‘Special’ Children : Dark Past Can Haunt Adoptions

Beautiful little Monica, 8 years old, has a past she cannot escape.

Juvenile Court documents obtained by her adoptive parents show that her schizophrenic mother, 15 years old when she gave birth, sexually and physically abused the girl when she was still an infant. Family members say that Monica’s grandmother and great-grandmother have been afflicted by mental illness and drug abuse.

But Christine Shoemaker says she did not know any of that when she took Monica (not her real name) into her home in the mountains above San Bernardino as a 3-year-old foster child in September, 1983.

Despite Monica’s increasingly disturbing behavior, she says the child’s social workers did not tell her about Monica’s family history when she and her husband adopted her through the San Bernardino County Adoption Service about two years later.

Nighttime Horror

Then, three times in 1986, Shoemaker awoke in the middle of the night to find Monica brandishing a butcher knife over her chest. Twice, she says, she discovered Monica trying to suffocate her adopted baby sister by pressing a pillow over her head.

Because the adoption agency failed to tell the adoptive parents about Monica’s past, Christine Shoemaker said, it was her own research, including interviews with the child’s relatives, that finally led her to the conclusion in January, 1987, that schizophrenia was the cause of Monica’s bizarre behavior. The diagnosis was later confirmed by psychiatrists.

“I didn’t like it and it scared me to death,” she said. “And the more I read about it (schizophrenia), the heavier my heart was. But at least I was comfortable with the answer.”

Monica’s case, although startling, is by no means unique, according to interviews with scores of adoptive parents, social workers, mental health professionals, attorneys and other adoption experts.

Withholding of Information

Precise statistics are impossible to come by because adoption files remain permanently sealed to outsiders and because there is no central clearinghouse for U.S. adoption information. But these experts contend that vital information on adopted children, ranging from past abuse to important medical and psychological information about birth parents, is frequently withheld from adoptive parents, despite professional guidelines--and in some cases laws--calling for full disclosure.

The consequences of not knowing can be severe. Children may be denied proper treatment and understanding. Parents may be left unaware of a child’s background--and therefore the likelihood of possible problems--and may not be prepared to deal with mental or physical illness. Worse, parents say, they often feel betrayed by a system that they had hoped would make their families complete.

“We love our child, and I guess that’s one of the real problems with the situation,” said an adoptive mother in the Antelope Valley who believes that social workers withheld information that would have presaged her son’s severe mental problems.

“If you didn’t love a child,” she said, “you could just turn and walk away from it all.”

In Monica’s case, the child endured years of what turned out to be inappropriate treatment from doctors unaware of her family history. Some of Monica’s former classmates, her first-grade teacher said in a school report, remain emotionally upset and confused by the child’s wild mood swings. And Christine Shoemaker says that her family, which includes another adopted daughter, four foster children and yet another two foster children who have grown and left home, lived in constant turmoil and fear because of Monica’s behavior.

Although most professional guidelines for social workers stress the importance of complete disclosure of information to adoptive parents, few states have laws requiring it. California is one of them.

But even in states where such laws are on the books, those in the field say that confidentiality provisions--designed to protect the privacy of natural parents--are often loosely interpreted. One result, such as in Monica’s case, is that social workers may decide for themselves what information adoptive parents need to know.

Unless they obtain a court order, adoptive parents throughout the United States are permanently barred from examining a child’s files directly or working on their own, before the adoption is finalized, to obtain other records from doctors, hospitals or schools.

Sometimes, social workers say, information about a child is simply not available. Fathers may be unknown, sexual abuse may be covered up and mothers may lie about behavior such as heavy drinking or drug use that have important implications for their children.

At other times, because information may be difficult, expensive or time-consuming to obtain, it is simply left out, they say.

“The truth is I think we could do a lot better job in providing information,” said Addie Love, an adoptions supervisor with the Los Angeles Department of Children’s Services, which runs the nation’s largest adoption agency. “But it is extremely difficult to do. . . . Those pieces (of information)are missing. We know that. We have to cut corners” in efforts to gather all available information about a child’s background.

In still other cases, information that a social worker views as detrimental to placing a child may be deliberately withheld.

“You want the best for these children,” said Richard Hoekstra, director of the adoptive services division for the state of Michigan. “So it is easy to withhold information, not in a malicious sense, but in the sense that you are highlighting the best in these children, and you tend to leave out some of the problems.”

Perhaps that is what happened in Monica’s case, although, citing confidentiality statutes, San Bernardino County Adoption Service Director Tom Sansone refuses to comment directly beyond saying that it is “entirely possible” that case workers did not know about Monica’s background.

Condition Worsens

By the time that Christine Shoemaker learned about her daughter’s past and could take those missing links of information to her doctors, Monica’s condition had deteriorated considerably. She was diagnosed as having multiple personality disorder and schizophrenia, her illness so severe that 23 hospitals refused to take her, the family says.

Eventually Shoemaker, who had already sold her business to help pay for Monica’s mounting medical bills, worried about future liability and contacted an attorney. (The Shoemakers’ real names, and the names of other parents in this story, are not being used to protect the privacy of the children.)

Rather than face a lawsuit, San Bernardino County officials say, they allowed the Shoemakers to relinquish custody of Monica and the couple’s parental rights were ended.

But Christine and Richard Shoemaker, who say they have never stopped loving Monica, went to court to win de facto parental status, which allows them to visit the child in the residential treatment center where she now lives. They attend weekly therapy sessions with her. When her condition permits, the child visits the Shoemaker home on weekends.

“I thought about suing the county, but it would probably take five years, and all we could get is money,” Christine Shoemaker said. “But there is no amount of money that can pay me and my family for what we have gone through, for what we are still going through.”

Although there are no comprehensive national statistics on adoptions, state and local data suggest that Monica’s adoption was only one of hundreds of so-called inappropriate adoptive placements made each year in the United States.

Jeff Rosenberg, director for adoption services at the National Committee for Adoptions in Washington, says there may be as many as 100,000 children awaiting adoption nationwide, the vast majority of them, like Monica, so-called “special needs” children.

Social workers say that the working definition of a “special needs” child is often any child who may be difficult to place. Depending on which part of the country they live in, “special needs” children could be anything from a black infant to a healthy white 2-year-old to a physically handicapped adolescent. In many areas, anyone other than a healthy white infant, who are the children most in demand, can be considered a “special needs” child. These children are almost the exclusive domain of public agencies.

“There is a great deal of pressure to place these kids, ‘move ‘em, move ‘em, move ‘em,’ ” Rosenberg said. “So what happens is this wrongful adoption stuff. We hope not too much, but we don’t know.”

But if the number of adoptions canceled before they become final is any indication, as many as one out of four “special needs” adoptions don’t work out. A variety of government and private studies cited by adoption experts indicate that the national “disruption” rate for “special needs” children falls between 13%and 25%.

Even those figures, however, may not tell the whole story.

Many adoptive parents who say they would not adopt again add that despite serious problems, they never considered returning their child. Other couples, desperate to become parents after years of waiting, may not have fully understood the implications of physical or sexual abuse, or parental drug addiction and alcoholism.

Unaware of Options

And still others were unaware that they had the option of not completing an adoption, or even taking more time to consider whether to accept a child.

“The first time out, people are intimidated by the social agency and they don’t realize that they have the right to demand information,” said Robert DeBolt, one of the country’s best-known adoptive fathers and founder of AASK America, a private “special needs” adoption agency headquartered in San Francisco.

DeBolt and his wife decided to form their agency, whose name stands for Aid to Adoption for Special Kids, out of frustration with the public adoption bureaucracy. Over the years, the DeBolts, who have six children of their own, have adopted 14 of their “special kids.”

“There is a need for some type of legislation that guarantees that all information is released to the adoptive parents,” DeBolt said. “If the agency chooses not to disclose all the information, what happens?Is the agency’s license taken away?No. There needs to be teeth and, damn it, with no exceptions.”

California is one of the few states that has any provision to void an unsuccessful adoption, but although state records show 69 annulled adoptions between 1983 and 1987 because county agencies fraudulently misrepresented a child, state officials can recall no agency that has been put on notice for alleged malpractice.

One Los Angeles parent says she was near the breaking point when she tearfully--and unsuccessfully--begged her county adoption worker for more information to learn why her “two darling little boys” had developed violent, disruptive behavior.

“The worker brought out a huge book of stuff, but she wouldn’t let me see it,” said LeAnne Walters. “She would just pick out little bits of information, things that weren’t helpful at all.”

That, Walters said, is how it was from the beginning, when she and her husband went to see the two brothers, 5 and 8 years old at the time, in a foster home. The social worker told them the boys’ birthdays, that they had Irish, English and a trace of American Indian blood and that both grandfathers had been bricklayers. No problems were mentioned.

Pressed for an Answer

At the end of the visit, Walters said, the worker wanted an answer:yes or no?

“Can you believe how naive we were?” she said. “But, you know, you think, well, they’re just children. You’re bigger than they are. It will be no problem. Well, that is a fallacy.”

The next day the boys arrived with their belongings in a paper bag. Within a year, the adoption was finalized.

Although Walters said that a month after the boys’ arrival “all hell broke loose,” she and her husband followed their social worker’s advice to tough it out.

“I thought that love, stability and a good environment would make everything right,” she said, “but now I am convinced that genetics plays a much bigger role.”

Walters said that pre-adoption school records, requested later by one of the boys’ teachers, included a neurological report indicating brain dysfunction in the older child. More information, about physical abuse of both boys in a foster home, has since come to light.

Today, Walters said, her younger son, 17, has a fascination with guns and knives and a violent temper “that triggers like a firecracker.”

The older son, who at 21 has been in and out of mental institutions all his life, has served several jail terms on drug charges. He lives on the street.

And Walters said she is haunted by the fear that the older son will return to murder her and her husband.

“I told him the last time I talked to him that I feel like having our phones changed and getting an unlisted number, but he said, he’d find us anyway,” she said. “It does kind of spook you, because you really can’t get away from them.”

In Los Angeles and elsewhere, public adoption officials describe a system swamped with children who need to be placed, a situation that social workers say has created pressure to place more and more children at a faster rate.

Unless more social workers are hired and trained, adoption workers at the Department of Children’s Services in Los Angeles say, even more children will be “processed” through the system without adequate preparation. They say it is this shortage of staff and overcrowding--which often means children wait years in emergency shelters and foster homes before they are adopted--that creates or deepens children’s emotional problems.

“The goal is to get them off the rolls, find them permanent homes, adoptive homes, which means that the state and county no longer have financial responsibility,” said Reuben Pannor, one of the nation’s foremost adoption specialists who recently retired as director of community services at Los Angeles’ private Vista del Mar agency.

“(But)there has been an over-zealousness about placing these ‘special needs’ children,” Pannor said. “Many have been placed without the proper preparation, background testing, without information about what problems the child has, or about recessive problems that may show up later.”

But some social workers say the inherent stress of social work plays a major role in adoption problems. Well-intentioned social workers, they say, may feel stymied by too many cases and too little time.

“What has become important are numbers,” said Josie Charlap-Hyman, a psychiatric social worker who worked for eight years in the Los Angeles County adoption agency, a unit of the Department of Children’s Services. “Placement numbers (in adoptions)become the ranking of how efficient a worker is.”

Pressure Told

Charleen Morrow, who recently left her job with Riverside County’s adoption agency after developing a stress-related illness, agrees that the pressure to place children is great.

“Statistics were what was important,” she said. “For instance, if you have a child who is adoptive, the first question should be, ‘Is this home suitable?’

“But what I got from the director was, he said verbatim, ‘Place them as rapidly as you can. If we have to disrupt (a placement), fine. We can disrupt it. That makes for more placements and that means better statistics.’ ”

Frank Guzevich, currently the regional manager in charge of adoptions at Riverside’s Department of Public Social Services, said that such assertions are not surprising in view of the direct correlation between state funding and the number of children that an agency places.

“Yes, it is true that statistics are very meaningful,” he said. “If you aren’t placing, how can you justify staff?But I say that with the caveat that it is unethical to capriciously place children. It can be very damaging to them. . . . And the basis of good social work comes down to that, good judgment. There is a lot of judgment in this field.”

There are few hard numbers on the kinds of problems faced by children who have been through the public adoption system, the vehicle for roughly one-third of all adoptions in the United States.

But data from a survey conducted in December, 1985, by Kay Donley, then executive director of a private adoption agency in New York City for “special needs” children, suggested that adopted children, including those adopted as infants, were five times as likely as non-adopted children to show up in residential psychiatric treatment centers. The survey, in the form of written questionnaires, was carried out among a network of 14 private adoption agencies in 11 states.

Another survey the same year by the National Assn. of Psychiatric Treatment Centers for Children and the American Assn. of Children’s Residential Centers showed that adopted children were seven or eight times as likely as non-adopted children to be treated at the centers. That survey was based on written responses completed by 51 treatment centers.

Donley, who has 26 years of experience in the adoption field, said some of the problem may lie with general ignorance about resolving the key issues of adoption--separation, loss and grieving--before emotional problems, of both children and parents, get out of hand.

Understanding the Concept

She said that adoptive parents traditionally tell their children at the age of 3 or 4 that they have been adopted, and then may only mention it in passing later on. But Donley says it is not until a child is between 7 and 9 years old that he can understand the concept of adoption.

“When he starts to grapple with that, he begins to challenge the parents,” Donley said. “He is emotionally disturbed. The problems may become very severe.”

The majority of today’s “special needs” children have several strikes against them even before they reach an adopted home.

Dr. Stephen Kandall, chief of neonatal services at Beth Israel Medical Center in New York City, said couples often call him to ask whether they should adopt a child whose parents may have taken drugs.

“And my answer is, you do what you want to do,” Kandall said, explaining that studies on babies born drug-dependent have been inconclusive. “In general,” he said, “it is not a stable segment of the population that takes drugs, so one would expect some psychiatric problems.”

“Alcohol is much worse,” Kandall added. “It is really devastating.” Although the condition is not always apparent at birth, children born with fetal alcohol syndrome are mentally retarded and have small heads and eyes.

Not all children of alcoholics, however, are born with fetal alcohol syndrome. Because doctors have not yet determined if there is a safe threshold of drinking during pregnancy--or what other factors may contribute to the syndrome--most advise pregnant women not to drink.

Harmful Effects

Dr. Justin D. Call, chief of child and adolescent psychiatry at UC Irvine, said that children taken from their principal caretaker at an early age and moved from place to place may never form an attachment with another human being. Other children may be traumatized, sometimes irreparably, if the bond with their caretaker is broken.

“Those that lack this capacity to form attachments eventually lack all of the things that stem from that, the capacity to learn complex things, to have abstract thoughts, to form a strong and meaningful conscience,” Call said. Delinquency, schizoid relationships and the inability to understand how people feel may follow.

But Call added that some children in danger of becoming permanently alienated may be saved if provided with an “optimum environment,” one that offers love and stimulation, by the time they are about 2 1/2 years old.

“We have babies who were thought to be retarded brought to the hospital and they light up like Christmas trees,” he said. “And those babies are recovering.”

Adoption, those in the field agree, may offer the same therapy. But experts, including adoptive parents who have learned by experience, stress that information is key.

Jim and Lisa Bradley, public school teachers in their 15th year of marriage, say that adoption workers gave them some, but not all, information on their three adopted children, all of them so-called “special needs” children, when the couple adopted them through the Los Angeles County adoption agency.

They learned more by doing their own research, talking privately to the children’s counselors and gathering information where they could find it. And in times of distress and times of trust, the Bradleys also have learned much from the children themselves.

“Someone decides what you need to know,” said Lisa Bradley, 37, as she thumbed through the county files that she and her husband were given on their children. “Who knows what the county knows, what they have been told?Sometimes you get things whited out. You don’t know if it’s just names or medical information.”

History of Trouble

The Bradley children, now teen-agers, have fought their adoptive parents and each other. They’ve run away from home, attacked their teachers and spent years in psychiatric care.

But the Bradleys stress that theirs is a success story, that with the pain has come love and personal breakthroughs. In a few years, they say, they may adopt yet another “special needs” child.

“I think that all adoptive parents hope they’ll get the perfect kid,” said Lisa Bradley, a sixth-grade English teacher. “But the more you do it, the less you expect.”

In their own way, each of the Bradley children has stumbled through the painful issues associated with starting a new life as a stranger’s child. The process has by no means ended, but in fits and starts, the Bradleys believe that progress--at least as regards their oldest son and daughter--is being made.

“But we can always look at it this way,” Lisa Bradley said. “They are not going to be professionals, or college graduates, but without us, or people like us, they wouldn’t have made it.”