Jiaozi

Square pegs, part 2

Part 1

Although Ella always made steady progress in school, she never caught up. She had an IEP (Individualized Education Plan) and was pulled out of class for extra help with reading and writing. This was a mixed blessing, because it meant she missed out on subjects such as science and art while she was out of the classroom. Also, it often placed her in the company of children with far more serious behavioral problems, which was distracting and upsetting to her.

The pressure picked up even more at the beginning of this school year when she moved into the upper elementary. Her teacher became concerned that Ella was so far behind in math that she might need extra help with that subject as well. The math curriculum moved rapidly from one skill to the next regardless of whether children had attained mastery. Ella was unable to finish the timed tests. Even with extra help from her tutor, she had at least two hours of homework each night, which was hard on her and me both, and she often burst into tears or threw a tantrum before she was finished. "I'm stupid!" she cried. "And I hate school!"

We met three or four times a year with the school team. I invariably left the conference room choking back tears because each "progress report" was just a long recital of the ways Ella was deficient. Each time we met, I asked them: Since she is consistently a year behind, as well as very small in size, why not just hold her back a year? Oh, no, they said. That would damage her self-esteem. We never retain students anymore. As if being hopelessly behind and getting pulled out of class for special instruction weren't already damaging her self-esteem. I wished so much that we'd known enough years ago to have her repeat kindergarten and give her an extra year to mature, but it was too late for that.

Finally, we realized that it didn't make sense to have her in public school if it meant we had to hire a private tutor just to keep her from falling further behind. We are huge supporters of public education, and I know the school was doing the best it could with their resources, but it just wasn't enough.

I started researching schools and found a private Montessori elementary school 20 minutes from our house. Bess and Ella were in Montessori preschool and day care -- we love Montessori. This school has a learning specialist on staff, and the teachers take extra training in brain development and learning styles. Part of the school's stated mission is to work with different kinds of intelligences and help children appreciate their strengths.

Last November we went to an open house at the school. We were impressed. And they were still taking students for the current school year. I visited the school and observed some classes. The children were in multi-age classrooms, with a three- to four-year range among the students. I love Montessori kids -- they are so thoughtful and courteous. Ella visited for a day and felt welcomed. She enjoyed the self-paced program, freedom to work at different stations during the day, and use of concrete, manipulative learning materials.

We looked at the tuition schedule, took a deep breath, and signed her up. (And then I asked my contract employer for more hours.) After careful consideration, and with the support of the school, we placed her in the lower elementary program, where she would be among students close to her age but still be able to work at a level that's comfortable for her.

The change in school has made a huge difference for Ella and all of us. She is much more less anxious. Her homework takes less than an hour each night. She is making steady progress in reading and math, and her writing has improved remarkably. The curriculum is challenging and content-rich and taught in an engaging way. She came home one day able to tell me the six kingdoms of life from memory. I was so proud to inform her that she now knew something I did not. (Protoctista? What the heck?) She has made lots of lovely new friends who have been taught Montessori-style consideration for others and for the planet. She loves that they have swimming and art and music every week with professional instructors. And it is such a pleasure to attend school conferences and hear about her strengths and achievements rather than listening to a list of ways she doesn't meet standards. She will never do things in a standard way, but for now she is in a place where it's okay to be a square peg because they celebrate children of all kinds.

 Many times in the past three years I have sat in Ella's doctor's office and said, "I don't know. I feel like we just haven't found the answer yet." And her doctor, a funny young man who wears Hawaiian shirts to the office, always says, "There may not be a single answer." He likes to describe things in terms of "flavors" -- "She doesn't have full-blown attachment disorder, but there's an attachment flavor to her behavior." Obviously, he is more comfortable with gray areas than I am. But I'm learning. A complex sequence of events made Ella the way she is -- including, we suspect, poor prenatal care, premature birth, traumatic abandonment, institutional neglect, and inadequate nutrition -- and it will take a multipronged approach to help her mitigate her weaknesses and capitalize on her strengths.

Ella is still a quirky kid, but it's easier to relax and enjoy her quirks now. She will be my baby for just a little while longer. She is in the 25th percentile for height and 10th percentile for weight -- her best showing ever! She still plays with dolls and takes a bucket of toys into the bathtub with her and runs around on all fours pretending to be a dog. Her room is a jungle of toys and costumes and half-finished projects that tend to spill out into the hall and  family room and kitchen.

Her sisters complain that she is annoying and doesn't act her age, and, to tell the truth, the piles of toys are kind of annoying. But I know just how quickly the next few years are going to pass, and I am going to enjoy my sweet, funny little girl as long as I can. Even if that means laughing at booger jokes and listening to Justin Bieber CDs on the drive to school. Every day. Morning and afternoon.

Square pegs, part 1

Ella turned 10 in March. My last single-digit baby has hit the big time. We brought her home a few days before her first birthday, so that means she has been part of our family for 9 years. And what a ride it has been.

She looked so fragile when she was placed in my arms. Fragile, but with an inner strength. She weighed just 14 pounds at 12 months of age. She cried when we changed her clothes, cried when the doctors examined her, cried for her adoption group "red couch" photo, cried on the airplane, cried when her bottle was not just right, and cried when we tried to feed her solid food, even soft congee. The only time she didn't cry was when I was holding her. Her little nervous system had never really adapted to orphanage life, and she certainly wasn't ready for so many big changes at once. She hung on for dear life.

Eventually she let me put her down. She met her developmental milestones within the normal time frame, but she always did things a little differently from other kids. She is our only left-handed child, if that tells you anything.

Three years ago I wrote an anguished post about some of our challenges together. We have been busy in the meantime -- researching, reading, testing, trying, laughing, crying. I have meant to post an update...but the story was still unfolding. And I'm never sure how much I should share. We haven't reached any sort of resolution yet, but I have a better idea of how the puzzle pieces fit now, and perhaps our experiences will be helpful to someone out there.

Since that 2007 post, Ella remained a year or more behind in most academic subjects, and she continued to demonstrate troubling behaviors such as inattentiveness, poor retention of information, and impulsivity. She also remained cheerful, creative, polite, and loving. And a mystery.

We have systematically sought to rule out or treat possible issues. She has been tested twice by the school district and once by a private psychologist. She has done work with an attachment therapist. She has had a quantitative EEG and a course of neurofeedback to help with attention and focus. She has done vision therapy for a possible tracking problem. We have tried nutritional approaches and supplements. We hired a private tutor to work with her after school and during the summer.

After all that, there was only one possibility left to explore: ADHD. We had fought this. She did not -- does not -- behave, to my eyes, like a typical kid with ADHD. The school psychologist and attachment therapist did not think she had ADHD. But questionnaires completed by her teachers strongly suggested ADHD. Her EEG was "consistent with" ADHD. Because testing showed no clear-cut learning disabilities, ADHD seemed like the best explanation for her school difficulties.

Finally, we agreed with her pediatrician, who is a specialist in adoption medicine, on a diagnosis of ADHD - inattentive type. (I, as well as many authors in the field, prefer the term ADD. I really wish the DSM-IIIR had not made hyperactivity a permanent part of the name of the condition, because it's misleading. Many children with ADD, and especially girls, present with symptoms of distractibility and daydreaming rather than disruption and hyperactivity.)

With gritted teeth, we did a trial of stimulant medication. The first two medications we tried had virtually no effect on her behavior, and kept her up at night. A third may have helped slightly, but she had no appetite and lost an alarming amount of weight, which is not good considering that she is underweight anyway. Finally, we tried a low dose of a blood-pressure medication that has been found to be helpful with impulsivity and anxiety in ADHD. Though it doesn't help much with focus, it helps her slow down her racing thoughts enough to make good decisions, and it takes the edge off her anxiety. Plus it has no side effects that we can see.

It is not a cure. Medication never is. It does help curb some of the behaviors that were getting in the way of her learning and socializing. It improves compliance more than anything, and that's a lot.

Each thing we tried brought incremental improvement. But school remained a huge concern. Despite everyone's best efforts, she was still struggling to fit in. Every day at school felt like a failure to her and us, and there was no relief in sight. We had to do something before school became synonymous with failure in her mind.

Part 2

What does "every adoption is a special needs adoption" mean, anyway?

I want to explain what I mean when I say that every adoption is a special needs adoption. (I think those of us who are saying this are pretty much on the same page, but I don't want to speak for anyone else.)

To me, "every adoption is a special needs adoption" primarily means that we need to acknowledge that every child who is adopted, and particularly every child adopted internationally, has experienced abandonment, neglect, and quite possibly trauma and abuse. In a white paper from EMK Press, "Disruption and Dissolution: Unspoken Losses," Sheena Macrae notes:

Experts now say that "all adoptions involve special needs kids". A child entering an adoptive family comes with heavy baggage from the past. Probably many involve families with special needs too, in how they desire to form a family. It's unusual to adopt, even now. Few adoption specialists currently believe that post-adoption love and a little luck will guarantee success.

I do not believe that babies younger than, say, 18 months of age "remember" events as such. But I do believe that they are affected by those events. A baby who is left on a cold doorstep for a few hours feels discomfort and fear and hunger. That experience leaves a mark on her nervous system and emotional makeup. A baby who must wait to be fed with all the other babies in the orphanage might not explicitly remember crying for her bottle, but she may have a hard time shaking the fear that her hunger will never really be satisfied. A baby who lies for hours in a wet cot may have a hard time trusting adults to care for her needs, even new parents who are ready to respond to her every cry.

For a remarkable baby's-eye view of abandonment and orphanage life, see the article "Short Circuits: An adoptive mom's exploration of the neurological impact of trauma, neglect, and sensory deprivation," by adoptive mother Heidi Holman. She alludes to recent studies that show that interruptions in attachment affect a child's neurological development. Attachment-disordered children don't choose to reject their parents; it's built into their wiring.

Children are resilient, but there are limits. My children didn't have the advantages a lot of their peers and cousins had. They weren't breast-fed for 6 to 12 months and then lovingly spoon-fed organic baby food. They weren't rocked to sleep, gently placed into a soft crib, and covered with a hand-crocheted blanket. Nobody played Mozart for them or hung brain-stimulating mobiles above their beds. Nobody bronzed their first little shoes or recorded their every milestone. Not until they came to our home, that is. And they have done pretty well -- heck, they're outstanding -- but sometimes I haunt myself with this thought: What would they have been like if they had been given every advantage? What have they missed out on? There's no point in dwelling on it. All I can do is give them the best parenting I'm capable of from here on out.   

Now, in the interest of full disclosure I must admit that the statement "every adoption is a special needs adoption" includes an element of hyperbole. It's a slightly shocking statement, and that's intentional -- it's meant to wake people up to a reality they may be ignoring.

But it's important not to overdramatize the point. Adoption professionals caution against "pathologizing" adoption -- that is, characterizing adoption as inherently abnormal and adopted children as unavoidably marked by suffering. This is the attitude we see when people fling misconceptions at us like I hear adopted kids have a lot of problems.

There's a fine line between pathologizing adoption and acknowledging that there are risks involved in adoption. It's important that we maintain that line. We can't predict failure for our children.

"A Journalist's Guide to Adoption," an informative fact sheet from the Adoption Information Institute, quotes Los Angeles Times colunnist Sandra Banks's response to a reader who suggested that adoption is "dicey":

As if raising children -- however they join our families -- isn't dicey anyway. Many of us have special challenges -- single parents, the working poor, grandparents raising their children's kids -- and statistics stacked against us. Children with problems can be found on any family tree.

In fact, no one has ever had a perfect childhood or perfect parents. A child who is hospitalized frequently during the first year of life may well have attachment problems, even if he is raised by his biological parents. I've seen kids living in their birth families who I could have sworn had attachment disorder or sensory integration dysfunction, but instead they were diagnosed with ADHD or ODD and put on medication. Of my parents' six biological grandchildren and three adopted ones, the most impaired children are among the biological contingent. There are no guarantees. Adoptive families have an advantage, perhaps, in that we are aware of the difficulties our children may face, and we can prepare ourselves.

So I want to be clear that "every adoption is a special needs adoption" does not mean "every adopted child will have serious problems." It's a caution sign, not a stop light. It simply means that we need to be vigilant, we need to get help when it's called for, and we need to stop romanticizing our children's first months of life.

And we need to stop expecting perfection from our children. Imagine how we would fare if they expected perfection from us.

I'm specifically thinking here of disruptions. But that's another post.

The things we don't talk about

Why don't we talk more about the challenges of parenting internationally adopted children? Why does the myth of the "perfectly healthy" child from China persist? Why hasn't the message gotten out that every adoption is a special needs adoption?

I can think of several reasons.

1. It's nobody's business.

It really isn't. None of us is under any obligation to share our struggles. Our co-workers do not need to hear about which therapists our kids are seeing. No one expects to hear the details of our children's individualized education plans in our annual holiday letters. Nobody should feel compelled to blog about their children's developmental concerns. These are private matters that we do not have to air in public, and indeed have an interest in keeping private for the sake of our children. Let's be clear about that.

However. There's a fine line between discretion and coverup. There are adoptive parents I've known for years who didn't reveal the struggles they had with their child until recently. I have only hinted at our challenges with my family and friends. There comes a point where "Everything is fine, just fine" is pure spin. But we have our reasons, namely....

2. We don't want to play into the adoption stereotypes.

For every person who is thrilled when you announce your plans to adopt, there are two who respond with caution. Mostly it's based on hearsay.

I hear that adopted kids have a lot of problems.

My neighbors adopted a kid, and when he was in high school he was arrested for stealing a car.

I heard about an adopted kid who killed his parents with a kitchen knife.

If 99 out of 100 stories in the newspaper are about criminals who were raised by their biological parents, it's the one who was adopted that everyone remembers .

Of course, we point out that adopted children do just about as well as children raised by their biological parents. They're just more conspicuous. But the damage has been done. Most of us, as adoptive parents, respond to predictions of failure with defiance. We'll show them! Our kids will be at least as good as their kids!

And, as the studies suggest, they do quite well. But no child is untouched by abandonment and institutionalization. The effects may be minor or they may be significant, but they're there. What child, biological or adopted, is perfect? Yet if we admit to our kids having even normal glitches in behavior or development, we risk getting hearing "I told you so!" from the doomsayers. As a result, we may do our children and the cause of adoption a disservice by setting up unrealistic expectations. Our kids are resilient, but they'e not invulnerable.

3. Family expectations are even more powerful than societal expectations.

Families are all about connections. Grandparents want to hold their grandchildren and say with pride, "He's a real chip off the old block" or "She has her mother's beautiful eyes." Adoption challenges those expectations. Maybe your son won't have your pitching arm. Maybe your daughter won't have your artistic ability. They will certainly have talents of their own, and some families readily accept that. Others have a harder time of it.

This is a huge bugaboo for me. A and I were both born into families of achievers. He comes from a long line of teachers. I come from a family in which intelligence and academic achievement are highly prized. My kids have four grandparents and a dozen aunts and uncles who graduated from college. Those are heavy expectations to live up to.  My mother had a hard time accepting that her biological grandchildren got half their genetic material from someone outside the family (read: inferior interloper), much less embracing the idea of a biologically unrelated child entering the family. She has come a long way, but I am aware of "protecting" her from information that might shatter her illusions.

4. The agencies aren't talking about it. Or we're not listening.

There's a big disconnect between the marketing and social services departments at most agencies. At times I felt that our agency pulled a bait-and-switch. Their advertising features soft-focus pictures of smiling parents and children and a tug-at-your-heartstrings tagline like "Won't you open your heart to a child today?" You feel like you're such a good person for taking the bait. Then you show up at the required adoption preparation classes and suddenly you're at bootcamp: You think you can handle adopting a child? Well, do you really have what it takes? Do you? All of a sudden you have to prove that you're fit for duty.

I don't necessarily fault their approach; at least they're preparing parents for the realities and potential pitfalls of adoptive parenting. And they've got to get parents into the room somehow. But I've seen couples looking at each other during the presentations, and I know they're thinking that it's all just a bit exaggerated, and anyway their kid won't have those problems. They want to talk about decorating the nursery, not how to find an attachment therapist.

I'm glad our agency tries to give parents a dose of reality. I suspect that some agencies are still promising their clients that babies from China never suffer from attachment disorder or serious developmental delays. I don't think those agencies are intentionally lying; perhaps they're just trying to put a positive spin on things. But I think it's possible that they really don't know what happens to their clients once they get home (see points 1, 2, and 3 above). As a result, some agencies may be leading applicants to believe that non-special-needs = perfect. And they're doing parents and children alike a disservice.

Which brings me back to where I started. If we don't talk about our experiences, how are we going to get an accurate picture of international adoption out there? How do we balance our children's privacy with the need to be realistic about their adjustment?

I don't have answers right now. I'm just asking the questions. It's a start.

Puzzle pieces

There's a poignant moment at the end of the Danny DeVito's wonderful film version of Roald Dahl's Matilda. Matilda's useless mother (Rhea Perlman), on the run from the law with her husband, has just agreed to sign papers so that Miss Honey, who truly appreciates Matilda's special gifts, can adopt her. With police sirens sounding in the distance, Mrs. Wormwood peers at Matilda as if she is seeing her for the first time and says sadly, "You're the only daughter I ever had, Matilda. And I never understood you, not one little bit." She looks away and asks, "Who's got a pen?'"

This passage always brings me up short. Although Mrs. Wormwood is no maternal role model, I have felt this way about my own children. I suppose I do understand them a little bit, maybe more than a little bit. But there are things about them that I will never know, much less understand, and sometimes I feel like I'm trying to put together a puzzle that's missing some pieces.

Some of this just comes with the territory of international adoption. My daughters' early years are a mystery to them as well as to me. We don't know why they were abandoned. We don't know their family medical history. We don't know whether their quirks are genetic or acquired. These are things that will be more important to my girls as they get into their teens, and we'll do our best to help them explore their identities with the information we have.

Other mysteries weigh more heavily on me.

Ella, now 7, is the biggest puzzle in my life. She is a joyful child. She is unfailingly polite and always remembers to say "please" and "thank you." She is the only child in the house who jumps up to help if one of us comes in the door struggling with grocery bags. She sings out, "I love you 100 percent!" while we're headed down the hall after tucking her in at night. She is incredibly creative. She has a cheerful disposition and a smile that would make Julia Roberts envious. Her Chinese name means "bright." I call her Ella Sunshine because it's impossible to see her grinning face and not feel happy.

She is also the reason my heart sinks when the phone rings and I see the school's name on our caller ID or I find an envelope addressed to me in her backpack. She is the only one of us who does not like to read, and she will pick a fight to get out of having to do homework. She cannot sit still at school and professes to hate every subject but PE. She hoards paper, bites her nails to the quick, and refuses to wear clothes with buttons. She is the only child in the family who has hit me and told me she hates me. She is the child I cry about, alone in my bedroom.

For a long time, I thought her differences could be chalked up to temperament. She's just high energy, I thought. She likes to be busy. That's why she won't let me rock her and sing to her at night, why she won't sit still to listen to a storybook without interrupting us every 10 seconds. We knew she was malnourished in the orphanage. That must be why she liked to hold her own bottle and gagged on solid food.

She seemed to catch up so well; she met all her developmental milestones on schedule. She learned her ABCs and counted to 10. She was a little quirky, but still within normal limits, from what we could see. Her pediatrician thought she was fine. When she proved to be left-handed, we thought it explained a lot.

We had no idea anything was amiss until she went to kindergarten and the school sent home a note letting us know that she was working below grade level and qualified for extra assistance. You could have knocked me over with a feather. Was I that clueless?

(Also -- Working below grade level in kindergarten? How is such a thing possible? But that's a separate post.)

I was sure she'd test out of the assistance program before the end of the year. And she has made steady progress, but now, in first grade, she is getting extra help in both reading and math. Plus several other kinds of assistance.

So we've had to reconsider everything we'd assumed about her. Does she have high energy or ADHD? Is she temperamentally different or neurologically different? Distractible or hypervigilant? Independent or anxiously attached?

Let the assessments begin! Five years after her adoption, I took her to the international adoption clinic for a post-adoption evalution. The doctor noted her distractibility and wiggliness and provided an ADHD questionnaire for us and Ella's teacher to fill out. The scores were high enough to diagnose ADD (her teacher rated her high for hyperactivity as well, but we did not), but he suggested that we wait before reaching any conclusions. We requested that the school evaluate her as well; they have been very accommodating. She is being tested by the school psychologist (cognitive testing), speech/language pathologist, and occupational/physical therapist. I have also started taking her to an attachment therapist.

The school would be satisfied with an ADHD diagnosis. But attachment disorder can mimic ADHD, and sensory integration disorder can look like hyperactivity. Oppositional behavior can accompany either ADD or attachment disorder. Malnutrition can result in learning disabilities. Neglect affects brain development. Nothing is easy with adoption.

We don't have answers yet. And the thing is, she's basically such a delightful kid. She's not way off the charts, she just hangs around at the far edge of normal. She marches to a different drummer. I'd be happy to keep referring to her as quirky, but the school needs a diagnosis to provide services (most of the laws regarding educational services are tied to the Americans wIth Disabilities Act).

I'm determined not to put her on medication if at all possible. I know medication can make a world of difference to many kids, but I have several reasons for wanting it to be a last resort. I'm giving her omega-3 supplements, with some positive results. We're trying some new parenting techniques. The school keeps coming up with new interventions. I have mixed feelings about this because Ella is beginning to see school as a place where she is constantly missing the mark. She has a lot of anxiety about school.

I started this post four months ago. I've debated with myself whether to publish it. I hope I haven't said too much. You probably don't know us in real life, so I think it's okay. And I believe it's important for people to understand that just because a child seems to be in pretty good shape doesn't mean that she is unaffected by institutionalization. And the effects may not be apparent for years.

A few weeks ago I was on my way to school to pick up Ella for an appointment at the IA clinic. I had the ADHD questionnaires on the seat next to me. The jazz station was on the radio, and as I approached the school, Tierney Sutton's slow, sad version of "You Are My Sunshine" began to play. It was all I could do to hold myself together so I could walk into the school office without tears streaming down my face.

I want my child to succeed in the world. But I don't want to dim her spirit.

Please don't take my sunshine away.

Reexamining international adoption, part 2

In the early days of adoption from China, word got around that babies from China were healthier and received better care than children from other countries. A lot of people still believe this, though it's not completely accurate. (In fact, children from Korea probably receive better care; children from Chinese orphanages may receive better care than children from some Russian and Eastern European orphanages, which isn't saying much.) But we heard what we wanted to hear.

Most of us adoptive parents went blithely down the path to adoption from China thinking that we were virtually assured of getting healthy children. Sure, our agencies talked to us about developmental delays, unforeseeen medical issues, attachment problems. But most of us didn't know anyone who had experienced these problems personally. At most, we expected our children to have mild developmental delays that would resolve quickly after we came home. We're all inundated with warnings anyway; heck, there are safety warnings on Happy Meals. The agencies were just protecting themselves against lawsuits, right?

As it turned out, the parents of children who had not escaped institutionalization unscathed weren't talking. And when they did try to talk on the big lists like APC, they were shouted down by parents who wanted to see adoption as all rainbows and ladybugs. Unfortunately, when their warnings were brushed off, some of these parents just turned up the volume, making claims so extreme -- in one case, insisting that every single adopted child suffered from Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder -- that they turned even more people away. Eventually they started their own groups, where they could share their experiences with others who understood, away from the doubters.

I had a hard time hearing their stories too. It didn't jibe with our experience. Bess was, and continues to be, a poster child for adoption. She is beautiful and a model of good health; she met her milestones early, and continues to be ahead of her peers developmentally. Based on our experience, I promoted adoption, and especially adoption from China, like crazy.

Then we adopted Ella. She met her milestones too, but without the ease Bess demonstrated, and she had trouble with basic tasks like eating and sleeping. Another baby in our small travel group was unable to hold her head up at 10 months of age and later required speech therapy. A family we know adopted a baby who was significantly delayed and required Early Intervention services; three years later, she's still not completely caught up. I met people online, in discussion groups and blogs, whose children from China had developmental delays, feeding issues, and unforeseen health problems. Children who had seemed fine until preschool were diagnosed with learning disabilities once they entered school. Behaviors that were once chalked up to post-adoption adjustment persisted so long that parents began to wonder if their children had attachment problems after all.

It sounds ridiculous now, but as well-informed as I was, I had no idea how fragile internationally adopted children were. I collected stories of struggling families for years until finally the weight of their experiences hit me on the head and I realized what our agency was trying to tell us. I knew in my brain what they were saying, but I didn't know it in my bones. Now I do.

I've seen the truth in the adage "Every adoption is a special needs adoption." I don't think it matters whether it's international or domestic adoption, a newborn or a school-age child, a child who was in foster care or an orphanage. It's not possible to remove a child from his birthmother's arms and place him in an institution without that experience affecting the child somehow. (This sounds dangerously close to saying that all adopted children suffer from PTSD, doesn't it?) The effects may be dramatic, or they may be virtually imperceptible. They may be devastating, or no more significant that the normal bumps all children hit along the way. But they will be there. Children from China do pretty well, but even the best institutional care is no substitute for a loving home. 

I'm alarmed when I hear prospective adoptive parents say, "I'm a single parent/I'm a working parent/I already have six kids/We don't have much money....I couldn't possibly deal with a child who has a disability." I know that most of the time, despite their protestations, people who adopt a child with unforeseen problems will find a way to deal with the situation, just as most people deal with unforeseen problems in their biological children. But there will always be some who refuse the referral, disrupt, or dissolve the adoption. I've seen far too many disruptions lately. And that's just not fair to these children, who have already undergone so much loss in their lives. I'm still a big adoption promoter, but now I feel as though I have to add a warning: "If you truly can't handle a child with problems, don't adopt. If you honestly believe that having a special-needs child would destroy your family, just don't take the risk. Because things will probably be okay -- but maybe they won't."

And I hate to have to say that. I've always found it distasteful when people go into adoption with the intention of "saving an orphan." Saving someone seems to me to be a lousy basis for a relationship. (I can point to my first marriage as proof.) The best reason to adopt is because you want a child to love and care for. If every adoptive parent must be prepared to deal with special needs, adoption takes on a charitable or altruistic aspect that complicates the parent-child relationship. Is it possible to love a child unconditionally, with no expectation of gratitude in return, if we know we've likely saved that child's life or health? I think it is, but it takes awareness and a lot of self-examination on our part.

I think of adoption differently than I did 10 years ago. I still think it's a win-win situation -- a child gets parents, parents get a child. I don't regret adopting my kids for a minute. They have enriched my life even more than I could have imagined. But it's not easy, and it's not "just like" parenting a biological child. Being an adoptive parent means knowing the signs of attachment disorder as well as you know the signs of chicken pox. It means understanding what acronyms like SID and IEP stand for. It means keeping the phone numbers for Early Intervention and the international adoption clinic alongside your pediatrician's and babysitter's numbers. It means writing "unknown" on medical intake forms that ask for your child's birth and early health history.

Parenting isn't for the faint of heart. We adoptive parents know that better than anyone. Even if it takes us a while to figure it out.

Reexamining international adoption, part 1

I mentioned previously that I have changed my views on international adoption over time. Ten years ago, I saw international adoption in simple terms. A child needs parents, we need a child -- it's a win-win situation. Now I see it more in shades of gray.

The political implications of international adoption are so complex that I can barely scratch the surface here. I've thought a great deal about it over the past few years and wound up close to where I started -- believing that adoption is an imperfect solution to the problems of an imperfect world.

I am most troubled by circumstances where poverty and disease are the primary reasons for children being relinquished, because those problems could be helped to some extent with money. What makes international adoption so controversial is the disparity between the wealth of the individuals and nations receiving children for adoption and the poverty of those sending them. The argument that the money that goes into adopting a child could buy vaccines or food for an entire village is a valid one. On the other hand, many, perhaps most, of the adoptive parents I know do give money to ameliorate conditions in their child's home country, and poverty will not be erased overnight. It makes sense to me to see adoption as a short-term solution for children without homes, and financial aid and social programs as a long-term solution to the conditions that make adoption necessary.

More difficult to resolve are the social and cultural conventions that lead to children being made available for adoption. We, as North Americans, cannot simply pop into China to try to persuade the Chinese that a girl baby is just as good as a boy baby and the one-child policy is unjust, or head over to South Korea to try to destigmatize out-of-wedlock births. (To their credit, some adult adoptees are now working within Korea to do just that, but if they succeed it will be because they are making this effort, not their adoptive parents, who simply don't have the same stake in the situation.)

In the end, I come back to Jesus' comment that "The poor you will always have with you" (Matthew 26:11) (which I am taking a bit out of context). We can, and should, work to improve conditions in other nations, but we will never eradicate the causes of abandonment. There will always be children who need homes -- if not in China, then in Ethiopia, or somewhere else -- and international adoption will remain an effective, if imperfect, solution to the problem.

I have also given a lot of thought to the cultural issues surrounding international adoption, again without changing my views much. I believe that transracial and transcultural adoption is difficult to do well, but not impossible. I read what adult Korean adoptees say, and understanding their feelings helps me see how things are for my daughters. I don't think that Chinese adoptees will have the same experience as the KADs, in part because so many adoptive parents are learning from their experience. So we won't make the same mistakes -- but we will make different ones. KADs were raised as "white," and had little exposure to Korean culture, a missing element in their lives that they regret today; we go out of our way to expose our children to Chinese culture, but 15 years from now our kids will be writing in their holoblogs about how ridiculous it was that they had to wear qipaos to those endless FCC events and how little exposure they had to real Chinese culture.

I can't conclude that transcultural and transracial adoption is inherently wrong, however. Yes, adoption means removing children from their birth culture -- a loss both for them and for their home country. But understanding the culture from which my daughters came, I know that they will have better opportunities, better education, and better health care in our country. We are fortunate to live in an area with a large Asian population; they have never been the only Asians in school and other activities. They meet adult Asians, both recent and second- and third-generation immigrants, in their daily lives. They seem very comfortable in their skins. Again, it's an imperfect solution in an imperfect world.

What has changed is my view of adoptive parenting. And I'll address that in my next post.