While individuals will argue that adoption advocates are being too sensitive about the comment, I want to share with you from the perspective of a child waiting for adoption.  I have worked for nearly twenty years with children and adolescents who have been abused by their birth parents.  These children and adolescents have been the victims of violence, not the perpetrators of violence.  Yet these children and adolescents blame themselves for being the victims.  They frequently believe that they were abused because of who they are or what they did.

A significant number of these children do not  return to live with their birth families and have their parental rights terminated.  Once their parental rights are terminated, most of these children become available for adoption.  During the time they are waiting for the courts to decide if rights will be terminated and for an adoptive family to be found for them, these children live in an emotional and relational limbo.

One of the consequences of this time of relational limbo is that foster kids believe that they are “bad” kids and no one wants them.  The longer kids wait for adoptive families, they more depressed and despondent they become because they believe they are unwanted and unlovable.  Despite the efforts that foster parents and professionals make to help these kids feel loved and wanted, there is no way to match the therapeutic impact that occurs when a child is “chosen” by an adoptive family.

The joke in “The Avengers” just confirms for children waiting for adoption their perception that they are unwanted, unlovable, or different.

I don’t want an apology from Marvel for the joke.  The reality is that comics have overwhelming portrayed adoption as a positive experience in their storylines about superheroes through the years.  Superheroes have swept aside the stigmatism of adoption for many years telling the stories of adopted superheroes who represented good and try to champion worthy causes.   The entertainment industry has for years made jokes at the expense of stereotyped groups.

I want a joke about adoption in “The Avengers” to create enough media stir that everyone becomes more aware of the impact of adoption on children and the need for foster and adoptive families in this country.  Let’s talk about how the joke impacts foster children and adopted children.

Then let’s do something to make life better for foster or adopted children.  Let’s make a donation to a adoption or foster care group.  Let’s babysit for a family with foster children.  Let’s buy pizza for kids in foster care.  Let’s become foster or adoptive parents.  Let’s use the laughter from a joke to make a change for the better.

When a police officer tried to calm Salecia Johnson in the principal’s office, she resisted and was handcuffed.  She was charged with simple assault and damage to property.  The police officer removed Salecia from the school in a police car.  While everyone is debating whether the police overreacted to the situation, I think parents need more information before they decide how they would react to this situation.

While as a parent your instincts are to picture your own child in handcuffs, I’d like you to take a different perspective for a moment.  Imagine that your child is sitting in the classroom with Salecia.  Salecia gets upset and starts tearing items off the wall and throwing books and toys in the classroom.  One of the books she throws just misses your child’s head.

The principal and an aide have to carry Salecia Johnson out of the classroom while she is kicking and screaming.  Your kindergartner has witnessed the whole outburst.  While this is one episode, you should realize that episodes like this occur frequently in elementary schools.  Your child may be sitting in a classroom where they repeatedly witness violence and hear profanity.  With the current policy of inclusion, children with significant behavioral issues and emotional disturbances are placed in mainstream classrooms with your child.  Some of these children repeatedly disrupt classrooms with their out-of-control behavior.

As a parent, do you know if your child’s education is being disrupted by the behavior of other children?  It seems reasonable for parents to expect that their children will be safe in their classrooms.

Rather than picturing yourself as the parent of a kindergartner in handcuffs, picture yourself as the parent of the kindergartner who nearly got hit by a book and lost an hour of instructional time because of another child’s tantrum.

The aunt and uncle stayed involved in the treatment process.  When their niece completed her treatment in the residential treatment center, the aunt and uncle tried to bring their niece back home.  The niece escalated her behaviors again and was not safe to live with her aunt and uncle.  The niece has remained in residential treatment centers and her aunt and uncle have continued to be involved in her life, but she is currently not able to live in a family.

The aunt and uncle provided a safe and loving family for their niece, but it wasn’t enough.  Their niece had experienced so much trauma at such a young age that she continues to need significant treatment.

The aunt and uncle did not fail their niece, but they recognized they could not meet her needs.  For every situation like this one, there have been numerous situations where families felt they had exhausted their resources and the state of Texas brought in additional resources to help the family.  The families committed to do the work it took to make the placement work.

With a commitment from the families and the children and professional help, some difficult adoptive situations can work.

Even with spending a lot of time researching the families and the children, sometimes the placement outcomes are surprising.  Sometimes children thrive in placements that look like there is little chance the placement will succeed.  On the other hand, some of the placements that look like they would be an amazing match for a child don’t work out.

One reason why it is so difficult to match adoptive children with families is because professionals working with children available for adoption only have limited information about the children’s past.  We don’t know how many or what types of drugs the children were exposed to prenatally.  We don’t know how their schema for attachment to caregivers was impacted by neglect or abuse.  We don’t know the psychiatric or medical history of the family.

Caseworkers and counselors work with the information they have and do their best to try to place children in safe and loving families who will provide them a lifelong connection.

Despite our best intentions, matching children with adoptive families is not an exact science.

There are children though, who need to address their trauma and attachment issues before they are placed in an adoptive home.  I believe most children are adoptable if we can place them in an adoptive home when they are ready to be placed.

Children should not be living in families if they pose a risk of harm to themselves or others or if they are so oppositional that they cannot respond appropriately to simple household rules.  Sometimes, counselors with a lot of experience working with adoption can help families and children navigate through some difficult situations and help adopted children learn to trust new parents.

Children need time to work through their trauma and learn they can trust adults to keep them safe before they are ready to commit to a new family.  We need to allow children to reach a point where they are healed enough to live in a family.

Many families who want to adopt children do not have children of their own and may have struggled with infertility issues.  They enter the foster care and adoption systems in their states seeking to establish a nuclear family.  They bring with them the unconscious expectation that their adopted family will work like the family units they grew up  in or the family units of their siblings.

All families have temperaments and characteristics that are similar.  Not only do families look alike, they often act in similar ways and enjoy similar things.  Adopted children bring their genetics with them including temperament, so even children adopted at birth will fit into an adopted family in slightly different ways than biological children do.

When families enter the system and have never parented children, they may be a bit naïve about what they are reading about a child or what they are being told about a child.  I have sat in numerous staff meetings with potential adoptive parents and directly told them the types of issues that the child they are adopting will bring into their home.  More times than not, these families want children so badly that they minimize what I am trying to communicate about the child’s needs.  Deep down, they believe that they will love the child so much that love will fix everything.

Love is not enough to address all the needs of children who come from hard places and are impacted by prenatal substance use, neglect, and abuse.  These children need specialized professional interventions to help them figure out how to navigate living in a family setting.

Regretfully, some adoptive families just can’t hear what caseworkers and professionals are telling them about the child they want to adopt.  They literally deny what they are being told about the needs of the child.

In Texas, children in the custody of Children’s Protective Services generally move through a series of caseworkers.  By the time children move to the adoption unit,  they will be working with their third caseworker.  Many times they experience more caseworker changes than three.  One caseworker does the removal and investigation, another caseworker works the case until the child is moved to the adoption unit, and a caseworker from the adoption unit actually helps find the adoptive family.

The adoption worker will read information provided by the previous caseworker and may review the file, but generally does not know the child well.  The adoption caseworkers genuinely try to find families that are prepared to handle the children they adopt.  However, the adoption caseworker may not have nearly as much information as I have about a child if I have worked with the child since he or she was removed from their biological relatives.

The adoption caseworkers make full disclosure of the information they know about the child and the adoptive family is provided a de-identified record of the child that contains all the paperwork that Children’s Protective Services has on the child.  Adoptive parents are asked to read this before they make a decision to take a child.

Adoptive parents sometimes do not read this file completely because it can be an overwhelming amount of information or if they read it, they don’t understand what they are reading.  All the information that CPS has accumulated on the child is made available.

Sometimes children don’t disclose information about their biological families and their abuse until they are adopted and in a forever home because only then do they feel like it is safe to disclose.

Certainly, I cannot speak for all adoption caseworkers or all adoptive situations, but in my experience, adoption caseworkers try to provided full disclosure to the families.

Some of the instances of child maltreatment I’ve read about include:

• A grandfather who forced his three grandsons to hike the Grand Canyon as a method of getting them in shape and forcing them to lose weight.  He restricted their food and water consumption and kicked and hit them to force them to continue to hike the Canyon.
• A father who spanked his son with so much force that he left bruises on the child’s buttocks and upper legs.
• Parents who forced a child to kneel for nine hours a day with his hands tied behind his back for TEN days before he ran away.  If the son moved from the kneeling position, he was beat with a stick.  The parents stated that they did not intend to hurt their son.  They were punishing him for cheating in school.

In each of these cases, adults tried to change behavior by taking drastic action.  What parents tend to forget is that time is on their side.  An appropriate consequence may not immediately change the behavior.  However, the more that a child consistently experiences meaningful and appropriate consequences, the more effective the consequences will be.

Too frequently, parents aren’t consistent enough in applying consequences or they expect changes to quickly.

Remember, time is on your side.

For many years, schools and parents have harped on “stranger danger.”  Adults have told children not to get in a car with a stranger and not to talk to strangers.  However, teachers and parents have not prepared children to recognize when family members, family friends, and acquaintances are asking them to engage in inappropriate activities.

Parents feel safer if they think a creepy weirdo is the person who poses a threat to their children.  Parents find it much more difficult to cope with the reality that family members and friends they trust will hurt children.  Frankly, when parents realize that the real danger for sexual abuse comes from people they know, they become unsettled and slightly paranoid.

What parents need to do is become proactive.  They need to teach their children about appropriate sexual and physical boundaries and they need to provide intrusive supervision.  In addition, they also need to look for the following indications that an adult may be developing an inappropriate relationship with children.

1.  The adult tries to spend an unusual amount of time with a child.

2.  The adult makes promises or comes up with justifications for spending an unusual amount of time with a child.  For example, an coach might tell parents that a child has great athletic talent and needs extra coaching to reach his full potential.

3.  The adult gives the child gifts or spends lots of money with the child.

Parents don’t need to be paranoid.  They need to be proactive.

Trustworthy adults will appreciate a parent’s vigilience in protecting a child.

While providing mental health care treatment for troubled children and adolescents would seem like a practical and simple solution, the reality is quite different.  If parents do not have health insurance, their children will likely only get treatment or intervention after their behaviors have become quite severe.  Even parents with health insurance will discover that there are significant limits on how much inpatient treatment their child can receive without placing a substantial financial burdeon on the family.

In some cases, families can get some support from Child Protective Services to access mental health resources.  However, many families fear that if they try to get assistance from CPS or other agencies, their children will be removed from their care.  Even Child Protective Services and the Department of Mental Health and Mental Retardation have very limited resources which typically provide services only for the most severely impacted by mental health issues.

While providing more funding to address the mental health issues of children and youth would save the State of Texas a significant amount of money in the long-term by preventing incarceration and removal of children from their families, our state budgets are generally decided based on political realities that rarely consider more than two to four years of expenditures at a time.

Regretfully children do not vote.  The State of Texas has balanced its budget on the backs of our children.  Significant funding cuts have been made to education and all types of services that impact children.  Children don’t choose to be born into poverty or into families that can’t care for them.

As you consider who you will vote for during the next several months for a variety of political offices at the local, state, and national level, look at how their positions on education, health care, homelessness, and child welfare will impact children.  Regardless of your political affiliation, it just makes sense to invest a little more money in children today, so that we don’t have to pay a whole lot more money in the future to incarcerate them.