Adopting.org Discussion Forums

Adoption and Foster Care Glossary

Continue reading Adoption Dissolution

My husband and I adopted a child 5 years ago. He was diagnosised with reactive attachment disorder 2 years ago. We are no longer able to give him what he needs and are in the process of giving him back to the state. I am seeking any help I can get through someone else who may be going through the same thing. If you can give support or help please contact me at jrock3@windstream.net

My husband and I adopted a 6 year old a year ago. She lived with us 6 months before the adoption was finalized. 2 months before the adoption was finalized she started getting very defiant and would hurt other kids at school. Our social worker said that she was acting like this because she knew the adoption was being finalized soon and that it would probably get better after she felt like it's final. No such luck. After it was finalized she just got worse. She has severe tantrums, lies, steals, etc. and hurts her 2 1/2 year old brother (my biological son, he was one year when she came to live with us). I have to hide knives and lighters and never leave her alone with my son because she will hurt him. She's getting treatment for RAD but she still has sever tantrums all the time and is a threat to our family. She breaks everything around her including furniture. My husband and I are now thinking about reversing our adoption. This is very very hard on us but I want to do whats best for her and my family. It would be very helpful to talk to someone else going through it. No one else seems to understand how hard this is.
Thanks
Laura

I adopted my step child in 1996 and it was the worst mistake I ever made. It has harmed my biological children immeseribly and it has broken up my marriage, and the 19th of December my adoptive daughter will go back to live with her birth mom.

Attachment Disorder is real, and it is serious, and my advice to you is to give up while you can, while your bio child is still healthy. If you need to chat you can email me anytime. slw081066@yahoo.com

I'm with you. My husband and I are in the process of terminating the adoption of our 11 year old son, whom we have loved and cared for since he was 6 months old. We were his FIFTH home by age 6 months, because we are white and he is black, and the Illinois DCFS wouldn't let a white family foster him until they ran out of black families. He already had a classic reactive attachment disorder by the time we brought him into our family, but we sure didn't know a thing about such a syndrome. We'd never heard of it, and nobody at DCFS bothered to mention it to us (of course). We thought the reason he cried constantly and fought taking a bottle was because we were doing something wrong, although all of our friends and family assured us that we weren't. It wasn't until the day of adoption 3 years late, AFTER we had signed all the adoption papers, that we then read that the baby's birth mother had used crack and alcohol during pregnancy, that his birth father had RAPED the 4 year old sister repeatedly while the mother did nothing, and that it's possible our baby was physically abused by the birth father. By the way, the birth father has been in and out of prison 6 times and recently died in jail when he swallowed a bag of cocaine he was smuggling, and it burst in his throat.

I have spent years and years reading up on RAD and FAS/E, as well as attended seminars by Dan Hughes, Dr. Ira Chasnoff, and other experts. Our son fits the classic mold, unfortunately, and his is even an extreme case because he is violent to the point that we have had to call the police to come over and intervene. Do you know how embarrassing it is to have the police here in broad daylight with all the nosy neighbors gathered outside to ridicule and berate us for calling the police on an 11 year old?

We have done everything humanly possible to help ourosn. Counseling (he refuses to cooperate). Hospitalization (he refuses to takes his meds and ends up being violent to the point we have no other choice). Even specialized foster care (we hired a top notch to take DCFS to court and force them to put our son in specialized foster care without taking custody from us). Nothing has helped. He is getting worse and worse each day. He sets a horrible example for our 9 year old son whom we also adopted after being his foster parents when he was a baby. (The younger son also has FAS/E but not so much RAD, and he is much happier and easier to raise, as long as he is not around the 11 year old).

Our 11 year old's psychiatrist has said he exhibits sociopathic tendencies, which we see more and more of each day. He truly doesn't seem to have feelings for anyone other than himself. At the very least, he is narcissistic. At worst, he could be a sociopath. But for certain, he is a wonderful, talented, creative, handsome, innocent human being who can't help the facts surrounding his birth history and early infancy. This is what breaks my heart. On those "good" moments, I think "Oh, we can stay together. We can do this." But then in, in a nano-second, if he doesn't get his way, he will lunge for our throats or crack us in the back with a folding chair or, worse yet, go after his younger brother in order to hurt us even more.

We will meet with our attorney this week, Wed., 1/17, to discuss getting paperwork started to rescind our 11 year old son's adoption. We are facing the fight of the century with DCFS, who will most certainly rake us through the coals as being quitters, deadbeats, and horrible parents to be giving us our child. They have threatened to have us arrested and charged with criminal child abandonment and to take our younger son from us if we go through with our plans. Our attorney is top notch and has successfully represented several Illinois families in similar cases, and she is not afraid to go up against DCFS.

What we need now is support, prayer, and encouragement that we are not the world's worst scumbags for doing this. I have cried so much the last few months, I can't believe there are any tears left. I cry because I feel SO guilty for giving up on my son, and I cry because I'm mad at DCFS for not telling us the truth before we adopted, and I cry because I don't know what will happen to him. Will he go to a bad home? Will he go to residential, where he may be hurt? Will he think he is unloved and unlovable? Because he isn't; he is loved enormously, with all our hearts. Will he end up in jail and/or on drugs? (Although this could happen even if we all stayed together.)

My heart is with all of you, and I feel sure that yours will be with me, too. You know, there are those among our "friends" and church family who do not support us and who think we are cruel for giving up custody of our son. They are few in number, thank God, but they have very big mouths and it's hard to ignore them. Sometimes, I think they're right.

Thanks for listening. Thanks for this website. Thanks for all us supporting each other.

I'm sorry for your situation and hope you are able to find a solution that works for you and family. My heart goes out to you and to your son. I hope he can heal with another family.

Jan: It has been a long time since your post here on Jan 2007. I will like to know what happened to you and your son. My case is similar to yours except that we are still trying to work to help with our daughter but I understand that making the decision that you made most be very hard.

Our family is in a very difficult situation to and wwe are facing similar issues: we became foster parents when our now adopted daughter was 3.11 years old. We were not informed of the potential effects that her early abuse and neglect would have in our daughter, neither that our daughter had lived with 6 different families before coming to live with us. Now she is 11.

she has been diagnosed with RAD, ODD, Depression, PTSS, borderline personality and enuresis. She is also cutting and we had found knives and scissors in her room. We cleaned and put everything away a while ago but she is getting them from somewhere else. It has been very hard. She cut herself badly and required 4 stiches. Next day she took the stiches off by herself. The DCF is now helping. For many years we could not get the appropriate help until we got a diagnoses on our own.

We are not contemplating dissolution yet, but today I found out about it in a post here about someone in Illinois. I will like to know if this is possible in case that we have to do it if residential treatment fails and she gets more violent.

Our life with her has become umbearable since she verbally abuses us constantly. Our home is so crazy with her behavior. She steals and lies like nothing. SHe is 11 but very strong/ 160 pounds and 5.6"".

We love our daughter but certaingly love has not been enough to help her heal. Nobody understand what we go through every day. We do not have friends anymore. It is like we are alone going through this very hard times.

She has always have enuresis and she wets everywhere; diapers are not enough. She has pee on my pillow, carpet, furniture, and every where. She refuses to do chores and there is no discipline that can make her do it. Her soiled clothes are everywhere, same when she gets her period, she refuses to use a S. napktkin so is blood everywhere. She also plays with feces and smears feces around the bathtub. She lies all the time and nothing that she says is ever the truth. Our home has become a battle zone. SHe tell us that she loves chaos and wierd. Her hatred is almost always against me but my husband has also experienced. Recently,she started cutting herself. We are concerned for her safety and for ours.We lock ourselves at night but she can pick the locks.

If anyone has been where we are, I sure will appreciate you input.We need a good residential treatment where she can get the help that she need in a controlled and safe environment. THe good ones around are more that 40K per year.

Dissolution seems to be a very controversial issue with many people blaming the adoptive parents for the situation. Some people posting here do not even know or acknowledge that a family facing dissolution could had already tried everything to help the child and that their own lives may be in danger by the child's increased violence. Most of the time the DCF does not share the child's real story with the ptotential adoptive parents, this was our case. The parents should also be told of the potential effects of multiple placements. I understand that we love her and that we had done our very best to help her for the last 8 years but her problems are beyond what we can safely and efectively deal with.

In addition, We are older and not so strong anymore. We are afraid that we could be casualties of these infortunate circumstances. we thought that we could change her with love but for anyone working with RAD this is not true at all. We are wiser and more experience. At 65 my husband does not have time left for 10/20 years of therapy. We are so lost on what to do. Thanks

My heart goes out to you, but you need to realize that you are doing the right thing for everyone involved. As I'm sure you've been told, there is no cure for attachment disorder and these children will destroy those around them. I'm in the process of adopting (hopefully internationally and a baby) but a therapist friend of mine is adamant that if the child has reactive attachment disorder there is nothing that can be done and the adoption should be terminated.

God bless you and your family. I wish you peace and healing.

I understand how hard this is for u and your family.We are trying to figure out how to overturn a adoption also but things are not so easy and it is hard to get help to do this...

We adopted a little girl at the age of 11 after a year of her being placed in our foster home.We we got her she had been in 10 foster homes in a 2 year time.We believed things were good so we chose to adopt her, she was the perfect fit to our family.Well about a year after the adoption things started going down hill.She would tell people she was getting abused and that we threatened to kill her, yet she was in theripy and would not talk to the teripist and they said she was a RAD kid and that things where only going to get harder,well we thought we could fix it,we where wrong...
She is now 13 and is in a treatment center where she has refused family counsling and home visits.She tells us weekly that she is going to do and say whatever it takes to not come home,and she doesn't care what happends...We have two other children at home and with all her aliagtions we where afraid someone would believe her and we would lose our other children.
Her therpist and our own has told us that she will never attach and that we should overturn the adoption,the treatment center is also tell us that..
She has been in the treatment center for 6months and things are only getting worse.
We know this is best for everyone conserned in are family but we have the issue that we can not find a attorney to help us with this and social services wants us to keep trying...
Mentally I don't know what else I can take,I love my daughter but I know I can not help her..

I'm so happy I have found this forum.
What do we do when we realize we can no longer give the care that is needed to our adopted daughter? We have had our daughter since she was 4 and she is now 11. During this time we have tried everything we can think of to help her. So what do we do now? People say we are giving up on her but we are not. What we are doing is hoping someone else can give her what she needs.
There is so much tension in our house when she is home. She is a ticking time bomb. I have never seen so much hate in a little child. We never know what's going to set her off. Our two yr old begs us not to give our 11 yr old time out because the 11 yr old will hurt herself. Then the other day our two year said that our 11 yr old was going to kill her. We have heard her threaten to kill us and her older brother, but now the two year old? She could actually do it. My husband and I completely understand that this is not our adopted daughter's fault. Her behavior is a result of her early history. With that said, my husband and I can no longer provide the care she needs. We have to protect our other adopted children and ourselves. She has not hurt anybody yet. She does hurt herself on a daily bases though. Therapy and Medications have not helped. We can no longer place our family in danger. The mental and extreme verbal abuse our family goes through every day has to stop. My husband and I are starting to look into dissolving our adoption. We will be contacting her Therapist, Psychologist, original social worker and an attorney on Monday. Can someone please provide us with some guidance in this matter?