Family Preservation, Family Reunification, Supporting Fostered Youth: NAAM

This is day 30 of National Adoption Awareness Month, so this is my daily post to amplify the voices of adoptees. Today I am also making a pitch for family preservation, reunification, and support for fostered youth.

This final day of National Adoption Awareness Month is also “Giving Tuesday,” a day dedicated to generosity and doing good.

So in honor of both NAAM and Giving Tuesday, I will ask that you consider looking at family preservation organizations any time you think about adoption. We can chip away at the forces that divide families, and keep more children safe and with their mothers and fathers. It is an ambitious goal, I realize. There are many worthy organizations doing this work, and I urge you to learn about and support them.

For today, here are three organizations devoted to reuniting families divided by adoption, to supporting birth parents, and to providing resources to youth in foster care.

Beteseb Felega/Ethiopian Adoption Connection BF/EAC is “a free, grassroots effort to reconnect Ethiopian family members separated by adoption, and to provide compassionate support to adoptees, birth family members, and adoptive parents.” Their unique “internet database contains Ethiopian adoption information (in Amharic and English) provided by adopted people/adoptive parents and birth families who are looking for each other…For Ethiopian families, we explain the system through which their children were adopted and provide meaningful guidance regarding reunion and ongoing contact with their adopted children. EAC is the only organization committed to giving a voice to Ethiopian families while providing services focused on their well being post adoption.”

Saving Our Sisters Saving Our Sisters (SOS) “focuses on family preservation utilizing our pool of national volunteers to support parents and their families by providing them with resources to navigate their crisis and build confidence in themselves and their abilities. These actions help show families that they are who and what their babies need, and gives them the confidence to overcome their temporary crisis. SOS, through information, advocacy and support, provides families the ability to make truly informed decisions for the best possible outcome – eliminating the trauma of separation for the infant, existing and future generations of their family.”

Treehouse for Kids Treehouse is an organization based here in Seattle that believes that “every child, youth and young adult who has experienced foster care should have access to essentials such as clothing, school supplies, extracurricular activities, job supplies and even car insurance.” Treehouse offers “tutoring and academic remediation while also eliminating financial barriers to success in school for both youth in foster care and young adults in Extended Foster Care (EFC).” NAAM’s original intent was to promote adoption of children from foster care; NAAM has changed a lot over the years to include more voices. Supporting the needs of foster care youth should remain a priority. Treehouse does that.

Final thoughts on theis final day of NAAM:

Everyone, including adopted people, has the human and civil right to know who they are (this refers to Original Birth Certificates and medical history access, as well as to eliminating fraud in adoption).

Support family preservation.

Listen to adoptees.

Podcast on Preventing Disruptions and Dissolutions in Adoption

Disruption and dissolution are such gentle words for the process by which an adoption is ended, either before or after legal finalization. A child moves out of the adoptive family, back to foster or private care, and a new family must be found. Disruption and dissolution  have the potential for a tremendous amount of trauma for everyone, most especially for the child, who’s already lost his original, first, biological family, and now has lost permanency yet again.

The likelihood of a disruption or dissolution increases when children are older at the time of adoption. When adoptive parents aren’t adequately prepared, are unrealistic about parenting a traumatized child, or fail to access resources for parenting, the odds increase as well.

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“The Truth About Preventing Adoption Disruptions” is a new podcast by Add Water and Stir. AWAS focuses on promoting foster care and adoption within communities of color, especially within the African-American community. The main speaker on the podcast is Beverly Clarke, LCSW-C, LICSW, the director of Project Wait No Longer, a program of The Barker Adoption Foundation. Per the website, Project Wait No Longer’s main goal is to find permanent, adoptive families for older children in public foster care. Most of the children are 10–17 years old, but some younger waiting children are part of larger sibling groups (three or more children) who desperately wish to stay together.

 

The interview with Bev starts about 8 minutes into the podcast. I’ve known Bev for many years, and, as usual, she is insightful and pragmatic. The key here is preventing disruptions, not waiting until too much damage is done.

 

 

Disclaimer: I worked for the Barker Adoption Foundation as interim executive director over a decade ago.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Suicide and Adoption: We Need to Stop Whispering

Update: For resources about adoption-related suicide awareness and prevention, here is information.

Just this morning, as I was getting ready to post this, I read on my Facebook feed about a 28-year-old Korean adoptee who died by suicide two days ago. I did not know her. She was the same age as my oldest son, and she had a daughter about the age of my granddaughter. May she rest in peace.

I am holding in my heart a 20-something-year-old adoptee, adopted with a biological sibling into a huge adoptive family (more than 25 kids). He is overwhelmed all the time these days, as a result of things he has done and has had done to him. He wants to go home, though he’s not sure any longer where “home” is. He is in great need of mental health services, and is intently resisting help. He is teetering on the edge of suicide.

Yes, I know most adoptees do well. But this one is struggling, and it appears to be the result of events after he was adopted. His adoptive family has abandoned him.

My two most shared blog posts (shared over 1000 times on Facebook) are “Does ‘Adoption’ Really Equal ‘Trauma’?” and “Fisseha Sol Samuel: Irreplaceably Marvelous.” Both deal with a hard side of life: trauma and suicide. The first post says, yes, adoption is trauma, and there is a spectrum of response to it. The second post was written last October following the suicide of an Ethiopian adoptee who had previously exhibited no symptoms of depression, and whose death was likely (we will never know for sure) the result of a sudden, triggering, traumatizing event in which he was overwhelmed and impulsive. Fisseha’s mother, Melissa Faye Green, has written several powerful posts as she sorts through her son’s death.

Here is an excerpt from my post about Fisseha:

“There is sobering research that says that adoptees are four times more likely to attempt suicide. It’s here in Pediatrics, the journal of the American Academy of Pediatrics. Not lightweight stuff, and even more startling in that the mean age of the 1000 participants was about 14. Out of the total group, which included adoptees and biological children, 56 had attempted suicide; 47 of those were adoptees.”

I am holding in my heart a 14-year-old Eastern European adoptee, who is too familiar with drugs and sex, who is loved deeply by her adoptive parents, who is in various therapies, who cuts herself and threatens suicide often. She can be a bubbly, sweet teen, and also a deeply frightened and frightening out-of-control mystery.

Yes, her struggle may not be the result of being adopted, but rather of what happened to her before she was adopted. She is struggling, and those who love her are deeply worried.

No one enjoys thinking of adoption as a trauma. No one likes to talk about suicide. And, I know: most adoptees–most people generally–don’t consider or die by suicide.

That said, let’s start thinking and talking about the link among adoption, trauma, and suicide. Let’s insist that suicide awareness be a part of pre-adoptive parent training classes. Let’s demand that anyone who claims “adoption competency” in their therapeutic practice is extremely knowledgeable about suicide. Let’s actively and shamelessly share resources to prevent suicide. Let’s request workshops like “The Presence of Suicide in Adoption” as a topic at adoption-related conferences. We need to stop whispering about suicide and adoption, and to speak about it with clarity and without fear.

I am holding in my heart a 16-year-old adoptee from India, beloved by her adoptive family, mentored by an adult Indian adoptee, raised in Minnesotan suburbs, who killed herself about a month ago.

Yes, she struggled, and also was offered and received help. She may be at peace now, though all those left behind are filled with sorrow and questions.

These 3 adoptees are among the reasons that we must talk about the role of trauma and suicide in adoption.

A few weeks ago, I was at the national conference of the American Adoption Congress. The main legislative advocacy effort of the AAC has historically been access to original birth certificates, a means of allowing adopted persons to know who they are, a basic human and civil right.

What is the connection between suicide and the AAC’s legislative efforts? Well, there may be a genetic component to the likelihood of suicide. Access to one’s medical and mental health history–too often denied to adopted persons–could be a matter of life and death. Knowing about a history of depression or other mental illnesses in one’s family could mean proactive treatment and interventions. It is yet another reason that closed records are unfair, untenable, and wrong.

Here are links to two medical journal articles:

Genetic and Familial Environmental Effects on Suicide – An Adoption Study of Siblings

Genetics of Suicide: An Overview

Many adoptees are adopted into families where the adoptive parents are well off financially, have attended college, and are in highly regarded professions.The adopted children go to excellent schools and often have wonderful opportunities. Still. Take a look at “Best, Brightest–And Saddest?”, in which Frank Bruni reflects on the “suicide contagion” among teens in Palo Alto and elsewhere who are under pressure to succeed academically in highly competitive situations. The article cites a CDC report that says 17 percent of American high school students considered suicide in 2012. Eight percent said they’d attempted it.

Suicide, of course, feeds on trauma and depression, and does not discriminate based on economics and education. While the “suicide cluster” among high schoolers in “epicenters of overachievement” is discussed in the New York Times’ article above, there has also been a similar tragedy–which has not made national press–among young people in Seattle. Three young men, ages 18, 18, and 20, who were students at the Seattle Interagency Academy (SIA), died by suicide, within a 4 month period in the last year. SIA works with at-risk youth, who have struggling families and who are often homeless or on probation. Listen to an excellent podcast with the SIA principal here.

Coincidentally, there was a string of 7 suicides by adolescents on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in South Dakota around the same time. No one is quite sure why this is happening, though bullying and grim prospects for the future seem to be significant.

I don’t know if any of these young people had spent time in foster care or were adopted. Certainly, though, their life paths echoed those of many young people whose families are struggling mightily, and those struggles are often the reasons that children land in foster care and/or adoption. Racism and micro-aggressions can significantly affect the mental health of transracial adoptees; I wrote about that reality here. Even adoptees placed as infants in same-race families can struggle with loss, grief, identity, and feelings of not belonging. It’s clear that many of these challenges manifest in adolescence.

This is all daunting tough stuff. I am seeking a balance: to acknowledge suicide prevention as a goal about which we can all speak in the adoption community, not over-reacting, being pro-active, and supporting each other. My next post on this subject will give some resources.

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Light Through Trees, Forest near Lake Langano, Ethiopia © Maureen McCauley Evans