Strengthen supports for international adoption

By Kathleen L. Whitten

A Tennessee woman last month sent 7-year-old Artyom Savelyev back to Russia alone, after she’d tried parenting him for six months, and sparked international coverage of adoption “horrors.” The adoptive mother said Artyom was violent. Some reports then generalized to claim that all children adopted from institutions have severe behavioral problems.

In fact, adopted children overall are similar to their
nonadopted peers in behavior, school grades and strong relationships with their parents, according to the most current studies in psychology and social work.

My own research shows adopted and foster children score higher on many positive outcomes: They are less likely to take sexual risks. They have stronger spiritual lives.

Foster children who have been abused or neglected can still form a secure attachment to a parent. For adopted teens, their relationships with their parents have a stronger influence on their behavior than their previous abuse, neglect or institutionalization.

Like other psychologists, I have found that most adoptive parents spend more time with their adolescents than nonadoptive parents. The adoptive fathers, in particular, are more likely to be involved in family activities with their adopted adolescents, and they have more positive relationships with their teens as a result. The positive aspects of adoptive parenting lead to better child and adolescent outcomes.

But these relationships are more challenging when children come with “risk factors”: being older than 2 when they were adopted, living in an orphanage and suffering abuse or neglect.

None of these means a child is doomed, or that a family should not adopt. It does mean that the children, like Artyom, need therapy, and their parents need intensive training in therapeutic parenting.

This latest bizarre incident in international adoption highlights several major structural flaws in the U.S. system of caring for adopted children. Specialized services for challenging children are not easily accessible, or even available, everywhere.

A study I conducted with another adoption researcher found that only 20.3 percent of counselors and therapists nationwide felt “very well prepared” to treat adoptive families — with 79.3 percent saying they were “somewhat” or “not at all well” prepared to work with adopted children and parents.

Adoption agencies take a leading role in preventing tragedies like this. The first line of defense is the home study, where a licensed social worker spends many hours with prospective adoptive parents to educate them about adoption and to approve them to adopt.

Although there are no statistics on this, anecdotes from social workers report that almost all prospective parents “pass.”

The Child Welfare League of America has suggested guidelines for conducting a home study, but these are voluntary and their implementation varies widely from agency to agency.

The second way to prevent a tragedy like Artyom’s is in post-placement “supervision,” where a social worker meets with the parents and child regularly after the child comes home.

A sensitive and appropriate post-placement process should have identified the problems in the Tennessee family early on, if they weren’t caught by the home study.

Adoptive parents create their families through a process about as simple as completing a tax return every day and face additional decisions in international adoption. A basic one is choosing the right agency.

It’s not only a business decision; it also has emotional overtones. Through the Internet, primarily, parents share stories of agency ethics and practices.

Families make the best choices possible in an arena rife with more unknowns. But there is no central source of information about adoption agencies, so parents as “consumers” cannot make a truly informed choice.

We depend on the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services and Department of State to look out for our interests abroad.

Three actions by those agencies would improve the process and reduce the chances of situations like the recent Russian experience.

First, under an international treaty, the U.S. Department of State approves agencies for international adoption. It should be able to revoke approval for agencies that fail to meet basic home study and post-placement standards.

Second, there should be open information on these issues to state licensing bodies and state attorneys general.

Third, Congress should strengthen regulations for oversight of international agencies working in all countries, not only those who’ve signed the international treaty.

Most adoptive parents’ strong commitments to their children are obvious in their hard work and care for their children.

They deserve to have accurate information about their children’s prospects, and the best possible support from the agencies designed to help them.

Kathleen L. Whitten is a visiting lecturer at Georgia State University and the author of “Labor of the Heart: A Parent’s Guide to Decisions and Emotions in Adoption.”