Parental travesty
There was a study that found adoptive parents are less likely to abuse their children than biological parents. I believe that because adoption is quite a deliberate process. No one adopts by accident. While I don’t know the exact numbers, I also assume there isn’t much difference.
But unlike biological parents, when a person wants to adopt they have to be qualified by the state to be parents. This is a good thing for the child, but I still get a little annoyed that I had to prove something that unmarried teenagers who get pregnant in the back of car on prom night do not have to do.
Because of a recent law, my wife and I had to take a state mandated parenting class when adopting our second daughter. Ironically this meant having to have grandma babysit our first daughter while someone told us how to care for a child. We also had to take a course at the local hospital and wash a babydoll. Believe me, it is nothing like what I do now: bathe three live, squirming girls at the same time. I also had to be fingerprinted by the FBI and had a log of the fire drills in my house. I had to put a chain escape ladder in the bedroom closet. Prospective biological parents have to do these things too, right?
Even in the general public, I encounter a subtle assumption that adoptive parents are a little less qualified. One of my wife’s relatives once asked “don’t lots of adoptive parents want to give their child back?” And this was from an intelligent, educated woman.
A few years ago on my local public radio station there was a new story: “Two kids conspire to kill their adoptive parents” but story had nothing to do with the fact the kids were adopted. The adjective chosen just as well could have been “conspire to kill their brown-haired parents.”
This past week there was a story out of New Jersey about Raymond and Vanessa Jackson. The parents of 12 kids had depravely starved four of their boys. Aged 9 to 19, the boys all were under 50 pounds while their three daughters were well fed. (Their other five children are adults.) What most journalists imply when reporting this story, is that the four were starved because they happened to be adopted. There is scant mention that three well-fed girls aren’t biological either. It was purely a gender thing with the parents. The girls went to public school while the boys were home-schooled and shielded from public view. The girls played in the backyard blow-up pool. The starved boys resorted to eating the house’s drywall.
What is especially horrifying is that the New Jersey Divison of Youth and Family Services (DYFS) regularly visited the house over the past few years didn’t notice that the house was dirty and didn’t have any food or electricity.
Thankfully DYFS is going through a house-cleaning themselves because of this. Unfortunately because of these sad stories, I’m sure there will be another law or two passed in New Jersey to that only applies to adoptive parents. Perhaps another required parenting course in the food pyramid?