Thread by @kwittman

The Myka Stauffer rehoming saga has been on my mind today. (For the uninitiated: standard.co.uk/insider/alist/…) An #adoptee rant thread:

When people react viscerally to rehoming pets, I remind them that this is something that also happens with children.

The practice is largely unregulated (see here for examples in TX scholarship.law.tamu.edu/lawreview/vol5…). There are entire private Facebook groups dedicated to rehoming recently adopted children, and before Facebook, there were backpage ads in newsletters and magazines for adoptive parents.

It's not a new phenomenon. Since the 1970s, 1 in 9 adoptions have been disrupted - where proceedings end prior to finalization - or dissolved after finalization. (childwelfare.gov/pubPDFs/s_disr…

In situations where adoptees are placed in mentally, emotionally, and physically abusive homes, some sort of managed, vetted secondary adoption process, like a foster-to-permanence arrangement, might be ideal in order to protect the children. (We also need better definitions…

...and monitoring to understand what emotional and mental abuse looks like for adoptees, as the 1st route of emotional abuse - personal history access denied - is a function of the state. Adoptees are also separated from bfam cultures, and denied knowledge of/access to those...

…cultures.) But in cases where the children themselves are otherwise physically healthy, the mental and emotional toll of rehoming anxiety, even at a young age, is problematic, even when it doesn't cross the threshold of 'abuse'.

There are lots of reasons for this anxiety, but as an adoptee who was in a safe and stable home, who was in no known danger of rehoming, I can only speak to one of them: fear of subsequent abandonment.

As a child, even many very young adoptees understand, in simple terms, the following things:
-They have another mother or another set of parents.
-Their first parents couldn’t care for them
(Though this is rarely presented as “didn’t want,” children are perfectly capable of...

...making and likely to make this leap on their own, as soon as they know they’re adopted.)
-Their adoptive parents “chose” them.
-In homes where families deal with financial challenges and children are exposed to the resulting arguments and tensions, it is very easy for them...

...to make the jump from their birth parents’ incapacity for care that resulted in abandonment and a diminished capacity for care - making a bad choice - by their adoptive parents.

-In homes where financial pressures yield arguments, children may avoid voicing their fears, because (again) they may see themselves as part of the problem, and they appreciate more viscerally than non-adopted kids how easy it is to be relinquished.

The points above aren't just from my own experience. Betty Jean Lifton’s groundbreaking oral histories with searching adoptees (as teens and adults) and their families dig in to the lifelong psychology of adoption.

Lifton also questions adoption culture’s narrow focus on fulfilling the adoptive parents’ need for parenthood.

More recent scholarship (Kim Park Nelson, Tina Patel, Margaret Homans, et al.) explores how the psychology of adoption plays out for adoptees in adulthood, including…

…perfectionism and anxiety, and adoptees' dangerously increased willingness to weather mentally, emotionally, and physically abusive relationships in adulthood.

Myka Stauffer, then, gives folks without a relationship to the adoption triad a glimpse of what we'd probably like to think of as the seamy underground of adoptions. But just as abandonment fears run on a continuum, interracial and international adoptions are rife with less…

…extreme examples of paternalism and privileged white saviors who limit their adopted children's access to their birth histories, who deny their cultural similarities with others who share their backgrounds, or who celebrate only their similarities with their adopted children.

There are solutions, or at least routes, to a more adoptee-focused triad. But until we can take the focus off of parents and families "being completed by" an adoptee's arrival, it will be hard to see how the triad fails to serve its most important part - the child. #Adoption