Posted on 11/08/2007 8:41:58 AM PST by Lorianne
but RAD kids who are unredeemable are RARE, even among children who have RAD characteristics. there is a LOT you can do with children devastated by early attachment breaks. You just have to KNOW what you’re getting yourself into, and be stronger than the pain of the child. I deal with parents every week who ask me for help and input about their adopted children’s issues. There is so much help available now. And knowing personally the love of God can turned EVERYTHING around, in understanding the power of redemption for your foster / adopted child.
That line struck me, too. The girl was hoping, somehow, to go back home to Africa. When she finally figured out that wasn't going to happen, she started really trying to make a go of it in UK.
At which point, she gets stiff-armed. Again.
That really sucks.
You don’t have the “call” or passion for adoption, and that’s okay. I don’t consider us “living off of government money”. If you saw our life, and knew us, you would never even think that. I’m glad that God provided a way to keep all four siblings together so that i do not have to work outside the home, and can at least not worry about where we will live and having plenty to eat and taking care of all their basic needs. Friends, family, churches help us each month with the shortfall. Down the road I will definitely need to work part time at something, I imagine. But for now — and the immediate future — we’re doing great. We’re in a VERY unique situation, and I’m glad for the monies available so that I can offer these kids the life they so deserve.
I wish so much for my kids to have a daddy someday, and God knows this also. He hears their prayers for this, and i trust Him to provide ALL our needs — in His way and time.
I guess I see the opposite, the truly fixed’ RAD child is rare. (at least that’s what I’ve seen and been told). I’m not saying they are all serial killers or going to prison, just that they usually aren’t the ‘huggy, kissy, touchy, feely’ kind of child. A person wanting to feel loved and validated by a RAD-ish will be very disappointed. They usually will have a degree of emotional distance and isolation that will make bonding in the classic sense rare.
Granted, I’m not throwing these kids under the bus, just understanding that their emotional depth and breadth will always be different is a big step in working with them.
and that’s the key — knowing the potential limitations, and being realistic about them. HOWEVER, it’s critical to making sure in your own mind you do not label them or limit them by the RAD diagnosis. God can and does heal deep wounds within the human heart, and that is all that RAD really is — deep emotional, mental, spiritual, physical wounds.
Bingo. I've learned that kids have incredibly sensitive BS meters. They may not always be able to put it in words (though Zahina seems to have done so), but they know.
And a little girl who's been through as much as this one has ... she's probably got a far more adult worldview than do either the author of this dreck, or the woman who couldn't be bothered to understand....
But, a few weeks, or 6 months surely isn’t near enough time to come to that conclusion.
This “woman” cut this kid loose because the kid wouldn’t fit her preconceived fairy tale plans. If after a couple YEARS, the child was still a problem, then I could accept this adoptive mother’s opinions, but still not accept her tossing one back in the pond. She would just have to learn to treat that child differently.
I guess it depends on your belief system and what you know about yourself. I personally beleive that you can’t create in a human what isn’t there-— limbs don’t grow back, nor can full emotions come from no source for basis. It’s more of an amputation or a missing organ that an actual loss.
Again, a lot of this is based on personal and familial experience. And the best thing you can do for an RAD kid is just say “Hey, whatcha are is just fine.” So if that kid/adult never understands bonding, or never reacts or feels a certain way that you think they should, that is who they are.
Oh I agree,
It’s like adopting a child wanting a piano prodigy and finding out that they don’t have the eye-to-hand coordination to play chopsticks, much less Chopin.
With these kids, you have to take three steps back and look at who they are, and sometimes its a shock. They may always be distant, cold, withdrawn etc. Still, it isn’t you they are rejecting, it’s simply they way they respond to the outside world. So you have to reformat how you deal with them.
Statistics show that children raised by single parents, especially mothers, have more problems than children raised by married couples. They exhibit more bad behavior, are more likely to grow up in poverty, to drop out of school, etc. This isn’t even debatable. While some single parents do a good job as a rule they cannot and do not do as good a job raising children as married parents do. Children need a mother and a father. It is wrong to deprive a child of the opportunity to have both a mother and a father by placing him or her with a single parent. Adoption isn’t about boosting the self esteem of the parent(s). It is about doing what is right for the child.
Allowing single people to adopt children is just another way of weakening and redefining the family.
This woman set about adopting a child as though she were adopting a puppy from the dog pound. She had no idea what this girl’s needs were or what she was getting herself and her daughter into. In the past, she would never have been allowed to adopt a child because of her marital status. If that had been the case today, everyone involved would have been spared a lot of grief.
http://www.rediff.com/news/2007/oct/30pune.htm
US cultural exchange turns into nightmare for Pune girl
October 30, 2007 14:16 IST
Top Emailed Features
Little did the 16-year-old Nikita Dhavle know when she left Pune for the US with dreamy eyes and an idealism of a cultural ambassador, that she would return in three months, with a scarred mind and a fractured hand.
In what turned out to be a nightmare, Nikita, a bright student of a city school, selected under a cultural exchange programme of the American Field Service, landed in of Minnesota in the first week of August unaware of the hostility that awaited her in the form of the host family in Pipestone.
“I was asked to clean the kitchen, dining room, wash clothes, clean utensils, mow the lawn. I also cleaned the barn where the horses were kept,” the girl, who returned to India on October 26, told PTI.
“It seemed to me that what they wanted was a domestic slave who parades as a cultural ambassador,” a disillusioned Nikita said.
Nikita, who joined the Raff family in Pipestone after an AFS local coordinator screened the host family.
She was in for a rude shock when after two weeks, Ryan, the teenage son who was away, returned home.
“I came to know later that he was on probation for drunken driving,” she said.
Nikita, a keen learner with good academic and extra-curricular activity record, joined the Pipestone Central School to utilise her 11-month stay under the programme. But her problems with her host family continued.
“Ryan hurled abuses at me and said he the never liked the concept of cultural exchange. I used to wake up to violent arguments between the boy and the host mom and at times I saw them wrestle with each other on the floor. The lady of the house used to ask me pretentiously whether I was overworked but never cared to reduce the load,” said Nikita.
“Once in a fit of rage, the host mom physically pushed me when I requested her to encash my cheque as I needed money. Ryan took every opportunity to insult me.”
A fall in the barn fractured her left hand. The Raffs took her to hospital to plaster it but did not care to keep the follow-up dates with the doctor, Nikita recounted. By that time the girl who had made a favourable impression at the school, had begun to think of returning home.
She spoke to her parents in Pune and sent an e-mail to AFS functionaries in Delhi urging them to bring her back as she was no longer interested in completing the stay. Nikita was directed to the local coordinator of AFS who told her “You can change the host. But it could be from bad to worse. All families here are the same. Learn to accept and take things in good humour.”
With her disillusionment mounting, and the fracture of the hand adding to her agony and she decided to put her foot down and told AFS officials that “students who come here do not deserve this treatment”.
The emotional bruises inflicted on Nikita did not escape the attention of an alert faculty member of the Pipestone school who was fond of her and the teacher sounded the local sheriff that all was not well with the foreign student who looked sulky and depressed.
“I could have proper meal only at the school for lunch. At home the cooking was subject to the whims and fancies of the host mom. For two weeks, I only ate omlettes at home. When I requested her to teach me some American preparations, Ryan said teaching you amounted to teaching a dog,” Nikita recalled.
“Sheriff Dan Delanie was a nice man, he spoke to me affectionately trying to understand my predicament. He said I could change the family if I want or return home as per my wish,” Nikita said.
When she conveyed all the concerned that she wanted to go back she was advised to cite ‘homesickness’ as the reason for her premature departure.
But she refused despite repeated pressure and stuck to her stand that she was not comfortable there.
Meanwhile, Nikita’s mother, Anita, a school teacher, and her uncle Sarang Kamtekar, who is vice president of Bharatiya Vidyarthi Sena, the students’ wing of Shiv Sena, contacted some Indian Americans settled in Minnesota appealing them to help her out.
Kamtekar said they got a very heartening response from the Indian community who contacted Nikita and was ready to arrange for her return journey. But her status of a minor posed some legal difficulties.
Finally on clearance from the Sheriff, the AFS functionaries decided to send Nikita back cutting short her stay.
She was sent to Chicago where she failed meet with an AFS contact who was supposed to put her on a flight to Amsterdam en route to Delhi.
“With none to escort me and my hand in plaster evoked suspicions at the airport and I was subjected to extra scanning at every point”, she said.
On her arrival in Delhi, Nikita met Adnan Siddiqui, cultural counsel at the US embassy. He had been briefed by AFS activists. “He told me he would look into the matter,” said Nikita, who returned to Pune with her uncle Kametkar who has demanded action against the host family in Minnesota who subjected her to mental and physical torture.
what you clearly do NOT understand is the total HELL us “foster adoptive” parents have to go through before we can finalize our adoptions. The birthparents parental rights have to be terminated — and then they have usually YEARS of appeals granted to them with tax paid for attorneys to represent them (who fight like HELL for their rights, no matter how bad the abuse). It took 2 1/2 YEARS before we could finalize — for what the birthparents put us through. My kids attorneys told me that the court (Judge) realizes the birthparents are only trying to “retrive repossessed property” in fighting the termination of their parental rights, since obviously they didn’t care one BIT about loving their kids or keeping them safe before they lost custody of them. They’re just ticked off that the govt came in and took them away. But the RIGHT are all on their side — unlike international adoptions. It costs a whole LOT more $$$$ to adopt internationally, and it’s true that you rarely have to deal with birthparents, but you’re dealing with profound cross-culture issues that SCARE kids to death — bringing them on a plane to a new country that looks like a new planet — away from EVERYTHING familiar, and usually a new language also. All of that has a serious effect on kids, no matter how well they may seem to adjust initially.
Not all children need to adopted into a two parent home. Those with histories of long term sexual abuse do better in same gender households, at least until the are past a certain degree of trauma. And for the sake of those of the opposite sex, these kids have blurred lines between fact and fiction, time is elastic and the most innocent behavior reads differently to them.
So “he/she touched me there!” may have happened 2 months ago with the abuser, not 2 days ago with the adoptive parent.
For the first time in her 44 years, it would appear.
And even then,"taking responsibility" meant "taking the easy way out."
Sometimes you are surprised-— you may not get what you expect right away.
I have two friends that raised a niece and nephew for about 5 years, until they returned to their bio parents as teens.
Sadly, the boy is in prison now, but....they just recently heard from the girl. She’s healthy, happy, married with a family of her own. And she credits them with her success, and even tells her kids that they were who made the difference in her life.
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