Joe Anderson
When Julie first began the adoption process for one of her foster children, she was excited and optimistic about the future.
“I thought love cured everything; you’d just love them and everything would be fine,” remembers Julie, whose name has been changed to protect her children.
She was quickly proved wrong. While this didn’t stop her — she is currently adopting her sixth child — she’s learned that it takes more than love.
All the children she adopted through foster care have psychological problems, and most have displayed sexually inappropriate behaviors and even violent tendencies. At one point, she had two teenage boys who made her fear for her safety.
“They’d rage, and our house would get pretty much beat up and ripped down,” she says. “I got punched in the face a couple of times.”
With a social work background and pure determination, she and her husband were able to build a support system for themselves, rearranging their lives and careers in the process.
Not every family makes it through these crises intact. Some adoptive parents don’t know where to turn when serious problems arise, which can lead to legal terminations of adoptions or to unofficial “rehoming.” While the frequency of such incidences are hard to track, each can be devastating for the child and family alike.
Four bills signed into law by Gov. Scott Walker on April 25 aim to provide parents with more support and children with additional safeguards. But amendments made to the bills throughout the legislative process reflect a tension between helping families and burdening them with extra requirements.
The legislation, known collectively as the Adoption Protection Package, increases pre-adoption training requirements for prospective parents, standardizes home studies for adoption placement, requires that children in the welfare system are identified if previously adopted and requires families who have adopted internationally to register their adoptions. The bills were authored by the Joint Legislative Committee on Adoption Disruption and Dissolution, co-chaired by Rep. Joel Kleefisch (R-Oconomowoc) and LaTonya Johnson (D-Milwaukee).
“When parents are ready to adopt, they’ve got much more of a team behind them ready to help them in any way possible with anything that could go askew,” Kleefisch says.
These are not the first laws to address adoptions ending badly. In 2013, Kleefisch authored a bill in response to a Reuters investigation that exposed the practice of “rehoming” unwanted children. According to the report, parents were advertising their adopted children on the internet to arrange private custody transfers. With no government oversight, these children could be placed with potentially dangerous guardians, including, in extreme cases, pedophiles.
Kleefisch’s Rehoming Bill made that practice illegal, but he recognized that more information was needed to get to the root of the problem. The bill created a committee to study what common problems confront adopting families and how they could be prevented.
“When we did this adoption study, it was just really eye-opening,” Johnson says. “Before, we thought the people who adopt these kids are just horrible human beings for trying to rehome these kids.”
But after hearing parent testimony, she adds, “We realized that there are a lot of underlying issues and problems with some of these families.”
Some foster care children have intense behavioral problems, mental health issues or special needs, says Verneesha Banks, a child and family training consultant at Wraparound Milwaukee, an organization that serves children with mental and emotional health needs. Banks works with minors who have been kicked out by their adoptive parents. She says issues can be especially problematic when they don’t surface until years after the adoption, commonly in adolescence.
Even when problems are initially dealt with, they can resurface years later, overwhelming the family. For Julie, after adopting an 8-year-old boy with an “absolutely horrific” history of abuse, years of therapy and love transformed him into a promising student who was extended an invitation to a Harvard science and technology program.
But when the boy turned 16, all that progress seemed to dissolve. “I don’t know if it was the hormones, but he almost reverted,” she says. He began exhibiting behaviors he hadn’t displayed in years, such as urinating in the closet.
Unfortunately, the initial support provided by social workers and clinical psychologists was no longer available.
The new laws aim to better support parents by increasing training requirements and strengthening parents’ relationship with local post-adoption resource centers.
The laws also increase safeguards for children. Previously, it was not legally required for internationally adopted children to be registered — meaning the Department of Children and Families technically didn’t know these children existed, Johnson says.
This made children vulnerable to rehoming and trafficking, Kleefisch adds. The laws attempt to correct this by requiring all foreign adoptions to be registered within a year.
Originally, the legislation proposed a registration deadline of just 60 days. The extended deadline was one of several changes proposed by Sen. Devin LeMahieu (R-Oostburg). Other amendments removed some requirements, such as six hours of post-placement training, a face-to-face meeting with a post-adoption resource center (PARC) representative, and a $1,000 bond posted for foreign adoptions until the adoption has been registered.
After talking to adoptive families in his district, LeMahieu believes the bills added burdens to families already experiencing a hectic time of transition. He saw visiting a post-adoption resource center as difficult for families in northern Wisconsin, as there are only six PARCs in the state.
“I think the overall intent of the adoption bills was really good, but I wanted to make sure that we didn’t put up a lot more barriers, especially to international adoption, which is a lengthy process with a huge expense,” LeMahieu says.
Johnson regrets that some requirements were removed, which she said were the best practices recommended during the study committee. She added that these recommendations not only benefit parents, but ensure the safety of children.
Kleefisch believes a reasonable compromise was struck.
“It’s a tightrope; you don’t want to make it more difficult for good people to adopt,” Kleefisch says. “At the same time, you have to have measures in there to make sure the children being adopted are going to be safe.”
Banks believes that more long-term support would be helpful, including interim assessments in the later stages of adoption, especially during adolescence. Kim Westfahl, director of adoption and foster care at Lutheran Social Services, would love to see long-term, low-cost therapy services and one-on-one post-adoption support.
Julie does not see mandated trainings, which may not be applicable to every family, as helpful. She would rather see additional post-adoptive resources and services.
“I could do all of the ‘I’ll love you, I’ll stick by you no matter what crazy behavior you do,’” she says. But eventually, she realized, “I really needed a little bit more support.”
