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  The Children Money Can Buy

  The Children Money Can Buy

  Stories from the Frontlines of Foster Care and Adoption

  Anne Moody

  ROWMAN & LITTLEFIELD

  Lanham • Boulder • New York • London

  Published by Rowman & Littlefield

  A wholly owned subsidiary of The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc.

  4501 Forbes Boulevard, Suite 200, Lanham, Maryland 20706

  www.rowman.com

  Unit A, Whitacre Mews, 26-34 Stannary Street, London SE11 4AB

  Copyright © 2018 by Anne Moody

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote passages in a review.

  British Library Cataloguing in Publication Information Available

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Moody, Anne, author.

  Title: The children money can buy : stories from the frontlines of foster care and adoption / Anne Moody.

  Description: Lanham : Rowman & Littlefield, [2018] | Includes index.

  Identifiers: LCCN 2017034191 (print) | LCCN 2017037267 (ebook) | ISBN 9781538108031 (Electronic) | ISBN 9781538108024 (cloth : alk. paper)

  Subjects: LCSH: Foster home care—United States. | Adoption—United States.

  Classification: LCC HV875.55 (ebook) | LCC HV875.55 .M65 2018 (print) | DDC 362.73/30973—dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017034191

  ™ The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992.

  Printed in the United States of America

  Contents

  Contents

  Introduction

  Part I: Foster Care

  1 Why Do I Want This Job?

  2 Service Plans

  3 Who Are These Parents and Children?

  4 Foster Home Highs and Lows

  5 The Cycle of Dysfunction

  6 Boy Troubles

  7 Termination of Parental Rights

  8 Making My Escape

  Part II: Agency Adoption

  9 The Home Study Process

  10 Adoption Is the Good Thing That Happens

  11 Adoption Disruptions

  12 “Doing Good” Isn’t Always Good

  13 The Need for Open Adoption

  14 Finding Just the Right Home

  Part III: Adoptive Parenthood and Sisterhood

  15 Children Are Exactly Who They Are Meant to Be

  16 How to Talk about Adoption

  17 A Homeland Tour

  18 A Sister’s Journey of the Heart

  19 Awkward (and Worse) Encounters for Adoptive Families

  20 Jocelyn’s Birth Mother

  Part IV: Adoption Connections

  21 Our Own Adoption Agency

  22 Birth-Parent Counseling Etiquette

  23 Two Open Adoptions

  24 Choosing an Adoptive Family

  25 Money Matters

  26 Scammers

  27 Trevor and Amanda

  Part V: Changes

  28 A Battle for Gay Adoption

  29 Baby Brokers

  30 The Ethics of International Adoption

  31 The Ethics of Foster Care

  Conclusion

  Acknowledgments

  Introduction

  One morning early in my marriage, my husband, who is a writer, told me about a dream he’d had the previous night. In this dream, I (who was not a writer) had nevertheless written a collection of beautiful and poignant stories.

  Many years later, I realized that over time I actually had become a collector of unwritten stories like the ones the dream described. They were brought to me by children in foster homes and orphanages and by the parents who, in a kinder world, would have been able to raise them. They were also brought by adults who had suffered the loss of children through infertility or relinquishment. The beauty in these stories lay in the hope and resilience of the people who lived them, and—for many of them—in their eventually finding love, happiness, and one another.

  The stories first came to me through my work with children in foster care whose parents had lost custody of them due to abuse, neglect, or some other form of tragedy. More stories came through my work with a large private adoption agency and children from Korea, India, Colombia, China, and various other countries, as well as children coming out of the U.S. foster care system. After becoming the director of an agency specializing in in-country infant adoption, I collected stories about the struggles adoptive parents endured in their efforts to bring children into their lives and about the selfless love and sacrifice of birth parents who chose adoption for their children. Some of the most inspiring and instructive of these stories are now gathered in The Children Money Can Buy. The first section of the book focuses on the years I spent as a child welfare worker. The second focuses on my work with a large adoption agency that handled international adoptions and was an early promoter of openness in domestic adoptions. The third concerns my own experiences as an adoptive parent of a child of a different race. The fourth focuses on the agency I direct and my work with pregnant women considering adoption for their babies. The final section examines some currently relevant issues in infant adoption, international adoption, and foster care.

  The nature of my work has given me entrée into the lives of many people, sometimes seeing them at their worst and sometimes at their most loving and joyful. Like others with long careers in child welfare and adoption, I have worked with hundreds of people over the years; these are just a few of the stories that I feel best illustrate the changing states of American foster care and adoption practice.

  The Children Money Can Buy is the result of my desire to share the stories I have collected and my hope that the people and experiences they describe will offer insight to the reader. It is a collection of observations about real people and real situations that I believe help illustrate larger life lessons about the way our society values—and fails to value—parents and children.

  I have borrowed the stories in this book from the people who lived them, in some cases without their knowledge and in others with their assistance and encouragement. In all cases, I have changed the names of individuals and I have altered specifically indentifying information unless it was already part of the public record. All of the other information in this book is factual and as accurate as memory allows. This book would not exist without the stories brought to me by the parents and children to whom they belong.

  I

  Foster Care

  1

  Why Do I Want This Job?

  “Do you promise that you will always work to reunite the family?”

  I wasn’t sure.

  My husband and had I expected to return to Seattle as soon as we completed our graduate degrees at the University of Michigan, but when he was offered the job of his dreams at Ardis Publishers, a Russian-literature publishing company, we decided to stay in Michigan. Once we’d made that decision, I looked around for a job and found an opening for a child welfare worker at the Department of Social Services. Although I had just gotten a master’s degree in social work, my focus had been on administration and policy rather than casework; as with many fateful decisions in life, the de
cision to apply for this job was made by chance and did not reflect any careful thought about my career goals.

  Now here I was, in a dreary, windowless conference room, finishing up my interview with the social services director, Charles, a mild-mannered ex-minister, and feeling pretty optimistic until he got to what appeared to be the final question:

  Do you promise that you will always work to reunite the family?

  I searched Charles’s face for a clue to the correct answer but came up with nothing, so I decided that it must be a trick question. For one thing, there was the problem of that “always.” As any good student knows, answers that contain that word are rarely correct. And then there was the more significant question of exactly what the purpose of this job was. Could it really be to always work to reunite the family? I didn’t think it could be that simple. What about the times when reuniting the family clearly wasn’t in the child’s best interests? What about when it was dangerous for the child?

  I decided to cap off what seemed to have been a successful interview by showing this man that I was someone who could think for herself and who understood the ethical complexities of child welfare work. “Well, I would work to do what is in the child’s best interests. Reuniting the family might not always be the right thing to do.”

  Instead of acknowledging my answer with any sort of approval, Charles repeated the question. “Yes, but do you promise that you will always work to reunite the family?”

  I was puzzled by his insistence, but naïvely continued to emphasize that I could imagine circumstances in which I could not ethically work to reunite the family. I guess I thought that I could impress Charles with the subtlety of my reasoning or perhaps with my conviction that the child’s interests should come first. But this was not the case. After sparring with me for a bit, he began to express a hint of exasperation, never a good sign, and particularly disconcerting when it comes from someone with the comportment of Mr. Rogers, the world’s most tolerant man. Charles and I eventually reached a compromise. I agreed that, in an ideal world—which we certainly were not dealing with here—I could see that it would always be best if there were no circumstances in which parents abused their children, or became mentally ill, or succumbed to substance abuse, or were sent to jail for many years. In that world, I would always work to reunite the family. I could also see that in the real world, there were times when parents made mistakes, when life circumstances overwhelmed them, when mental illness and substance abuse were untreated, and when parents were given no assistance, encouragement, or even any sort of fair shot at overcoming the problems they faced. These parents and their children certainly deserved their caseworker’s best efforts. I definitely wanted to work to make life better for these families. But I wasn’t sure that “better” always meant reuniting the family.

  That was not the answer Charles wanted, but he offered me the job anyway. Apparently they didn’t have many qualified applicants because, with my brand-new degree and no relevant experience, I brought little to the table other than an ability to learn.

  I had a pretty vague idea of what to expect when I took the job. Soon enough, I found that becoming a child welfare worker put me on a frighteningly steep learning curve littered with lessons made painful by the nature of the problems our clients faced. The other caseworkers in my office, four women and three men between the ages of twenty-five and thirty-five, had either a little prior experience or, like me, an appropriate degree in lieu of experience. Half of us were married, and none of us had children. The University of Michigan School of Social Work was highly respected and served as a productive source of employees for the department, particularly for graduates who wanted to settle in Michigan for a while.

  The job of a child welfare worker in our foster care unit began after a child was removed from his or her home and placed in a foster home. The initial turmoil surrounding the allegations of abuse or neglect, and the legal work involved in obtaining a court order authorizing foster care, had been handled earlier by a caseworker in the child protective services division. Once the child was settled in foster care, usually within a matter of weeks, the protective services case would be closed and the foster care worker would take over the job of working with the family. It didn’t take long for me to get a grasp of the general parameters of the job, which were daunting; but far more daunting was the level of responsibility handed over to someone like me, who had absolutely no experience working with children or dysfunctional families other than a brief stint answering phones on a crisis line. Since the previous caseworker had already moved on to her new job, I received virtually no training or preparation other than the opportunity to read over the files on the fifty-eight families that made up my caseload. I was shocked by how quickly I was given what appeared to be immense power over the lives of my clients.

  When the initial court work justifying the need for foster care was completed by the protective services worker, another court date, usually three months after the first court appearance, would be set to review the case. The foster care worker’s task was to determine what needed to happen for the child to return home safely. This involved the creation of a “service plan,” which included a set of tasks for the caseworker and a set of tasks for the parent. Ideally, the parent’s part of the service plan would consist of straightforward statements about what actions the parent could take in order to have the caseworker recommend that the child be returned home. Caseworkers were supposed to come up with specific, understandable, and attainable tasks for the parent. For example, rather than saying that a parent needed to stop beating up the child, the plan would say that the parent needed to take part in parenting classes. Instead of saying that the parent needed to become mentally healthy or stop using drugs, the plan would say that the parent needed to attend counseling or rehab. This system had obvious flaws in that it was perfectly possible for a parent to meet the standards set out in the service plan without actually changing the behavior in question. Parenting classes, counseling, and rehab could be ordered and attended faithfully, yet to no avail if the problem behavior didn’t change (as it usually didn’t). But creating the service plan was at least a good place to start.

  The tasks specified in the service plan were presented to the parent as soon as possible after the child was placed in foster care. The parent would then have a few months to work on correcting the problems and to demonstrate to the court that he or she was committed to changing. If, for example, the child had been removed from the home because of physical abuse when the parent was drunk, the parent would be ordered to attend rehab and parenting classes and the caseworker would assist him or her in connecting with the appropriate resources or programs. The service plan also included a visitation schedule, with supervised visits usually taking place either at the parent’s home or in the child welfare office.

  This all sounds straightforward, but it never was. We all know that there is nothing straightforward about alcoholism or anger-management problems, and none of us expected our clients to suddenly change their behavior. But the fact that many of them couldn’t or wouldn’t take even the first few steps toward improvement was truly dismaying. And equally dismaying was the fact that so many parents, for whatever reason, didn’t visit with their children while they were in foster care, despite the often-elaborate arrangements put in place to make this possible. It was depressingly common for the parent to be absent when the caseworker or foster parent showed up with the children for a visit or, if home, to be incapacitated by drink or drugs.

  Most often, my clients would initially approach the service plan with at least a flicker of optimism. Our goal, after all, was to help them regain custody of their children, and most people were able to understand that they would need to change their behavior. Even among abusive parents, there is general agreement that children shouldn’t be abused. (We’re not talking about a vigorous spanking here. We’re talking, at best, about a loss of control resulting in injury and, at w
orst, sadistic ritual torture.) The reasons for removal of their children were strong enough that the parents usually didn’t try to justify their abuse—with the notable exception of those whose “religious” convictions prompted and/or supported child abuse. These people were the hardest clients to work with because they believed that abusive “discipline” was exactly what their child needed; they were unlikely to be amenable to treatment or service plans.

  One of the most surprising discoveries I made as a beginning child welfare worker concerned my own reaction to abusive parents. The first such parents I encountered were a young couple who had sexually abused their three- and five-year-old daughters, and I remember feeling so enraged after reading through their file that I didn’t know how I would manage to talk with them. But at our first meeting, I found that my reaction to these poor, scruffy people was just a profound sadness. It seemed so clear to me that they had been abused children themselves not so long ago, and that anger on my part now would be a futile and simplistic response. This does not mean that I wanted them to have their kids back. Not at all. I wanted to keep those little girls far away from their parents and to protect them from further abuse. Even so, it was evident that an adversarial relationship with these parents wouldn’t be helpful to any of us, least of all the children.

  Another surprising discovery was how few expressions of anger were directed at me and my fellow child welfare workers. Many of the parents on our caseloads were mentally ill or had a history of criminal behavior, a serious problem with substance abuse, or some combination of these problems. Quite a few also had a history of domestic violence, and they all had a history of child abuse or neglect of one form or another. Typically, the parents were people who had difficulty with aggression and impulse control. Yet despite the anger they must have felt toward us—the embodiment of the system that had taken away their children—there were relatively few instances of overt conflict. There were plenty of borderline situations in which it would seem as though the client was about to lose control but would manage to regain his or her composure. Perhaps these were mostly bluffs, and when the caseworker didn’t take up the challenge (unlike many of the other people with whom our clients interacted), everything would calm down again.