Molly McGrath Tierney

Child welfare systems are troubling places. I know because I spent a career inside them trying desperately to make them work. Among all the horror stories and damage done, there are success stories. Generally speaking, adoption is considered one of them. It was a highlight of the decade spanning 2000 to 2010 across the country: children who had been removed from their parents, lingered in foster care and left the system by being adopted into a waiting family. 

I’m an adoptive parent myself. The first time they showed me a grainy black and white Xeroxed photo I knew she was mine. We spent a grueling year untangling her from the foster care system, and then the healing began. After an early life where no one had paid particular attention, she unfolded from her shell (three squares a day, a lot of love and sunshine will do that to a person). I remember exactly where I was standing the first time she called me “mom.” At 4 ½ she signed herself into our adoption hearing. I hope I never forget the judge’s words to me: “In the eyes of the law, it is as if she came from your body.” 

Child welfare systems are different now. The focus has shifted from adoption to work that will keep or return children to their own parents. That is for the greater good to be sure. All the better that systems are using data to drive decision making and to measure their ability to get better outcomes for children. 

As I travel around the country a new measure, growing in popularity, has given me pause: disrupted adoptions. These are families who return children they have adopted to child welfare systems – sometimes years after the decree was signed. These systems welcome these children back into the foster care fold and categorize them as disrupted adoptions.

My daughter has fuzzy memories about her 4 years in foster care and the dozen foster homes through which she was shuffled. Recently they came up when she and I were talking about family. She opined that hers was very large because the people in all her foster homes thought of her as part of their family. And I thought “Oh no, darling. If they had thought of you as theirs, they would never have let you go.”

I think child welfare systems are getting it wrong on disrupted adoptions. If they categorize them in this separate way, then neither the agency nor the parents took the nature of adoption seriously. It sounds like what they really meant was “trial adoption” or “adoption if it works out”. This must be positively devastating for children who need to belong somewhere. And who must have known, the entire time, that the home and family in which they lived, even though judge and the agency had decreed it permanent, was not theirs to claim.

Me? If a parent deposited their kid to foster care saying “I don’t want her anymore”, I’d just go ahead and count it as abandonment.