Resources for Families with Adopted Children
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Friday, July 30, 2010

Not All Adoptions End 'Happily Ever After'

Paula and Bryan Blatchford were excited to adopt. Paula had a teenage daughter from her first marriage, and Bryan didn’t have any kids of his own. They were willing to adopt older children, and were soon paired with a brother and sister. But 16 months after the children arrived, a series of problems resulted in them leaving the family.

Each year, roughly 5 per cent of the 600 adoptions from children’s aids societies in Ontario are not completed. With children over the age of 6, that number can be as high as 25 percent.…

Experienced adoption workers say all children put up for adoption, whether given up by their parents or seized from the home, have special needs. Abuse, multiple moves, drug or alcohol addictions and abandonment have left their mark on fragile psyches. [Source: The Toronto Star]

Adopted children, especially older ones, sometimes have trouble bonding with their adoptive parents; often the result of trauma suffered at an early age. Some families can get past issues like this, using counseling or some other form of family therapy.

Labels: abandonment, connections

Posted By: Stefanie Hamilton

Comments:

Traumatizedexmom on 9/25/2010
In our situation, the agency seriously downplayed the child's issues. Years later when the child hit adolescence multiple serious issues surfaced, including RAD and bonding issues, that made this child emotionally dangerous to the family and ultimately, helped destroy the lives of those in the family. Get all the information you can first. All the love in the world can't heal these kids.
Writergal on 9/6/2010
I agree- information is power! One such therapy that we've found to be especially helpful with children with ADD, RAD, dyslexia and autism is neurological re-organization. This therapy helps to re-map the brain and assists the child that has been traumatized through institutional care (aka orphanage) or foster care to re-map critical areas of the brain and help heal the trauma. It's almost guaranteed that EVERY child that will be adopted will have some issues- it's important to immediately have the child assessed and begin working on a treatment plan. We've used NR therapy with our three children and seen huge improvements in all three of them.
Kensington on 8/23/2010
It makes sense that older kids who are in the foster care system have "special needs". I think it's a helpful idea to think of the situation in those terms, as you should know going in that a child will have an adjustment period when she/he is in a new home. Those special needs may present themselves right away and they may take awhile to show up. Information is power.