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Acknowledgments
• Table of Contents
• Introduction
• Part One: The Issues of Neglect and Trauma in Today’s Adoptions
• Part Two: Putting the Pieces Together—Restoration after Traumatic Stress and Neglect
• Appendices
• Useful Tools and Exercises
• References
• Resources List
• About the Author