Adoption, Russian-Style: Are We Up to the Challenge?

By Fran Cronin for Adopt-a-tude

The saga of seven-year-old Russian-born Artyom Savelyev’s adoption gone wrong has once again focused attention on the controversies that dog international adoptions.

Artyom’s tragic journey begs us to consider if there is a difference between an adopted and a biological child—and if so, does adoption give a parent the right to return a child when the relationship disappoints?

As the adoptive mother of a twelve-year-old born in Russia, I have to say an emphatic no.  From the moment I held my son in my arms and smelled his skin, I knew he was a part of me. These kids are not Russian dolls. They didn’t ask for us. We wanted them.

The problem is, Artyom’s story has become a convenient hook for Russian politicking as well as for commentators who know little about the experience of parenting deeply troubled children. Sensationalized headlines make great copy, but they distract from the truth.

Russian President Dmitry Medvedev called the actions of Artyom’s adoptive mother, Torry Hansen, a 33-year-old single mom and nurse, “a monstrous deed.”  Pavel Astakhov, the Russian Children’s Rights Commissioner, threatened to suspend adoptions unless Russia and the U.S. sign a treaty to ensure that Russian children are better protected once they leave the Motherland. Acrid complaints about the treatment of Russian adoptees in the hands of American families have resurfaced, specifically 16 deaths due to abuse since 1996.

What is omitted from the storyline is Russia’s own treatment of children who are abandoned and orphaned and then placed in institutional care.

The Russians also conveniently seem to forget that protective laws are already in place. The United States and about 80 other nations have signed on to and ratified the Hague Convention, a body of treaties whose purpose is "to work for the progressive unification…of private international [adoption] law…” (from Article 1 of the Statute of the Hague Conference). Standardizing these practices, especially when it comes to money, adoption disclosure, and parent training, seems a crucial tool for monitoring pre-and post-adoption placement. Russia, however, is currently a non-Hague Convention country.

Brandeis researcher E.J. Graff, laid out in the Boston Globe this past week just how dire Russia’s intransigent position could prove to be.  Thousands of institutionalized children who desperately need homes may not be placed in one. Those placed might fear return to their first country if the placement does not go well.  

Russia officialdom’s outrage is a hollow distraction as it tries to dig into the deep pockets of American largesse. Lacking both the political and financial will to fix their corrupt institutional care system, the Russians would love nothing more than to have American dollars pay for the care and oversight they themselves have chronically failed to provide.

In the pecking order of Russian social services, institutionalized children get a very thin slice of the safety-net pie. In a 2007 report, Unicef cited that nearly 200,000 Russian children lived in state institutions and were provided only the minimum of custodial care. With a low qualification threshold for childcare workers and a woeful lack of adequate resources, the staff often reflects the same lethargy as the children in its care.

Compounding the neglect is the Russian political tactic of delaying international adoptions. Since 1998, when we adopted our son, the waiting period has doubled from four months to eight, if everything goes without a hitch. The intention is to give Russian nationals the opportunity to adopt before proceeding with an out-of-country placement. The reality is that Russians have been slow to adopt.  The number of children available greatly outpaces the demand.

While the media, the U.S., and Russia wrangle and posture over the legal machinations of this case, the real-life tragedy has been pushed off-center like a sidebar. 

Last year, Americans adopted 1,586 children from Russia, the third highest rate for non-domestic adoptions. Chuck Johnson, CEO of the National Council for Adoption, stated on NPR last week that more than 60,000 Russian children have been successfully adopted in the United States.

When looking at failed adoptions, Johnson said the rate is 15% for both foreign and domestic adoptions. Biological families, like adoptive families, can also become unhinged. In 2006 (the most recent year for which there are statistics), the number of children in domestic foster care topped 510,000.

So if many kinds of families do fall apart, why has this story captured our collective consciousness?

Simply stated: shame.

Artyom’s story tells us not just that two nations and assorted agencies supposedly working on his behalf failed him but that our American ideal-laden notions of parenting, family, and adoption did as well.

How frightened and alone this seven-year-old must have felt, plucked, like a toy in a claw-operated prize booth, from where he lived and flown across the ocean to an English-speaking home in predominately white, rural Shelbyville, Tennessee.

Although some facts have dribbled out through the media free-for-all, we really know very little about Torry Hansen or what actually occurred in her home. Hansen herself says she will not speak or meet with investigators unless she is formally charged with a crime.

Artyom’s life both prior to and after his adoption is a mystery, deeply concealed by both language and cultural barriers. It is unclear when Hansen began to feel overwhelmed by his unhappiness. Was she self-blaming and resentful? Or was the reality of life with her adopted son so removed from her imaginings of motherhood that she found the situation unbearable?

Adoptive parents may be able to empathize with Hansen, but what we need, as a society, is a reality check. Adoption is not a trial run. When we adopt, as when we birth, we bring into our orbit of love and care a being wholly dependent on us. It’s about a no-turning-back lifetime commitment to raising a child and helping that child navigate his or her way safely into adulthood.

I know something about what Hansen must have been going through. Like her, I am a single parent. (My husband died three months after we adopted our baby son. Our biological daughter was three at that time.)  Like the alleged reports about Artyom’s disruptive behavior, my son has been a tough kid to parent: four schools, multiple therapists, meds, lots of acting out, and need for in-home support.

But unlike Hansen, I never thought it an option to relinquish my son, despite extreme moments of exasperation, his bouts with unpredictable behaviors, and the number of gray hairs he has given me.

Although my son was just five months old when we adopted him, institutional neglect was already apparent. He was constantly hungry, underweight, malnourished, listless, prone to self-soothing, and subsequently chronically ill for the first four years of life.  In pre-school, the best that could be said about his social skills was “does not play well with others.”

But instead of his challenges pushing me away, they have fueled my quest to be a better, smarter mother. I have attended workshops, support groups, individual and family therapy, and secured mental-health services.

I say this not as a putdown to Hansen, or any other parent who has struggled with difficult children, but as a way to offer insight into what it takes to nurture, care for, and love a child that flails against your best intentions. Living in Cambridge, Massachusetts, I have benefited from a highly educated, massively professionalized, and resource-intensive urban area. As an older parent, I have many friends who have also adopted, and together we share our uncertainties, experiences, and support systems.

With professional help, I learned to overcome the great waves of inadequacy I encountered when my son was a toddler and I wasn’t sure I was up to the job of being his mother. With the loving support of friends and family, I have navigated through the tough social and educational choices I needed to make for the well being of my son.

I have learned that asking for help is not shameful and does not reflect on my parenting inabilities. I have learned, as all parents must learn, that the needs of my son are often much more urgent than my own.

And I have also learned that the only thing shameful about this kind of struggle is a lack of funding and political will for the services families truly need to care for their children. If we’re not up to the job, then who is?

To read more about Fran's personal story of adopting an infant son in Russia, read her 2009 Adopt-a-tude piece "Why Do the Russians Make It So Hard to Adopt?"

Russian Adoptions: Who's at Fault and What Do We Do?

By Martha Nichols for Adopt-a-tude


When I first saw the pictures of seven-year-old Artyom Savelyev—who is close to my son’s age—in Moscow, after his adoptive grandmother put him on a flight from Washington, D.C., by himself, I wondered what the hell is wrong with us.

Who is “us”? That’s the question. American adoptive parents? Not most of us, by any stretch. The American adoption agency involved, which has now had its license suspended by the Russian education ministry? Again, that’s painting with a broad brush. The Russian orphanage in which by some reports the boy was mistreated? Who knows?

I wanted to blame somebody, though, as did the many commenters on news stories and blogs about Artyom’s fate this past weekend. Adoptive mother Torry Hansen and grandmother Nancy were right at hand, courtesy of the AP. Here are a few comments about the story from Lisa Belkin’s Motherlode blog:

“This is totally unconscionable and irresponsible.”

“This woman's (I cannot say—‘mother's,’ for she doesn't deserve such a title) behaviour is despicable.”

“This article made me cry. It takes the patience and endurance of Mother Theresa to deal with special needs children. Where did this woman not understand the commitment to a young, troubled child that she adopted into her family?”

Last week, Nancy Hansen decided to fly Artyom (called Justin by his adoptive family) back to Russia because his violent behavior had become too much for them. According to one of the AP stories, his grandmother “chronicled a list of problems: hitting, screaming and spitting at his mother and threatening to kill family members.” He apparently slammed one aunt with a statue when she pushed him to do math homework. (The family was home schooling him.) Hansen says he threatened to burn their home down.

Back in Russia, he was accompanied by a note from adoptive mother Torry Hansen, who is a registered nurse: “This child is mentally unstable. He is violent and has severe psychopathic issues…I was lied to and misled by the Russian Orphanage workers and director regarding his mental stability and other issues…. After giving my best to this child, I am sorry to say that for the safety of my family, friends, and myself, I no longer wish to parent this child.''

As of Friday, Russian foreign minister Sergey Lavrov was threatening to suspend all U.S. adoptions, calling this “the last straw.”

Grandmother Nancy says she had no idea she was setting off an international incident. She did tell an AP reporter, "The intent of my daughter was to have a family and the intent of my whole family was to love that child."

I hate stories like this, in which a child becomes abandoned over and over again, unwanted by anyone. I hate what this does to me as an adoptive parent of a son born in Vietnam, of the doubts I start to feel about whether I had any right to everything that my family means.

I’m also waiting for more facts. The problem, as usual, is that a media storm has managed to make the situation even murkier, spreading an array of misinformation about international adoption, attachment disorders, and what constitutes “normal.”

Shocking headlines like “Boy from Russia said ‘he’d torch our home’” and “Grandmother: Boy terrified adoptive kin” keep the focus on extreme behavior. Here’s the blurb that introduces the AP report in the Seattle Times: “Torry Hansen was so eager to become a mother that she adopted an older child from a foreign country, two factors that scare off many prospective parents. Her fear came later.”

A distorted look at “the inside story of adoptions that go horribly wrong” aired on ABC's Nightline Friday, including videos taken by parents of children having “meltdowns.” (Click here for the accompanying article.)

This prompted developmental psychologist Jean Mercer to debunk some myths in a Psychology Today blog. She rightly castigates Nightline for running home videos without questioning the parents’ interpretations. In one case, shortly after a pair of Russian sisters had been adopted, the older sister wanders around her American home in tears, clutching a blanket, and crawling under furniture. Mercer notes,

“[T]he parents seem to have regarded it as such bizarre and unacceptable behavior that it needed to be recorded because no outsider would believe it.

“But what do we actually see in this video of a child who has been in the adoptive home for about a week? Let me just inquire how similar it might be to your own behavior, if you had been taken by very large people who spoke a different language, put on an airplane with little comprehensible explanation, and taken far away to a new house, new food, new ways of doing things? Would you be grateful?”

Meanwhile, it’s important to keep the numbers in perspective. According to the U.S. State Department, there have been about 15,000 U.S.-Russia adoptions in the past five years. I’ve heard that in the last fifteen years, it’s about 50,000. As many adoption experts have noted, most of these don’t go “horribly wrong.”

Whether Artyom is really psychopathic and violent is unclear. Even if it were true, shoving him onto airplane is at the very least an act of ignorant desperation. Giving him an American name when he was already six years old indicates a lack of awareness and empathy. The Hansens—not to mention those parents supplying videos of their children for Nightline—appear to have little understanding of what it means to suddenly land in another culture.

Yet something much larger is at play than the actions of two unfit adoptive family members. Based on the official outrage of Russia—following on the travesty of American missionaries trying to hustle Haitian “orphans” out of that country after the recent earthquake—the practice of international adoption is once again under fire.

There are lots of ethical reasons why it should be. In Haiti, a number of the children involved still had biological parents. In many other developing countries, from Vietnam to Ethiopia, there’s always been the risk of money paid for babies to finance a less than savory adoption industry.

Yet there’s the flip side, too, and you see it in Russia and Haiti: social welfare systems that simply are ill equipped and far too under-funded to support the rolls of abandoned children. What you see is poverty and its brutal impact on society’s most vulnerable: children who receive little or no adult care.

Let me say it again: you see poverty, on a global scale, ramped up by the churn of developing economies. The Harvard University Project on Global Working Families, research that surveyed 55,000 people in a variety of countries and is detailed in Jody Heymann’s book Forgotten Families, makes clear that many children have no one to take care of them. Here’s a quote from my own 2007 review of Heymann’s book in Women’s Review of Books:

“Of the working parents interviewed, nineteen percent in Vietnam left their children alone or in the care of an unpaid child; 27 percent did so in Mexico; and a whopping 48 percent did in Botswana, which has almost no publicly funded child care.”

Even the reference in a USA Today story about Artyom—“United Airlines allows unaccompanied children as young as 5 years old on direct flights. Children age 8 and above can catch connecting flights, as well”—chills me.

So maybe we should blame global capitalism and every one of us (that “us”) who participates. Maybe it’s not just the Hansens of Shelbyville, Tennessee. Maybe we should blame general ignorance about international adoption—for example, the various media commentators ranting about the numbers on the rise when in fact they’ve been in steep decline since 2004.

Our son was a baby when we adopted him from Vietnam, from an orphanage in which he seemed very well treated by affectionate staff. He is now a happy and healthy little boy. I say this not to vaunt my own skills as a parent but to add that even my son, who remembers nothing of the orphanage—an orphanage that was far from a horror show—has occasional meltdowns. When he was just a little younger than Artyom, he would cry uncontrollably when I left him at school. My son still sucks his thumb, though he’s working on it.

Loss experienced by young children can be profound and impossible to process rationally. The fact that my mother was hospitalized when I was six still sits in my soul. Sometimes I believe my own loss has helped me to understand my son’s; other times, I think that all humans walk alone.

In my adoptive family, some days we walk in the light. We are together, we are whole. But have we really become a world in which so many children have no safe homes?

Apparently so. At this moment, all I can do is hug my boy close.


This piece also appears in Martha's Open Salon blog, Athena's Head.

Is My Son Lucky?

By Martha Nichols for Adopt-a-tude


He’s so lucky to have a parent like you.

She’s lucky to be here.

Every adoptive parent hears the “lucky” comment at some point, especially if a child was born in a developing country like Vietnam, as my son was. Most of us have ready-made responses: No, I’m the lucky one or We all feel lucky to be a family.

If you haven’t adopted internationally or spent time with adult adoptees, it’s probably hard to imagine the mix of guilt, irritation, and confusion the “lucky” comment sparks. I’ve heard it from extended family members, strangers on the street, friends, even from a security worker at the Phú Quốc airport last December.

I’m never sure if people say it because they think it will make me feel good, because they think it’s what I want to hear, or because they simply don't know what else to say. In the case of the Vietnamese airport worker, I think she really believed it.

Talking about my lucky son doesn’t make me feel better, however. More than anything, the notion of luck emphasizes the randomness of life and the fact that a child I dearly love might not ever have crossed my path. How could that be? The thought scares me; I’m also deeply grateful. I’m all too aware of the cognitive dissonance I experience as an adoptive parent: I'm thrilled we are a family; at the same time, I know my gain is another woman's loss—and possibly a loss for my son as well.

When Mei-Ling Hopgood titled her terrific memoir Lucky Girl, I’m sure she was invoking cognitive dissonance, too, as an adult adoptee. A child’s understanding of luck changes over time. It’s not a simple notion, particularly if you’re grappling with what luck means in two different cultures and the way that has shaped who you’ve become.

Talking about adoptees as "lucky" makes them sound like charity cases. This construction of international adoption was foisted on an earlier generation from Korea and Vietnam, including those adopted through the infamous or humanitarian (depending on your point of view) Operation Babylift in the mid-1970s.

There’s been plenty of criticism of this humanitarian approach, much of it justified. Yet now the pendulum has swung the other way, with many current adoptive parents claiming they were motivated by a desire for a family rather than by charitable impulses. Critics snap back that we’re buying babies. Celebrity international adoptions and ethical violations put us on the defensive even more.

In recent discussions on blogs like Racialicious and Harlow’s Monkey, there are bracing comments about the “selfishness” of international adoption and the havoc it wreaks for children of color. These are well worth a read; they make clear that mainstream media representations of adoption and the debate about it are misleading at best.

But if you extend this reasoning—as some more hyperbolic commenters do, especially when railing again Madonna—no international adoptees are lucky. They’ve been torn from their birth families and cultures; they are saddled with unresolvable grief and identity confusion.

So, when a well-meaning person beams at my charming seven-year-old and says, “He’s so lucky,” I’m extremely uncomfortable. Knowing the sharp criticism of some adult adoptees, how can I not squirm?

Nevertheless, there really are millions of children who need homes now. Not in some distant future when all sending countries have completely overhauled their systems and the U.N. is satisfied—now.

In this way, I think my son is lucky. I don’t believe he would have been better off in an orphanage. He’s lucky to have escaped an institutionalized existence or life on the streets.

Like so many adoptive parents, I’ve been tempted by the idea that fate brought this child to my husband and me. Our being together just feels right. But if I’m honest, luck makes more sense than fate. I can’t pass off a decision I made—and the resources I have to carry it out—on God or the Universe. I’m responsible for it, for good or ill. And I'm an American, after all, who believes we make our own luck.

At the moment, my son is going on eight years old and confused about what his luck means. He still clings to me whenever he gets worried that we aren’t a “real” family. Yet close to a year after we took a return trip together to Vietnam, my son’s understanding of his own situation also seems to be deepening.

He tells me lately that he feels sad, as if he left a part of himself in Vietnam.

“You did,” I say, because it's the truth.

 
This post originally appeared in WOMEN = BOOKS, the blog for the Women's Review of Books. Read Martha’s review of Lucky Girl by Mei-Ling Hopgood and Culture Keeping by Heather Jacobson in WRB 's September/October 2009 issue.

Why Do the Russians Make It So Tough to Adopt?

Guest Post by Fran Cronin for Adopt-a-tude

This past September, Fran Cronin’s family was featured in the Adopt-a-tude piece “Attachment: ‘Love Is Just a Starting Point.’” The struggles of Fran and her son with attachment issues were highlighted there. Now Fran describes how she came to adopt from Russia and why institutional care can profoundly hurt children.

When you are 46 and want to have a baby but biology is no longer on your side, the answer to what you want is adoption.

In 1998, when my husband and I decided to pursue adoption, we had been living in Moscow for almost four years. Our biological daughter was almost three, and we were eager to expand our family.  But as a breast-cancer survivor, living in Yeltsin-era Moscow, the farthest I got with fertility enhancement was taking little purple pills prescribed by a doctor in Helsinki, accompanied by lots of unspontaneous sex.

“We are living in the land of adoption,” my weary husband finally said. He was alluding to what we called Plan B in the family-planning manual. 

That year, the adoption of Russian babies by foreign nationals was almost epidemic. During 1998, Americans alone adopted 4,432 Russian babies, more than 12 adoptions a day. On our frequent travels back and forth between Moscow and New York, there would invariably be several families returning with their newly adopted children. The trend peaked in 2004 with the adoption of 5,865 Russian children by American families.  The following year, the Russians tightened the rules for accrediting adoption agencies, and since then the number of Russian children adopted by Americans has been in decline.  The most recent report from the U.S. Department of State revealed numbers had dropped to 1,861 in 2008.

We were familiar with adoptions, but those we knew of in our wide circle of aging-out parents were not of babies; they were all of young toddlers, ranging in age from fourteen months to three years.

Although Russian institutions were bursting with abandoned or unwanted children, the bureaucracies of both the U.S. and Russia made arduous, repeated, and capricious demands on us. (No one challenges your intent when you birth a baby.)

The U.S. Embassy lost our fingerprints. The Russians made us scramble for their coveted brightly colored (and costly) ribbons and seals. For nine months, I cleaned our apartment in preparation for home visits, crisscrossed unfamiliar and congested streets in search of obscure notaries, bought dozens of baby outfits and baby toys.

Although we made clear to every so-called adoption expert available to us in Moscow—especially those in the lucrative position of helping us identify a baby—that we wanted to adopt an infant, we were told we were misguided. What we really wanted, they insisted, was a girl at least three years old. This would safeguard us against “boy trouble” and unknown ills lurking beneath the cuddly cuteness of an infant.

We countered that there are no givens, even with a biological child. We never wanted a guarantee. The driving force was our desire for a child. Our thinking was—and I believe this even more strongly today—that in places where infants are at risk, adopting a baby as young as possible allows adoptive parents to ameliorate the wrongs of early care.

Up until we began our own adoption process, I had assumed that living in Moscow would be an advantage. I had contacts, knew the bureaucratic ropes, and felt I could facilitate an independent adoption without the hassle and pandering of a stateside agency. 

I had spent two years on the board of a nonprofit organization (ARC or Action for Russia’s Children) that actively supported alternatives to institutional care of children abandoned, abused, or relinquished at birth due to obvious physical defects. Many of these defects could have been easily ameliorated if proper medical care had been available. But warehousing children with either physical or neurological disabilities was the assumed norm. (I never once saw a wheel chair anywhere in the city.)

For example, my Russian tutor, a woman in her late thirties, revealed to me that she had a brother born with a severely low IQ. Her parents hadn’t wanted to give him up at birth. But fearing reprisals from nosy neighbors, they shuttered him in their two-room apartment rather than risk public ridicule and ostracization. Her brother’s existence wasn’t revealed until a man interested in marrying my tutor came over to meet her parents. The suitor left and never returned.

Actual numbers for any of this are hard to obtain. But the government and medical community’s rampant collusion in keeping “undesirables” out of the public eye is well known. More recently, legal introduction of parental-rights termination due to poverty, alcoholism, and out-of-wedlock birth has further swollen the institutional population. Unicef estimates that in 2002 at least a half million (or two out of every hundred) Russian children were in institutional care. Other organizations estimate the number to be as high as 800,000 and growing.

In the late nineties, although warehousing of young adults and placement of infants and young children in detsky domes (children’s homes) was a tremendous drain on scarce resources, it was simultaneously a venue for bureaucratic power. The figurative turnkey to required adoption permits lay buried deep in the tightly bound bosom of a woman who presided as the Minister of Education. It was in her windowless basement office that I presented my multi-sealed and stamped dossier.

          

At the time, Russian law required that babies be available for domestic adoption up to the age of four months. The wait has since doubled and is now eight months. This waiting period was thought to be a window of opportunity for family members, or other Russian citizens in that oblast (region), to come forward and adopt. The reality was they never did.

Testing at the age of two was institutionalized as a way to categorize state-dependent children. If a child was diagnosed as an idiot, then the services provided would be marginal: no formal education or life-skills training, large warehouse-type housing, release to the streets by the age of sixteen or so.

Of course, babies reared in stimulus- or nurture-void environments will invariably test poorly. Denied the comfort of being held, the satisfaction of good nutrition, or the opportunity to bond and form human attachments, these babies grow solitary and listless. Or, as in the case of my son—who was only five months old when we adopted him—lose the desire to cry.

Leading up to our adoption, we first viewed him, on video, as a chubby two-month-old in the arms of caretakers. We then visited him at three-and-a-half months, loaded with stimulus toys and presents of simple clothing for him and other babies in the orphan ward of the hospital in southern Russia where he lived.

Six weeks later, we returned with our daughter, carrying more presents and envelopes stuffed with cash, to attend the local oblast hearing and complete our adoption. In the short span between our two visits, our son had physically deteriorated from a plump, animated, alert baby to a drawn, gray-pallored, and muscularly low-toned infant. All the toys we had given him—mirrors and soft toys with bright colors and sound—were gone.

On pick-up day, we received him bound and swaddled in a tight-fitting cloth that rendered him unable to move.

I got the baby boy I wanted; at five months, my son remains the youngest Russian adoption I know about. Yet the emotional scars of his early deficits go deep. I can’t make up for what he was denied before me.

Which raises many questions, including why do the Russians make it so tough to adopt?  They clearly are not invested in raising unwanted children—so why don’t they provide the education and access necessary for women to have control over conception? (It is not uncommon for a Russian woman to have multiple abortions as well as children they give up for adoption.) If the government does not want to release these babies into families who will care for and love them, then why don’t they provide the support necessary to help them mature into productive citizens?

Today, at age eleven, despite all the love my 115-pound body and well-educated mind can give, my son continues to need lots of care to help him feel happy and whole. For him, every day is a struggle against misread social cues; slow processing of multiple instructions; and a chronic need for attention, love, and approval.

I used to get seeing-red mad. If only someone had cared for my son, perhaps much of what dogs him and makes him fearful of his world might have slipped away.

But shaking my past at the past does not aright so many multiple wrongs. The reality is that we are here, and ever grateful together, mother and son. I don’t know what the future will bring, but as this boy’s mother, I can guarantee I will do whatever it takes for him to realize all the happiness he deserves.