Now that I am in matching and able to look at the profiles of kids that are available for adoption (which has been limited to sibling sets by our choice), I am very surprised at how minor the kids “issues” seem to me.  At some point, we had to, almost blindly decide a “level” of issues that we could handle.  So “moderate” seemed relatively safe.  We are really competent and resourceful people, so yah…we can handle moderate issues.

We expect our lives to completely transform and to begin revolving around our kids… this has happened to all of our other friends that have kids. And my guess is that my friends kids will at some point have “issues”, maybe even “moderate issues”.  Sometimes medical or emotional things come up.  Sometimes there is sexual abuse. Sometimes trauma happens and sometimes nobody but the child ever knows about it.  Sometimes the whole family is affected.  So again, moderate issues seemed pretty acceptable to us, even expected.

So, it is really a pleasant surprise that many these kids seem so normal.  After reading about Reactive Attachment Disorder (RAD), we were concerned that every kid in the pool would be like The Bad Seed, waiting around the corner to stab us and sabotaging any attempt to be friends.  There are certainly some extreme cases; medically fragile kids, kids that saw their siblings murdered, kids that start doing really manic things when they meet a potential adoptive parent.  But they are not the majority of the kids that we have been finding. 

They may have things that make them harder to place in an adoptive home that to me barely qualify as an “issue”.  Some of the kids have very minor medical issues that will be corrected by a simple surgery when they arrive at the appropriate age.  Some are in sibling sets; including a relatively high percentage of twins.  Many of the kids have some “flags” in their profile, though.

Kids naturally learn and grow at different rates and between the ages of 1 and 5, it is pretty hard to diagnose certain development issues and classify any kid as NOT normal. I hear stories about kids who barely say a word until they are three years old, then they start talking in complete sentences.  Some kids like to crawl and move around more, others like to pull themselves up and stand.  Some kids need speech therapy and some wet their beds.  All of this is considered perfectly normal. 

Foster kids, though are under a microscope.  Many of these kids were born addicted to drugs or alcohol, so a great deal of attention is given to the potential delays that these kids have.  The ridiculous thing is that most of these kids have not been given an environment in which they can thrive.  They may have been subject to neglect and abuse or simple instability, all of which will lead to less than average performance.  So even kids that are presenting behavior that is probably normal under the circumstances, it also could be the sign of something wrong. I often see in the profiles that the kid tested poorly at this time, but has had remarkable improvment since being put in their current placement.

I see why it happens this way, people want to know all of the potential negatives about the kids (the profiles do say nice things, too, by the way!) right away. As a product of the litigous society that we are in, it makes sense that the “flags” are fully disclosed and that people can read between the lines.  It is frustrating, though to read what could be a black mark against them when they’ve nver really had a proper chance in the first place.