Help, I Don't Think I Can Continue With This Adoption!

Are you really struggling with your adoption and feeling you've made a huge mistake? Listen to this interview with Lindsay Lanham, MSW. She works at Holt International and is the author of the online article “Predictors of Adoption Disruption and Dissolution: A Literature Review.”

In this episode, we cover:

• Difference between an adoption disruption and adoption dissolution. 
• What causes an adoption to fail? What causes parents to say: “Help, I don’t think I can continue this adoption?”
• Child-related factors:
  • Child’s age
  • Child’s behavior 
    • Aggression or children who sexually act out
  • Are sibling placements more stable?
• Adoptive parent-related factors:
  • Demographic characteristics? (age, marital status, parenting experience, income, race)
  • Parental expectations
  • Parenting style
  • Relationship prior to the adoptive placement
  • Characteristics of parents in successful adoptions
• Adoption professional-related factors:
  • Identify problems quickly and provide support
  • How to address children who have experienced sexual abuse. “It is recommended that social workers universally prepare families for behaviors associated with sexual abuse trauma and the possible impact of sexual abuse. Adoptive families should have the language necessary to speak about child sexual abuse and know how to access supportive resources in their community, such as child advocacy centers, prior to placement.”
• What should parents do when they realize that the adoption isn’t going as they had hoped/planned?
  • Identify the problem quickly and get support.
  • Reset expectations
  • Self-care
  • Get help
• What should parents do if they are reaching the point where they want to dissolve an adoption?

Resource: Predictors of Adoption Disruption and Dissolution: A Literature Review 

Transcript

Please pardon any errors, this is an automated transcript.

Dawn Davenport  0:00  
Welcome to Creating a family. Talk about foster, adoptive and kinship care. Welcome back to all of our regulars. We really do appreciate you, and we want to send out a special welcome to our newbies. We are so glad to have you with us. I'm Dawn Davenport. I am the host of this show, as well as the director of the nonprofit creating a family.org. Today we're going to be talking about failed adoptions, answering the question of not question, but the lament of help. I don't think I can continue with this adoption. We'll be talking with Lindsay Lanham. She has a master's in social work, and works at Polt international as the director of adoptions for their China, Taiwan and Hong Kong programs. She is the author of the online article, predictors of adoption, disruption and dissolution, a literature review which was published by the National Council for adoption. She began her career in 2004 as a child welfare case worker, before becoming a child welfare adoption supervisor, and after over a decade of infield practice, she transitioned to research and policy, and she collaborates with state agencies and universities on projects addressing a whole host of child welfare topics. She has also worked with state legislators to draft and implement policies aimed at creating a more responsive child welfare system for families. Welcome Lindsay to creating a family. We're thrilled to have you

Speaker 1  1:27  
here. Thank you so much. I'm really excited to be here as well. You know, this, the

Dawn Davenport  1:31  
topic of failed adoptions, adoptions, dissolutions and disruptions, is a topic we don't talk a lot about in this field, and I think, I think it's important to note at the onset that the vast majority of adoptions are successful and gratifying for both the child and the family, and maybe that contributes to why we don't talk about when adoptions don't work. But I think it probably goes deeper than that. I think we probably don't as a profession we want all adoptions to be successful, and it's easy to overlook, because we don't really want to acknowledge on some level that, in fact, sometimes they don't work, and there's no universal reason that adoptions fall apart. I'm not 100% sure I agree with all of Tolstoy's, but his opening line to the novel Anna Karenina was, All happy families are alike, and each unhappy family isn't happy in its own way. I'm not sure All happy families are alike. I think they probably share something, but nonetheless, who am I to pick an argument there? He's brilliant. So first of all, we hear the terms adoption disruption and adoption dissolution, and one of the very frustrating things, because I also have tried to do a lot of research in this area, it drives me crazy that the research very often doesn't make a distinction between the two, and yet there is a significant distinction. So what is that? What are the differences between when we say disruption or a dissolution?

Speaker 1  2:58  
Sure, absolutely. And first, I do want to echo that absolutely most adoptions are so successful and bring such joy to the adoptive parents and to the children who are adopted. But looking into disruption and disillusion, it's really a legal distinction and something to keep in mind. So disruption is an adoption that is unsuccessful prior to the adoption being legally finalized, or is a disillusion, is an adoption that is terminated after the finalization has occurred?

Dawn Davenport  3:31  
And I think it's safe to say that if, if we made distinctions, if the research made distinctions, we might find different reasons for an adoption dissolution versus an adoption disruption. So I do think that it is frustrating because oftentimes they don't make that distinction, and I feel like that's a significant oversight on their part, on the researchers part. So what causes an adoption to fail? What causes parents to say, help? I don't know that I can continue this adoption, and you follow as much of the research also does, but you divide it into child related factors, adopted parent related factors, and adoption professional related factors. So we're going to talk to you using those same breakouts. Let's start with child related factors, even though I really want to start with adoptive parent related factors, because I think that that's where we should be focusing. Our audience can't see this, but I just got a thumbs up from Lindsay, but nonetheless, I do think it's probably important for us to begin with child related factors. So what are some of the things that research has found that indicate a child that is more likely to have an adoption Disrupt.

Speaker 1  4:42  
When you look across the literature, there are two that are really pronounced as predictors, and that's the child's age at the time of adoptive placement, and then the behaviors that are exhibited in the adoptive placement, of course, after the child has joined their adoptive family. Mm, hmm. It's really clear. It has been clear since the early 80s, since Richard Barth did his initial study with his team, the older children get, the more likely they're going to experience adoption and stability,

Dawn Davenport  5:14  
the older they are at placement. Let me just make sure we're clear here. It's not the age of the child, per se, it is the age of the child at the adoptive placement increases the risk at the

Speaker 1  5:24  
time of a placement. Yeah, gotcha Absolutely, and it goes up pretty significantly as you look at sort of age brackets, when you break it down. These findings have been replicated for many decades, and it seems to be pretty clear that age is an impactor. Scholars have tried to unpack this. Why? What is it about being older that makes a child more likely to experience an adoption, disruption or dissolution? And there's a theory that scholars have sort of put together, and they really feel like an older age really captures an accumulation of negative experiences that harms a child's development and perception of the world, thereby increasing the likelihood that the child will experience mood instability and express challenging behaviors, thereby impacting, ultimately, the adoptive placement,

Dawn Davenport  6:20  
which makes common sense. I would add in the article that you wrote for National Council for adoption, predictors of adoption, disruption and dissolution. The term that you're using is disruptions, but I assume you're also including dissolutions within that. Absolutely

Speaker 1  6:36  
and Bart's early research, he decided to use the word disruption universally, as opposed to consistently writing disruption and or disillusion. So it was for ease of the reader, and I echoed that in highlighting his findings, right?

Dawn Davenport  6:51  
I actually think also more commonly. When people think of it, they think of disruption, not dissolution, too. I think it's a more it just feels to me, the more common term. But anyway, so there is a chart, and just to give you a feel, just to give our audience a feel of the difference of adoption a child place for adoption between the ages of three and five, approximately 4.7% of those adoptions fail six to eight years old, 10.4% and then nine to 11, 17% age 12 to 14, 22.4% fail. And then for 15 to 18 year olds, 26% fail. Just to give people a rough idea, and we're going to include a link to this article in the show notes. All right, so child's age, they've accumulated behaviors, they've accumulated coping techniques, and they've also oftentimes have had so much trauma and have had so much disappointment as time goes on, that attaching and bonding and all of that becomes more difficult, or it could, it can. It doesn't have to, but it can. You mentioned that there were two child related factors. One was the child's age at placement. The second one is the child's behavior. It seems intuitive, but let's unpack that a little further,

Speaker 1  8:15  
absolutely. So as you said, it's pretty intuitive. We know that behaviors can impact stability, and the two that are really highlighted in the literature are, one, sexually acting out behaviors, makes a lot of sense, and then the second are aggressive behaviors, or behaviors that are perceived by the adoptive parents as being violent. And again, I think this makes a lot of sense when you're parenting a child and their behaviors are escalating to the point where you're feeling unsafe or other children and you're needing to protect other children in your home, this can reach a real crisis point for adoptive families. Absolutely,

Dawn Davenport  8:50  
one thing that I would like to let the audience know is that creating a family has a lot of resources on helping children heal from sexual abuse. It's something that I am really passionate about, because I think that we often make assumptions, if a child has been sexually abused, that they are going to become abusers or that they can't heal. And nothing is further from the truth, these kids can absolutely heal, and we have a lot of resources here for families to understand behaviors that can be associated with children who have been abused sexually the same with aggressive behaviors as well. But I'm particularly passionate about not wanting to re victimize children who have been sexually abused. One of the challenges we often face, perhaps more with sexual abuse is that often parents don't know ahead of time if a child has been sexually abused. Either it's not in the record, it's something that children often don't want to talk about, and often don't talk about until they feel safe. Is that one of the reasons you think that it's it's hard to set realistic expectations when you don't know it exists. Yes,

Speaker 1  10:00  
absolutely. I think sexual abuse is really complicated for people. One sex makes people uncomfortable, period. Even though we try to be fairly progressive and liberal in America around sex, that's simply

Dawn Davenport  10:11  
not the case, not when it's related to children, especially Yes, and I

Speaker 1  10:15  
find when I'm working with families, they have a really hard time just unpacking sexual abuse. Sexual Abuse also looks a lot different. We can think of it traditionally as a perpetrator and a victim, so sort of an adult towards a child. That's sort of our worst case, scariest scenario. But there's also when children are living in children's homes, we also have a lot of sexual exploration play. This play may be consensual or it may not be consensual, but what we know is that this behavior, or any behaviors children are experiencing or participating in in the in the child care setting, it will transition into the home. Now, as you had mentioned, is it in the child file, we don't know. We tell families to be universally prepared for some type of sexual abuse. Children without parents are vulnerable. All children are vulnerable, even when they have parents. Children without parents are particularly vulnerable and particularly vulnerable to these types of behaviors, whether consensual or not. And we want to prepare families to not be shocked if they get home and their children have been taught in a children care setting that they they develop friendships through sexual exploration play, or, more significantly, if children have been victimized, that those behaviors start to resurface in the adoptive home, as you're right. Children don't often disclose that they've been sexually abused. Some children don't even know that it's a problem. They don't know what happened to them as a concern. So we do prepare families for sexual abuse and also for the reality that there will most not always, but there can be disclosures once in the adoptive home, and as soon as the children begin to connect with the adoptive parents, and they have that connection and feel safe, they began to explain what has happened to them in the past, and some of that can be really sad and and be abused.

Dawn Davenport  12:14  
And you specifically said children without parents, but also children whose parents are not functioning well, children's whose parents are struggling with substance abuse disorder, children who have been neglected because not a lot of adult supervision. Children need adults in their lives, and regardless of whether the adult was present but not functioning well, or if the adults oftentimes with international adoption, the adults are simply absent. You have children in large group settings with few adults and less supervision. How about aggressive behavior? How common is that? And I think we know that why it would be associated with disrupting an adoption. But how common is it with children?

Speaker 1  12:57  
Well, I think every child is going to respond to the adoption differently, and as we transition into the adoptive placement, aggressive behaviors are something we're going to prepare families for. Aggressive behaviors can be just verbally aggressive, saying some maybe colorful language to something more significant, like actually destroying property or being aggressive towards an adoptive parent. We see these behaviors from time to time, especially during the transition. And I often remind parents, think about where the child is coming from and think about where the kid was at at this point. They're often extremely scared during the transition into the adoptive home. And when kids who don't have full functioning of their brain are scared, it is not uncommon for them to demonstrate big behaviors for me, those behaviors are saying, I need my space, I'm scared, I need to protect myself. And so we see the escalation of behaviors. Those behaviors need to be addressed right away, and we're going to support families through those behaviors when they persist for months and months on end, and when we can't get to the root cause of those behaviors, or somehow mitigate those behaviors, I think that's when we get into a real crisis with families.

Dawn Davenport  14:08  
Sure, and it's one thing aggression towards a parent, they may be able to handle, maybe not, but when they see aggression towards other children in the family, we see that that becomes even more frightening for parents. Many children adopted through foster care or internationally now are being placed with siblings. Are sibling placements more stable, are less likely to disrupt.

Speaker 1  14:35  
So in the literature, it's really mixed. Some sibling placements thrive, other sibling placements cause more stress and discord in the adoptive family, and I think this makes a lot of sense. Any social worker who's been in the adoption field or adoptive parents, perhaps, who've adopted two sibling groups know that sibling groups are really complicated. A lot of it depends on their dynamic prior to the adoptive placement. It depends on if they've. Placed together, as you know, in care, sometimes siblings are not placed together, and the first time the siblings come together is actually in the adoptive home. This can add in a layer of complexity to the adoptive family and make that sibling group placement more complicated and more vulnerable to instability. The same time, you can have siblings who have thrived together, who have survived together really difficult situations, and when they actually bring each other up, they support each other. When they are placed together, it actually makes it a more harmonious adoption. So in the literature, it's mixed, and it's really speaks to just the dynamics of how unique siblings can be and also the uniqueness of each individual adoption,

Dawn Davenport  15:44  
yeah, that makes sense. Let me pause for a moment to remind you that creating a family has a another podcast. It's called weekend wisdom. It's our opportunity to answer your questions. So please send us your questions. You can send them to info at creating a family.org and we'll answer your questions on one of our upcoming weekend wisdoms. And now back to the show. All right. Now let's turn to adoptive parent related factors that I wanted to jump right to, but force myself to be patient. I find this area absolutely fascinating. So first, let's talk about demographic characteristics, age of the parents, marital status, parenting, experience, income, race, what does the research show? As far as can we predict which parents are going to be more likely to dissolve an adoption?

Speaker 1  16:45  
We can't based on simple demographics that you had mentioned, the research is just far too mixed to be able to to really make a distinction. With no 45 year old moms do better, or 23 year old dads do better. We just don't have enough data to really make inclusive findings based on simple demographics at this time. What

Dawn Davenport  17:08  
about parenting experience that one seems like it would be a more logical one to assume

Speaker 1  17:15  
absolutely parenting experience is actually still really mixed. We do know that single parents with no previous experience actually tend to have pretty high success rates. Even though they are adopting, they often adopt children who are older and children with more significant special needs, interesting, but previous experience across all the studies can be mixed, I suspect. And again, this is my own theory coming in here. I suspect it has to do a lot with our findings around parental expectations. When you have a lot of experience parenting, you're set in your ways. We all are, and we also have pretty significant expectations. So when you've parented for children, and you've done that very successfully, even if those children have had various needs. When a new child enters your home, you're going to have some expectations that your parenting style has been successful. It could perhaps be more challenging for you to even be nimble, which we know is a really, really important characteristic to predict an adoption success, is having the ability to be nimble, to change your parenting style on a dime, and to really be child centered in your approach. This can be really challenging to do if you're a seasoned parent or even a seasoned adoptive parent.

Dawn Davenport  18:28  
That makes very good sense. I'm going to come back to ask you about, in a minute, other characteristics of parents and successful adoptions. But before we do that, I wanted to talk about parental expectations. That is something here at creating a family we harp on all the time, because it is if I could identify one single thing that would predict a successful RR, a smoother transition. And that is, if we can help parents ahead of time, set realistic expectations. They go in understanding and they go in prepared. So let's talk some about parental expectations and what that shows for adoptive parent success with adoptions,

Speaker 1  19:10  
absolutely. So we know that parents who have heightened expectations regarding their adoption or adoption experience are gonna are gonna struggle more. The literature is very, very clear. Makes a lot of sense. Having no parental expectations, it's gonna be really hard. You know, in my position at whole I work exclusively now with parents adopting from other countries. It's a long process, and during that process, parents are in America, imagining their child abroad, imagining the time their child gets to join their family. And it's impossible not to idealize that situation and idealize that moment where you're going to take your little kiddo and get their nails done, or they go to the park and play. It's just impossible not to. I mean, we want families to do that. That's part of pre adoption preparation, where you're making connections with your child, even though they're so far away. Unfortunately, children come to us, especially older kids, with their own minds, their own temperaments, and not unfortunately, but actually fortunately, they come their own individual cells, which they come perfect as they are, oftentimes, though, that makes a disalignment with the parenting expectation. Perhaps you had always envisioned taking your kiddo to get their nails done, and your kid hates getting their nails done. For example, this would be a time where you need to be particularly nimble and put your wants, your desires and expectations aside and really stay focused on the child's needs at the given time. So we encourage families to, yeah, think about what it's going to be like when your kiddo comes home. But no, these are your thoughts. These aren't going to be what it's going to be like. And oftentimes kids because we are child centered, and we want to be child centered, we want to go at the pace of a child, and we want to be nimble and build our expectations, not safety expectations, but our own individual parenting expectations around the actuality of how the child presents when they get to join the family. What about

Dawn Davenport  21:16  
parenting style, the type of parent you are? Can we draw a correlation between different styles of parenting and adoption failure?

Speaker 1  21:27  
Absolutely, and this is going to be no surprise, and it's still of the same spirit as parenting expectations, but when you have a rigid parenting style, you are much more likely to experience adoption and stability, again, makes a lot of sense. When you're stuck in your way and you're not able to really get down and meet the needs of a child where they're at, it's going to be really challenging for you and the family.

Dawn Davenport  21:54  
That makes sense. It's the loving but authoritative style the which we read about as being a successful parenting style in general. How does that fit in with what you see in the research? Or did it dig in that deep?

Speaker 1  22:09  
I didn't specifically dig in that deep, but I think we can have some thoughts around it anyway. Certainly, we want families to be loving, nurturing, and meet the kids where they're at, but at the same time, families need to have pretty strict boundaries so children can feel safe when families don't have boundaries in their homes, and it's children have no idea what to expect, and there's no real pattern of how the daily life goes. It can create actually more chaos in the home. So it's a delicate balance between being loving, nurturing, understanding the needs and we always say triggers of your kiddo being that proactive parent. We call it mindfulness, a mindful parent, but at the same time, recognizing your role is so one, first and foremost, of course, keep your child safe, and secondly, begin to set some boundaries to help them develop their own executive functioning skills, as well as their own ability to regulate as they get older.

Dawn Davenport  23:02  
Excellent. Something that your article brought out, and this, again, makes common sense, is that a factor that is indicative of successful adoptions is the existence of a prior relationship between the child and the parent prior to the adoptive placement that plays partly into what we believe as the importance of kinship placements, be they blood kinship or fictive kinship, you know, godparents or neighbors or teachers or whatever, anything you want to add to that. I thought that was interesting, intuitive, but still interesting that the literature teased it out.

Speaker 1  23:37  
Yeah, no, I think it makes perfect sense. Of course, the more we know about a child before they join our family, the more prepared parents can be, and you also get to develop that initial relationship. What we know is we need to connect with our kids in order to feel safe. And if that can happen, if kids can start that connection prior to them joining your family, that can be wonderful. And we would hope that for all children in the adoption experience, that all adoption preparation would include some component of getting to know the family prior now in inter country adoption that can be extremely challenging, because we do follow, of course, the policies of the sending country, and not every country allows an interaction trip or multiple zoom calls to begin to establish that relationship. But in all possibility, we try to do that across all adoptions, we're going to really help the family get to know the child as much as possible, and for the kiddo to get to know their new parent.

Dawn Davenport  24:38  
Fortunately, in foster care, adoption, that is very often well, the majority of them are foster parents who are raising the child, so there is a long term existing relationship. But even if you're adopting one of the children who is legally free and you're not your current foster parent, the general approach is supposed to be slow. Transitions, where the child and the family get to know each other. That's how it's supposed to happen. All right, you talked about characteristics of parents and successful adoptions, and I love the term. You nimble. I think it's a great term. So flexibility is certainly one. And then we've talked about loving but also able to set realistic and firm boundaries. That's another one. Any, any other characteristics that you've seen, either through the research or through your your work experience, and what makes a successful adoptive parent,

Speaker 1  25:32  
something that's not mentioned in the article. And I think this is more from my own personal professional experience. Oftentimes, when I see family struggling in an adoptive placement, and parents will come to the table and say, Johnny's not doing well. He has X, Y and Z behaviors, and we really need these behaviors to stop what really and I say this almost 100% of the time, when we really start to unpack what's going on in the family, the problem often originates with the parents. So parents have to get really they need to be able to be vulnerable, and they have to be able to have some self reflective ability to say, You know what, I'm not doing it right. This may have worked with Child A, B and C, but this isn't working for child D, and it's not a reflection on me as a parent. It's just a reflection on this dynamic and what needs to change. So parents who can take a really good look at what is going on, and who can really get a sense of what their own individual triggers are, and get a hold of those, begin to unpack what is actually causing them to have such strong reactions to the family dynamic. It can really, really help stabilize the adopted placement. Behavior modification is really hard. It's hard to change a 12 year old's behavior overnight, especially a 12 year old that you don't have a very close relationship with. What's easiest to do is get self reflective, get real about what's going on in your head, your body, your thoughts. If you're approaching a hot situation, you're going in thinking, I this. This kid is not I don't like his behavior. I don't like him. Today, you're going to have a different response than going in and saying he's had a really hard time. I'm leading with empathy. Even though this behavior is really challenging to me, you can see some different results. So that's not really highlighted in the literature. And something I'm certainly we could probably pick out of literature somewhere, but it's not highlighted in this article. And something that I see is really important for the success of overall adoption parents is just the ability for parents to be really real with themselves and be self critical. It can

Dawn Davenport  27:41  
be self critical exactly to acknowledge the What am I bringing to this? Yes, this kid's behavior is unacceptable, because often parents get stuck there. It is not okay, and they're right. The behavior is not okay. We're not saying that you have to accept the behavior. What we're saying is all right, the behavior is not okay, the way you're approaching Is it working? If it's not working, then we need to step back and say, All right, if this is not working, then we have to change. It is far easier for parents, but it's hard for parents to change. Let me be honest. That is hard too, but it's hard for anyone to change. It is exactly but, but we are the adults in this situation, not the child, and the only people we can change are ourselves. You really can't change anybody else as much as you might try. And Lord knows, I have tried, but haven't had a lot of success anyway. So yes, I think that is interesting, and absolutely makes such good sense, just in life in general. You know, look to yourself if a relationship is not working, because the only person you could work with is yourself. Excellent. Let me interrupt briefly to thank hopscotch adoptions for their support of both the show and the nonprofit creating a family.org. Hopscotch adoptions is a Hague accredited international adoption agency placing children from and I love reading off this name. They are so political to me. But anyway, Armenia, Bulgaria, Croatia, Georgia, Ghana, Guyana, Morocco, Pakistan, Serbia and Ukraine. They specialize in the placement of children with special needs, especially with Down syndrome. And they also do a lot of kinship adoptions. They can place children throughout the US, and they offer home study services and post adoption support to residents of New York and North Carolina. Thanks, hopscotch. And now back to the show. All right. Now, moving to adoption professional related factors. So we've talked about the three factors impacting whether an adoption falls apart or not. We've talked about child related factors, adoptive apparent related factors. Now we're talking about adoption professional related factors. So what can professionals do to you? Ensure that adoptions stand the best chance of being successful.

Speaker 1  30:05  
Well, this is another area that's been well researched across the board, adoption preparation, adoption training for social workers, case load numbers. It's really been studied quite extensively. The two that emerge as particularly useful in predicting adoption disruption or dissolution. The first is the matching process. And I know in adoptions, we talk a lot about matching and the process of when families are actually matched with a referral. Literature is pretty clear here that when families accept a referral that's much outside of the parameters they originally came into the adoptive space with, we seem to have adoptions more likely to be vulnerable to instability. Again, making a lot of sense. Families have a really good sense of what brings them to adoption. And as you know, waiting for referral, especially in the inner country adoption world, or even in domestic private adoptions, it can be really challenging to wait and wait and wait. You want to be a parent, you want the referral right away, and sometimes that process can actually people get a little fatigued and will begin to undo their original parameters, maybe made broader. And I think it's important to make the distinction. Families revisit their parameters throughout the adoption. That is perfectly acceptable. You may get more information about a special need, and you think, hey, that's something we could successfully parent. However, when families are at the point where they're fatigued and they know a child diagnosed with complex medical needs is not a good fit for their family. However, they see a referral, they see a sweet little child's face, and they begin to really stretch beyond what they're capable of and what they know they're capable of, not for malicious reasons, not for any other reasons, then they're excited to be parents. However, when you're not prepared for the reality of a complex medical need and then that child joins your family, that can be a really jarring experience, and that's just one example, but certainly moving much past your adoption parameters can make your family more vulnerable to instability. And so we would encourage families, if they want to move past their original parameters that they first and foremost, talk with their social worker, the social worker who did your home study. This is the person who approved do for a very specific trial profile. So if you want to move outside of that profile that say you do want to include perhaps more significant medical needs, talk to your social worker first see what they say. They have a lot of experience that they bring into this space, and they can lead you through a weather they feel like this would be an appropriate referral for your family,

Dawn Davenport  32:58  
and you were specifically talking about international adoption, but I would say that it also adopting from foster care. People don't realize this, but when you apply to adopt a child who is already legally free, you're not going in as a foster parent, but you're going in as a we want to adopt a child. It's very common to find that you say, I don't want to adopt a child, say, over the age of six, and I don't want a sibling group, and those may be very reasonable boundaries for your family, or I don't want a child who is acting out aggressively or has to be the only child in the family, or whatever. And it's not easy. It's people aren't expecting that. They're thinking, oh, there's 100,000 children in the US waiting for a permanent home? Well, I'll step up and just be able to pick one. That's not how it works. And we see parents get antsy and say, All right, well, I guess I could go up to age 12. I could take a child who's had these behaviors, and if you get prepared and you get realistic about what that would mean, you may well be able to do that, but just saying, I will take the child without doing the preparation first sets you up for failure. Absolutely, it's across the board. I think that we might see, Okay, one more announcement here before we get back to the show, and that is, we have 15 free courses. Thank you. Jockey being Family Foundation. These courses are really aimed for parents who are currently parenting, be you an adoptive parent, a foster parent, or a kinship parent, or just a parent in general, who is interested in being a better parent. You can get more information at Bitly slash, j, b, f, support, that's B, i, t, dot, l, y, slash, j, b, f, support. And now back to the show. So what should a parent do when they realize that the adoption isn't going as they had hoped and planned? They see that they and their family are beginning to struggle and they're. Reaching out to us, saying, Help. I don't know whether I can continue to do this. What should they do

Speaker 1  35:06  
a family that's struggling or immediately? Should contact their social worker and their adoption agency. So whoever you're working with, the social workers that you are working with, that you have been working with, to complete that adoption, you should contact those social workers immediately and as concretely as possible identify the concerns that you're experiencing in the home. This goes a little bit against this is some finding that I found really interesting, actually, in this literature review, traditionally in my own practice, if a family, let's say, had a brand new placement. You know, second day in the home, I might traditionally have said, Hey, let's wait. This is a new placement. Let's see how a few days might help stabilize or or calm the placement down. Literature, however, is very clear that we shouldn't be doing that as social workers. We really, if a family calls us and identifies a real, serious concern. We need to be in the home immediately. We need to be offering face to face support. I know sometimes the zoom, we can do a zoom, but face to face is always better. Having someone in the home standing with the parents or sitting with the parents through the behaviors are going to be really important. Also, we're going to put interventions in place immediately. Those interventions, almost always, are first and foremost going to be parent coaching. Again, like we said, we can change your child's behavior immediately. That can take time. We can change your parenting approach, and we can help change your response to a difficult situation, so that's going to be our first response, and you're going to want to get into the home as a social worker immediately. Do not wait it out. Don't wait a month and see how it goes. Oftentimes, what we're finding in adoption placement time actually isn't helping, if it's not going well, even even for an inner country adoption, when the family is in traveling, we need to be there, present, standing with the families and offering coaching support right away. This is a great time to pull back from the trainings we've done in your adoption preparation. Any social worker working with an adoptive family has done a great deal, hopefully, of adoption preparation. Every agency has their own models at Hope. We use tbri or trust based relationship intervention, and we use that to provide families sort of a framework of what we think can be most successful in helping families through this difficult time. So when I get a call for a family that's struggling right at the onset, I'm going to be in their house that day, if possible, and then we're going to be going back through our tbri trainings to start helping and encouraging families to connect to play and let's help develop that sense of felt safety. But again, the work is with the parent. The work isn't going to be with the child right away. Do children need therapeutic intervention? Absolutely, but that's not what we're doing in the midst of an adoption crisis. We may get therapy in place to help support the family, but what we're doing as social workers is going in and doing coaching and standing and sitting with the family to help them through those difficult moments, while at the same time getting those more intensive services in place, such as clinical social work services.

Dawn Davenport  38:28  
And this when people say, How do I choose an agency? This type of service is what you are looking for. When you choose an agency, go in with the expectation that this is what you should be expecting when you are struggling. You want an agency to come and walk beside you and provide these resources for you. All right? Anything else? Okay? We've talked about identifying the problem and getting support through your agency, hopefully as soon as possible. Any other things that you would recommend for parents to do when they realize that they are truly struggling with this adoption. What

Speaker 1  39:05  
I would recommend is also, this is sort of a little bit prior, but just really focusing in on that adoption preparation period. We encourage families after they read the child file to really sit with the unknowns and those worst case scenarios, I want you to sit with that. What if the worst case scenario happens? How comfortable are you? And not only how comfortable are you, but what therapist Are you going to call? We're going to have this in place prior. We're not waiting until there's a crisis to find a therapist who can speak your child's first language, or a therapist that is a good fit for your child. We want to have the therapist in place. We want to have all of the services in place prior so that once you start the adoptive placement, we're not scrambling when a crisis happens. We're as prepared as possible. All we have our list of services, and every adoption agency will do this differently, but you're going to have your list of services, your list of professionals to call, and I encourage families to even have called that therapist before the adoption, making that connection and saying, if we have problems, we would like to reach out to you and make sure it's a good fit before the crisis happens. So there's a lot that you can do as an adoptive parent to prepare and truly prepare, not just the fun stuff, like getting the room ready and buying the cute dresses, and we all love all that stuff that's so fun, but there's other hard work to be done, like, what are you going to do when there's a real mental health crisis in your family? If that is to arise, where, who are you mom going to call? Who? Who are you going to call for your child? Who are you going to call as a couple? This can be really challenging. Adoptions can be a real challenge on a marriage. So who are you going to check in with? Now, some families like therapists. Other families like to rely on more their faith based community. So there are a lot of avenues. There's never one avenue of our family to get the support they need. All of those supports, though, must be in place prior to the adoptive placement.

Dawn Davenport  41:11  
And I would throw another one out there, and that is, take a look at your life and say, Am I doing anything for me? Is there anything that I have done in the last week that nourishes me, and it could be anything. It could be just having 30 minutes in the morning, or maybe 10 minutes in the morning or in the evening. It can be being able to go to a coffee shop by yourself, whatever it is you need to be doing something, hopefully daily. Could be a small something that nourishes you, when you're not nourishing yourself, that's when you're going to be much more likely to burn out. And let's say none of this has happened, or none of this has helped, and parents reach the point where they are saying, I want out. I want this kid out of my house. What is the first step they should do at that point? Because at this point we need to do this in a safe manner. Absolutely.

Speaker 1  42:05  
When we do reach the point where families really are thinking that adoption, disruption, dissolution needs to happen for the well being of their family, it's really important that this is done therapeutically, and it's really important that this is done legally. Transferring custody of a child is a legal process, and it must be done through appropriate authorities, and you need the support of a social worker. My advice to families, if this is hopefully, you've been in contact with your social worker and your child policing agency prior to this moment, they have probably done some background work and maybe even preparing for this type of scenario, but your first step is to call your child placing agency. So this is the agency that actually facilitated your adoption. You're going to call them. You can call anyone that you can reach, and you explain that you're in crisis and you're are feeling like your adoption is going to either disrupt or you're going to have a disillusion. Usually, at least at Holt, we have a direct person you would speak with, so I would know who you talk to. Most agencies will probably have something in their post adoption units who will help you through the process. Depending on if it's a disillusion or disruption, the process is going to look very differently. You will have to get a lawyer involved. And of course, we want this to be done in a very child centered and therapeutic way. So we are going would request that you do have social workers and some therapeutic support, not only for the child who is being disrupted, but also for your family. If you have other children in the home, perhaps other children who have been adopted. This can be really complicated for them, and it can be really hard for them to make sense of is their adoption also going to disrupt. So it's important to think about how a disruption ripples. It ripples the immediate family. It ripples the extended family, and it can those ripples can last for quite some time. So we want it to be legal. We want it to be child centered, and we want it to be therapeutic.

Dawn Davenport  44:05  
Excellent. Well, thank you so much Lindsay Lanham for talking to us today about a topic that's hard to talk about, failed adoptions, adoption disruptions and dissolutions. It's a hard topic, but it's also a really important topic. So thank you so much for talking with us today. We truly appreciate it absolutely.

Unknown Speaker  44:22  
It was great being here. Thank you so much. You.