The south suburban couple had spent the better part of a decade hoping for a child, so when an adoption caseworker called with the news that a 10-year-old foster child was available for adoption, they were ecstatic.
But shortly after the slim, serious girl with blond bangs arrived on their doorstep, the couple’s fantasy of a happy family unraveled.
Just a year after Brittany came to live with them, they put her adoption on hold.
“You think everything is going to be grand, but then it isn’t,” Susan Brown said, recalling Brittany’s hostility. “I didn’t think it could possibly work.”
The third of eight children to be taken away from a drug-addicted and mentally ill mother, Brittany had lived with grandparents, aunts and foster families since the age of 6, rarely staying in one home more than a year.
The last foster family Brittany lived with had tried to adopt her, but ultimately, they gave Brittany up, citing the child’s cold behavior as the primary reason.
“Her foster mother said you can’t warm up to her,” Susan Brown said.
At first, the Browns shrugged off the foster mother’s comment, as well as a psychological report that diagnosed Brittany with an attachment disorder. But as the months slipped by, they began to wonder if Brittany would ever accept them as her parents.
“We didn’t think she even wanted to stay with us,” Dan Brown said.
Whenever Susan Brown hugged her, Brittany snapped, “Don’t touch me.” She greeted motherly glances at the breakfast table with a snarling, “Stop looking at me.”
“Finally, I told her right out, `Your adoption’s on hold because we have to learn we can all live together,”‘ Susan Brown said.
Fearful that yet another family might reject Brittany, Catholic Charities, the agency that arranged the adoption, stepped in to try to save it.
“We’ve seen adoptions come apart and know that the process is much more difficult than people believe it is,” said Harry Wildfeuer, Catholic Charities Children’s Services director for Will and Grundy Counties.
Although there are no precise national or state statistics on the number of children returned by preadoptive families, most studies indicate between 8 to 15 percent of adoptions fall through before they are finalized, said Susan Smith, a social work professor with Illinois State University. Co-directors of the Center for Adoption Studies, Smith and ISU associate professor Jean Howard have been evaluating post-adoption preservation programs in Illinois for the last five years.
Far fewer adoptions-less than 1 percent, according to the U. S. Department of Health and Human Services-are dissolved after they are finalized.
“But when it does happen, it can be a pretty damaging experience for all concerned,” Howard said.
When Wildfeuer found that between 15 to 20 percent of his agency’s adoptions of foster children were falling apart in the preadoptive phase (it typically takes anywhere from 6 months to two years for an adoption to be completed), he proposed a new program designed to decrease the failure rate of adoptions in Will and Grundy Counties.
“We’d like to cut that number in half at least,” said Wildfeuer, who has been running the Family Adoption Stabilization Team since January, when the Illinois Department of Child and Family Services agreed to fund the $67,000 pilot program for one year.
FAST appears to be the first comprehensive program to address the threat of disruption before adoptions are final, said Alexis Oberdorfer, DCFS statewide post-adoption and guardianship coordinator. The program is available free of charge to any family in Will or Grundy that considers returning a child before an adoption is final.
When a family is referred to FAST, the lead caseworker, social worker Kate Lopez-Gilmore, visits the home to assess the situation. She helps the parents develop a plan for dealing with problems as they arise and connects them to other resources, such as psychological counseling and adoption support groups, if necessary. Sometimes, even marital counseling is called for.
“They’re functioning fine when it’s just the two of them, but then you add a third person to the mix and it becomes a question of whether the marriage will survive,” Lopez-Gilmore said.
FAST can also arrange for an educational adviser to meet with teachers and school administrators, because problems at home often translate to problems at school.
In April, Lopez-Gilmore, began weekly meetings with the Browns.
“We talked a lot about what was developmentally appropriate behavior for Brittany,” Lopez-Gilmore said.
She tried to help the Browns realize that some of Brittany’s behavior, particularly pulling away and staking out her independence, was normal for a girl Brittany’s age.
“Susan said, `I’ve bought her dresses and she won’t wear them,'” said Lopez-Gilmore, the mother of two teenagers. “I just looked at her and said, `Give it up. She’s a preteen. As long as she’s being appropriate, not being kicked out of school for wearing slutty clothes, let her wear what she wants.'”
Brittany was present for a few sessions but more often Lopez-Gilmore met with the Browns alone to coach them on parenting techniques for dealing with ordinary adolescent problems, as well as the problems unique to children who have been abused or neglected.
“You go in and give the parents the skills they need in dealing with these kids,” Lopez-Gilmore said. “It’s about unconditional love, but it’s also about setting limits.”
Often, her biggest challenge is helping parents discard unrealistic visions of a happy family.
“There’s a tendency for adoptive parents to believe that `all the love I give them and all the things I give them are going to magically make them love me and make them okay,’ and that’s not the case,” Lopez-Gilmore said. “I don’t know if Brittany is ever going to be really affectionate with them.”
Accepting that possibility was hard, but it was the key to keeping Brittany, said Susan and Dan Brown.
“It’s a letdown, a little bit, but I see her now, these last few months, coming around,” Susan Brown said. “You just have to hang in there and show them you care.”
So far, eight families have been through the program, and although more families have resolved to go through with adoptions, not every adoption has been salvaged.
“The kids these people are adopting have problems,” Lopez-Gilmore said. “They come from, more times than not, situations where there was physical as well as sexual abuse.”
Though adoptive parents are always sympathetic, not everyone can cope with a child damaged by years of abuse, Lopez-Gilmore said.
“No matter how much you train people before the placement, training without having a child living in your home can only go so far,” said Howard.
Recognizing the difficulties adoptive families can encounter, Illinois has joined a handful of states that have developed extensive post-adoption preservation services–including therapy, tutoring and support groups–all aimed at preserving families after adoptions are final. Nearly 70 percent of the state’s post-adoption preservation program participants are families who have adopted from the child welfare system, according to Smith and Howard. About 20 percent are families who adopted internationally, and 10 percent are private infant adoptions.
The state typically provides the services long after an adoption has been completed–an average of eight years after it’s finalized, according to a 1995 Illinois State University study.
Fewer adoptions would fail if parents were better prepared for what to expect before a child is ever placed in the home, Lopez-Gilmore said.
“These issues are addressed in the training people have to go through in order to be ready to adopt, but they are so excited about the possibility of getting a child they overlook the realities,” Lopez-Gilmore said.
To receive the mandatory state license to adopt, parents must attend a training course. Most are offered through the adoptive agencies, such as Catholic Charities, which has a contract to coordinate DCFS adoptions.
Training would be more effective if it included volunteer work, such as providing respite child care to foster families on weekends, or simply driving foster children to therapy appointments, Lopez-Gilmore said. Such work, she added, might give prospective parents more reasonable expectations before adopting their own child–“Anything that would give them a more realistic idea of what they’re getting into while there’s still nothing at stake,” she said.
If such reality training discourages some people from becoming parents or from adopting a particular child, it’s probably for the best, she added. Fewer foster children will have to hear that another family wants them out, Lopez-Gilmore said, still stung by the recent memory of removing a 14-year-old boy from an adoptive home.
“This boy’s social history was the worst case of child abuse I’ve ever read where the child survived,” said Lopez-Gilmore, who has worked with abused children for five years.
The teen was placed in a preadoptive home in February, and behaved fairly well, considering his history. But the couple had never lived with a teenager and decided it wasn’t working out, Lopez-Gilmore said.
Eventually, the couple backed out of the adoption.
“They felt bad about it,” Lopez-Gilmore said. “They felt like they were giving up on him.”
As a result, she and Wildfeuer have begun to discuss how to include real-life experiences in Catholic Charities’ adoption training program. They’re also hoping to make FAST a part of all agency adoptions.
The plan is to introduce FAST before there’s any sign of trouble. Ideally, a FAST caseworker would visit every preadoptive home periodically to assess the family’s situation, Lopez-Gilmore said.
“If they know for the first year you’re going to come, that it’s part of the adoptive process, parents will feel more comfortable asking for help when they need it,” Lopez-Gilmore said.
Informing potential parents of problems they might encounter before an adoption is final is still a slightly radical concept, according to adoption experts.
“Historically, we felt if we introduced the idea that there would be problems, we would be tainting the process,” Howard said.
Rather than scare off desperately needed recruits, “it used to be that we’d place the child and keep our fingers crossed,” Howard added.
Though a few states are doing a better job of preparing parents for adoption and supporting them after adoptions are final, getting kids out of foster care–120,000 of the more than 500,000 children in the nation’s foster care system are waiting to be placed in adoptive homes– remains the most pressing problem, said Michael Kharfen, spokesman for the U.S. Department Health and Human Services’ Administration for Children and Families.
“We’ve been concentrating on getting more kids through the system,” Kharfen said. In 1996, 28,000 foster children were adopted in the U.S. By 1998, the number of foster care adoptions jumped to 36,000.
The increase was spurred by the 1997 Adoption and Safe Families Act, which ordered states to move more swiftly to establish permanency for wards, Kharfen said. AFSA also provided bonuses to states that increased the number of adoptions over the previous year.
In Illinois, foster care adoptions jumped from 1,961 in 1996 to 7,315 in 1999. Last year, DCFS received an additional $6.9 million in federal support for exceeding adoption quotas.
Although Illinois deserves praise for the dramatic jump in adoptions, some adoption experts say such increases may indicate that more children are being placed precipitously.
“My major concern is that with the speed all of this is supposed to happen, many kids are getting rushed into permanency without adequate preparation for the children or the families,” said Chicago family therapist Miriam Reitz, who specializes in adoption and is the co-author of “Adoption and the Family System: Strategies for Treatment.”
Spurred by increasing pressure from DCFS to complete adoptions, agencies have been known to persuade adoptive parents to take children who might not be the best fit for their family.
“Social workers are trying to find homes for the kids they have, but it’s unfortunate if they talk families into things they didn’t bargain for,” Reitz said.
When families are rushed into placements, everyone suffers, she said.
“We have to better inform and prepare families who want to adopt,” Kharfen agreed. “With the whole notion of recruiting more families you’ve got to assure them there will be help when they go through difficult times.”
The good news is that Illinois is ahead of the curve, Kharfen said.
“Illinois had a lot of problems and they have done an enormous amount of work and made a very dramatic turnaround,” Kharfen said. “If anyone in the country asked me who to look at as a model for [revamping the adoption process] I’d say Illinois is the state to look at.”
Wildfeuer hopes that the state will recognize the value of his fledgling program, and eventually expand it statewide.
He points to families like the Browns, who officially adopted Brittany in August as evidence of FAST’s success.
“We’ve noticed such a change in her,” Dan Brown said. “I think she’s happy–she knows she has a stable family now.”
