Posted on 12/19/2006 12:56:34 PM PST by Dr. Marten
The move comes amid a surge in foreign applications to adopt Chinese children. The United States is the No. 1 destination for children adopted abroad, but the number going to Europe and elsewhere is rising.
The restrictions are meant to limit adoptions to “only the most qualified families,” said the Web site of one agency, Harrah's Adoption International Mission in Spring, Texas.
An employee of the government-run China Center of Adoption Affairs, the agency that oversees foreign adoptions, said it has issued new guidelines but refused to confirm the details released by the American agencies. He wouldn't give his name.
A U.S. Embassy spokesman in Beijing said it was looking into reports of the new regulations. He spoke on condition of anonymity in line with embassy rules.
The Chinese agency also is trying to increase the number of children available by creating a new charity to improve conditions in orphanages and “keep infants and young children alive and well enough to be adopted,” Harrah's said.
Americans adopted 7,906 children from China in 2005, raising the total since 1989 to 48,504, according to the Joint Council on International Children's Services in Alexandria, Va., an association of adoption agencies and parents' groups. The group's Web site lists 110 U.S. groups that arrange adoptions from China.
Under the new rules, only people who have been married for at least two years will be eligible to adopt, according to Harrah's, the New Beginnings Family and Children's Services Inc. of Mineola, N.Y., and Families Thru International Adoption Inc. of Evansville, Ind.
Beijing previously allowed adoptions by unmarried foreigners.
The agencies said Chinese officials disclosed the rules at a Dec. 8 meeting in Beijing. They take effect May 1.
Among other restrictions, couples must have a Body Mass Index – a measure of obesity – of no more than 40 and be aged 30-50, with people up to age 55 considered for children with special needs, according to the agencies.
The rules bar parents who take medication for psychiatric conditions including depression and anxiety or have “severe facial deformity.”
Many Chinese children adopted abroad are girls who are given up by couples who, bound by rules that limit most urban families to one child, want to try for a son. Others are left at orphanages or by the roadside by unmarried mothers or poor families.
A sharp increase in foreign applications for adoption has led to a backlog in approvals, with waiting times rising from six months in early 2005 to as much as 15 months now, according to adoption agencies.
Obese? Wonder what standards they are using?
A body mass index over 40 (as stated in the article) would likely meet just about anyone's standard for obesity.
I have a BMI of 41.
And a bodyfat percentage of less than 10%. (8% to be exact)
BMI is meaningless for anyone with muscle.
When a child over three is available for adoption in the US, it's almost always because s/he has been subjected to severe abuse and/or neglect. Dealing with the effects of that (often permanent) is a whole lot worse than changing diapers for a while. I applaud those who are willing to take it on, as long as they're doing it with a realistic idea of what they're getting into. I think it's extremely unwise to do if there are other young children already in the home, or if there's still a possibility of the parents having a baby of their own. Some of these horribly damaged kids have grown up to do horrible things to their adoptive parents and siblings.
If you're not familiar with the whole RAD scam, please do NOT get your info from RadKids.org -- it's part of the problem. Beware of any therapist who has given a "RAD" diagnosis or any parent who has accepted such a diagnosis and is following a therapist's treatment recommendations without the full and ongoing approval of an MD currently board-certified in psychiatry.
"RAD" is a favorite label among dangerously crazy therapists, including the one who helped an adoptive mother smother her 10 year old daughter (Candace Newmaker) to death during a "therapy" session in which she was rolled up in a blanket and forced to struggle to get out as a "rebirthing" experience, and the one who directed a Utah couple to use "forced water drinking" as therapy, which ended up killing the adopted 4 year girl (Cassandra Killpack).
From Cassandra's story: Prosecutors say the Killpacks disciplined Cassandra by forcing her to drink at least 2.5 liters of water June 9, 2002, as punishment for stealing her younger sister's juice. In taped interviews, the couple's 7-year-old daughter, Nicole Killpack, told police her parents had forced Cassandra to drink at least four large glasses of water as punishment for "sneaking" her younger sister's Kool-Aid or juice. After tying Cassandra's arms behind her back, Jennete Killpack poured glass after glass of water down the girl's throat until she fell off a bar stool and hit her head, Nicole said. When Richard Killpack came home from church meetings, he assisted his wife in what they considered therapy. Cassandra was forced to run around the house and stand in a corner until she vomited, Nicole said. Cassandra fell unconscious soon after. State Chief Medical Examiner Todd Grey testified at a preliminary hearing in 2003 that the girl's death resulted from her blood-sodium level dropping precipitously and a subsequent fatal brain swelling. He said Cassandra also had water in her lungs that came from the forced water drinking or breathing in her own vomit. . . . Jenny Gwilliam, a licensed clinical social worker and co-owner of the Cascade Center, testified she diagnosed Cassandra as having a severe case of reactive attachment disorder -- that she failed to bond with her adopted parents.
Gee, if a kid won't "bond" with parents who would be willing to things like that, she must have a "disorder", right?
All these "therapies" are aimed at children who don't want to be dependent on or trusting of the adults they're living with. The plan is to terrify and traumatize them to the point where they'll be so desperate for help that they'll start looking to the only person available for it. In most cases, the problem is with the parents, not the child, and the child is acting on very good instincts not to trust people who would buy into these sketchy diagnoses and therapies. Quackwatch has a good summary of the whole cultish industry: http://www.quackwatch.org/01QuackeryRelatedTopics/at.html
Note that the RadKid.org site is promoting Nancy Thomas as a reliable expert. This site http://www.childrenintherapy.org/proponents/thomas.html exposes what Thomas is really about (including the fact that she was affiliated with the therapy practice, Connell Watkins & Associates, that killed Candace Newmaker, at the same time Candace was killed, and has advocated the forced water drinking therapy that killed Cassandra Killpack and other children). A sample of her advice:
-- "I have had instances where a kid is so out of control that they refuse to stay. When that happens, I will sit on the child. I have had to do this with dogs as well, and they are generally more dangerous with their teeth and claws than children. … I pick a good book and read while I sit on a child and that really seems to upset them because they feel that I should be miserable like they are."
-- She also believes in the thoroughly debunked tales of secret Satanic cults: "I had one little boy who was in a ritualistic cult. … He had been a cannibal and had taken part in the rituals. He knew how to worship Satan, full blown."
-- On "rage reduction therapy": "In rage reduction therapy, the person doing the holding is the person in control and he is the aggressor. He holds the child and provokes the child into a rage on purpose."
RadKids.org also promotes Daniel Hughes. This page from the same site http://www.childrenintherapy.org/proponents/hughes.html provides selections from Hughes' books and writings.
-- Re "holding therapy": "The therapist … gradually moves the child into the emotional spheres of terror, rage, and despair that the child wants to avoid. … She directs therapy in ways that the child would never choose to do. … the child reluctantly gives up control."
-- While a terrified child is being restrained this way by a crazed adult "therapist", Hughes advises: "the therapist directs him to recall and reexperience significant memories from his abusive and neglectful past, he is likely to feel intense rage, terror, and despair that will often be focused on the therapist." (keep in mind these may be sexual abuse experiences, which the child is being forced to relate to the crazed adult who is forcibly holding him/her close to the adult's body)
-- Perhaps most chillingly: "I am indebted to Connell Watkins, Deborah Hage, Foster Cline … for many of these concepts." That line was from a book he published in 1997. Watkins was the "therapist" who personally led the April 2000 "rebirthing" session in which Candace Newmaker was murdered, and personally held Candace down inside the blanket while she suffocated to death. At the trial, details of the session came out: "In a voice filled with panic, Candace repeatedly screamed that she couldn’t breathe, couldn’t move, and couldn’t find the way out. Her struggle was so intense that she kicked a 31-inch tear in the sheet with her stocking feet. In time her protests got weaker and eventually only labored and irregular breathing could be heard from her. Fifty minutes into the session, Candace went completely quiet. The therapists taunted her with “quitter, quitter, quitter” and sat on top of her for another twenty minutes before unwrapping the sheet. Candace was discovered blue and lifeless. " That was Watkins herself, shouting "quitter, quitter" to a child she had just killed. Nice folks Hughes is indebted for his ideas.
There's lots, lots more.
Oh dear, I've read about that incident.
I didn't realize that case was somehow affiliated with the website.
What's your opinion on kids supposedly diagnosed with RAD?
Do you not consider it to be a real disorder?
I do not like their Communism, or particularly care for their leaders. But when we gave up on Endostatin - a side-effect-free antiangiogenesis drug - due to a few suspect technicalities, Dr. Luo persevered, offering hope for an effective and painless treatment for cancer. (FWIW in my experience I see these smart young Chinese researchers spending a good deal more time at the lab/office than trolling for girls, which Americans seem to excel at).
Based on these facts, which is the more noble society?
You left out the worst possible scenerio. The mother named the wrong 'daddy', and some guy shows up a few years down the road, claiming his rights weren't properly terminated, to extort money.
"Why is there a surge of foreign applicants to adopt kids? What about all the orphans in their own country?"
I know many people who have adopted domestically, and many more people who attempted domestic adoption, only to come away heartbroken or worse.
Just last week, a couple who had fostered to adopt 3 small children for 22 months had those children taken away from them. Where did they go? To the birthmother's father, who had LOST CUSTODY OF THE BIRTHMOTHER MANY YEARS AGO! The grandfather had not shown any interest in the children for the almost 2 years the children were in foster care. Yet suddenly when the case was winding to a close (so that the foster parents could adopt the children they had raised and loved so much), the grandfather (undoubtedly persuaded by the unfit birthmother) rushed in to take the children. The children are black, the family is white, Christian and homeschool- a deadly combination. It's much better for the children to go live with a man they have seen once in their life (who lost his custody of his own child years earlier) than to stay with the family who has lovingly raised them for almost 2 years. (sarc)
Sadly, the grandfather told the foster family that he did not want ANY of their toys or personal belongings. The children left with the clothes on their backs, and will never be able to see the family they grew up with (the youngest is just over 2).
When we went through foster/adoption classes, the social worker said, "The courts in our county are hesitant to sever the rights of parents, so the children that are available for adoption will be SEVERELY abused and neglected."
I could go on with other domestic adoption debacles.
That is why people adopt internationally.
I'm not a psychiatric expert by any stretch. Just well-read enough (mostly via FR!) to know that this is big, big scam run by unspeakably evil adults. The official psychiatric diagnostic manual ("DSM-IV-TR" is the current version) does list this disorder. Naturally the scam artists pick one that they can point to as being "real". But legitimate psychiatrists apply very different diagnostic criteria http://www.behavenet.com/capsules/disorders/reactatt.htm , and certainly don't advocate anything along the lines of these wacko-sadistic "therapies" as treatment. The scam artists, have their own kooky set of diagnostic criteria, insist that the vast majority of adopted children have RAD, and also insist that mainstream forms of therapy "don't work".
Perhaps most importantly, legitimate psychiatrists will be quick to diagnose psychiatric problems in the parents, which obviously all parents who are willing to undertake "therapies" of this sort have. The root appeal of the scam artists version of RAD is that EVERYTHING is the child's fault, and the child is cured when the child has complete faith that the parents can do no wrong and has no desire to do anything except exactly what the parents want. A very appealing paradigm to psycho parents who don't want to face up to that fact that THEY are the ones with a serious problem. Also convenient for the "therapists" who are talking parents into forking over checks for thousands of dollars (Candace Newmaker's parents paid $7000 for the planned 2-week session in which she was killed) -- somehow, saying "Look, Mrs. Jones, you need to recognize that YOU are the one with a mental problem" doesn't keep the fat checks rolling in.
These scam artists basically define RAD as any behavior in a child which isn't exactly what the adoptive parent wants in his/her fantasy "ideal child". Like all cultish scams, these "therapists" set up "support groups" for parents in which only those parents subscribing to all this garbage are allowed to participate, and in which they are actively discouraged from/warned about changing to mainstream therapy (the idea that maybe there's just nothing wrong with the kids at all is obviously completely taboo). This is what accounts for parents with no previous criminal or psychiatric history (which few adoptive parents have, and even fewer who have enough money to pay for this garbage) being drawn deeper and deeper into a belief that it's okay to inflict these "therapies" on their child -- they meet regularly with other parents and a "facilitator" who reinforce the belief in the cult.
I once briefly taught a 3-4 year old adopted girl in a gymnastics class who probably did have RAD, though the parents never mentioned any such label. They did advise the coaches that she was adopted as a toddler and did not take the usual notice of authority figures or interact quite normally with other children. She was a perfectly non-disruptive child, but was somewhat off in her own little world, unconcerned with whether she could or couldn't perform the skills that the other kids were doing, and with a tendency to wander off without warning. She just didn't seem to notice the existence of the social structure around her, but it wasn't really a problem. Her perfectly sane parents didn't seem too worried about it, and I'm sure she largely outgrew it with nothing beyond ordinary chat/play therapy.
It's true that children who spent their first year or two in an bad orphanage or other situation where they had virtually no interaction with other human beings (many Eastern European orphanages just dump kids in cribs and leave them there 24/7, often until they're 4-5 years old), or only bad interactions, can have a permanent inability to form normal attachments, but most aren't seriously disruptive due to this. I'm sure they could all be MADE disruptive, though, by being subjected to regular psychological and physical torture such as these pseudo-therapies consist of. But then again, so could any perfectly normal child.
I expect the grandfather's sudden interest was due to a social worker of the no-white-parents-for-black-children ilk enlightening him that he'd receive a fat monthly check for the next 16 years if he took them.
"Most people still want to adopt babies, healthy babies. Little interest in children over three. I've never understood why, I mean a diaper free child would be perfect."
People want to be able to mold kids as their own. By the age f four or five, a lot of the molding that will determine much of a child's personality and future as an adult has already been done.
I can't help it, I got fat eating in Chinese restaurants. No fair.
Have you ever seen a skinny Buddha figure?
"I can't help it, I got fat eating in Chinese restaurants. No fair."
I highly doubt that. I lost weight after living/eating in China for two years.
"Have you ever seen a skinny Buddha figure?"
No, but then again, Buddha wasn't Chinese.
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