Remember how much it hurt when you skinned your knee? Not when you just scratched it sliding into second, but when you scraped off a chunk of skin the size of your kneecap. For the first few seconds it just looked pink and raw, with some grit embedded around the edges. Then the pink darkened to red, as blood oozed out of dozens of torn vessels. The scrape began to throb, and for the longest time it just kept hurting more.
Eventually, you knew that unless you gave up things like baseball and biking, you couldn’t help but scrape it again. By then, your knee was hypersensitized. The nerve endings were raw, and you waited for a little scuff to send you writhing in agony, starting the long, painful healing process all over again.
Skinning your knee is a nuisance; losing your parents is a catastrophe–for anyone at any age, but especially for young children.
Before any officials, no matter how well intentioned, decide to take away children from their caregivers, they had better be sure it’s the right thing to do. Stability may be moderately important for grown-ups–we all like to know without having to think about it where a favorite coffee cup hangs or who is sleeping in the next room–but it is essential for youngsters. They need to know absolutely–not wonder–who loves them, who provides for them and who will fix the many things that can go wrong.
For the child formerly known as “Baby Richard,” those issues, which ought to have been settled soon after birth, just won’t go away. Two years ago he was taken from his adoptive parents, the only caregivers he had ever really known, in as cruel and abrupt a fashion as our community through its legal system could devise.
We two doctors were brought into the process, one of us fairly early as a psychiatric consultant, to help determine the best interests of the child; the other, a psychologist, later on to assist in the transition. We both vigorously opposed the transfer on human, rather than legal, grounds. It had become a contest by that time, and Richard lost the first round.
Then we suggested a series of measures to help prepare the child for the transfer. He lost that round, too. In the end, we witnessed the calamity through the eyes of families and the horror of the national media as the thoughtful guidance and unselfish suggestions of almost every professional involved went unheeded.
We would describe what finally happened as only a full-fledged catastrophe. Not a mere nick on the knee, but a swift and vicious kick. No one recovers quickly from a wound like that. Perhaps the victim is scarred forever.
Since then, the soreness has been compounded. Richard was promised regular contact with his former parents and his best friend, his former brother, but that was denied. A few months ago his biological parents split up again. His biological father, who had initiated and won the custody battle, left Richard and his biological mother to move in with another woman. Those are the only fresh wounds we know about so far.
Ripped at the age of 4 from the only set of parents he had ever known and separated again at 6 from half of his second set of parents, the half with legal custody, Richard now appears to have been thrown back on the “mercy” of the courts. As in his case’s first appearance there, the issue has provoked a range of opinions, including loose talk of vengeance, righting wrongs, teaching lessons and establishing precedents.
As mental health professionals who specialize in working with children and families, we would like to shift the focus away from these complex, competitive legal issues to a simpler and more important point. The key issue at stake, the only one that matters, and the one completely absent from the previous decision, is still the best interests of this child.
At this point, it doesn’t much matter who might be the slightly more skillful parents, who was cheated by earlier decisions, who misbehaved and who suffered. These issues are now irrelevant.
Unfortunately, it’s not easy to determine what will be best for Richard. It seems that no one knows enough about him to provide an answer. He apparently has not been evaluated by appropriately trained and experienced professionals since he was dragged through that shattering experience two years ago. Children are an unpredictable blend of fragility and resilience. Therefore we can only guess how well he might have coped with his torture. But it might not be a bad idea to check.
Evaluating a little boy after such an event is hardly simple. It requires a good deal of time and patience, talking to those who know him now and those who knew him then. It involves observing him at home, at play, at school, in as many different environments and situations as possible.
How is he functioning in school? Is he curious? Outgoing? Engaged? Does he make friends? Respond to challenges? Tolerate frustrations? Is he different at home? How does he relate to adults? To his pals? How has he changed?
We need to know how well he has healed, and how well he hides what hasn’t healed and how we might try to fix that which is broken.
We all look forward to the end of the age of Baby Richard, and we dread the thought of a sequel. He has been hurt badly, at a time and in a way that may make it difficult for him ever to trust others easily. He may have trouble ever making solid attachments and feeling secure in them. The last thing he needs is to be dragged back through the process, reopening old but exquisitely sensitive wounds.
In the end, this is not an issue of what is best for the adults in this case, much less the lawyers and judges with their clearly defective laws. Nor is it the time to make policy or set precedents. It is time to help a child–an innocent child–whose brief history already reminds us, ironically, of a line from Shakespeare’s “Richard II”: “Tell thou the lamentable tale of me, and send the hearers weeping to their beds.”
