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Overview
There were no criminals. There was no crime.
Then why were we sitting in the accused chairs?
As an infant, Daniel entered the foster care system as a result of severe neglect, which manifested in violence and aggression later in his childhood.
Desperate to get their adoptive son, Daniel, into a residential treatment center and keep their other children safe, the state of Illinois left Jim and Toni Hoy with two options. If they brought their son home from the psychiatric hospital for the 11th time in 2 years, the Department of Children and Family Services threatened to charge them with child endangerment for failure to protect their other children. Mental health professionals recommended abandoning him at the hospital after the state denied all viable sources of funding for his treatment. Making that choice would trigger a child abuse investigation and subsequent neglect charges.
Daniel re-entered the foster care system for no other reason than he was mentally ill.
A year later, Daniel’s mother discovered that his treatment was covered by a funding source that he was awarded as part of his special needs adoption. The EPSDT provision of Medicaid. How could they get the state government to understand the federal law and re-gain custody of their son?
"Second Time Foster Child" is the story of parents who never gave up on their son, despite being prosecuted and persecuted in exchange for his medically necessary treatment.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781614481607 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Morgan James Publishing |
| Publication date: | 05/01/2012 |
| Pages: | 250 |
| Product dimensions: | 5.90(w) x 8.90(h) x 0.70(d) |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
AN AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL PERSPECTIVE
ON JULY 20, 2010, I sat in the Governor's office explaining how children, adopted out of foster care, were cycling back into the system. There is a gaping hole in the state mental healthcare system and our adoptive son fell into it. He became violent and aggressive due to pre-adoptive trauma. The state refused all sources of possible funding for the residential care he needed to keep himself and the rest of our family safe. The policy advisor responded with a question that I never saw coming.
"Why did you adopt those mentally ill kids anyway?"
I had to ransack my brain to find an adjective to describe the way that question made me feel. The only one I could think of was a word that is used often in England, but rarely here.
Gobsmacked!
I took a moment to compose myself before I responded, "Because I'm darn good at it! Because not just anyone can love a mentally ill child — I can. The state of Illinois needs people like me."
I still wonder just exactly where this policy advisor thought mentally ill children should be. As parents of two mentally ill children, we have experienced a lot of stigma, but I certainly didn't expect to get it from the most senior health policy advisor in the state. Once I got over the shock; I realized it was really a two part question. Why did we adopt? Why did we choose to raise mentally ill children?
Why We Adopted
I'll explain why we chose adoption versus giving birth first. We had physical and emotional reasons for choosing adoption. There are a lot of things in life I do very well. Physically speaking, pregnancy and childbirth are not included among those things. Our emotional reasons for considering adoption stem back to my husband's and my own childhoods.
We are not an infertile couple. I gave birth to two of the most beautiful red-headed children you've ever seen. In fact, when we disclosed to our families that we intended to adopt, one of my sisters-in-law asked, "Why would you want to do that? You have the prettiest babies in the family." I believe that my nieces and nephews are all beautiful in their own way, but I suppose there is something especially engaging about a porcelain skinned baby with the perfect shade of amber curls. In fact, strangers have long stopped us on the streets to ask us if our daughter's hair was real or a wig. So, what was to stop us from having another equally beautiful child?
The issue of getting pregnant was not an obstacle for my husband, Jim, and me. In fact, in that realm, my biological clock never skipped a beat. We chose to have children and weeks later, I was pregnant. No waiting or wondering required. But, the issues of pregnancy and childbirth were entirely another matter. Just weeks after becoming pregnant, if I could make it from the bed to the bathroom before the morning sickness hit; it was a good day. None of the remedies, old or new worked. I was miserable for five to six months. About the time I could actually keep a meal down, I was so uncomfortably large, I could barely move around. I stand five feet nothing with a very short torso, so there was really no room for a baby to grow. Once it did grow, there was no space left for my bladder. After suffering a miserable miscarriage following my first pregnancy, I decided I'd had enough of hospitals. A co-worker had been telling me about how wonderful home birth was. After researching the differences thoroughly, it sounded like the most comfortable option for me. What I didn't anticipate was having a December baby in the Midwest, when it was 30 degrees below zero and having a virus with a fever at the time I went into labor. This precluded me from having the uneventful home birth I desired and sent me off to the hospital with a broken water bag and water freezing as it ran down my legs.
In 1989, my first full term pregnancy yielded the first of our two red headed cherubs, but not before 24 hours of hard labor followed by a Cesarean section birth. Five days after I came home from the hospital, we celebrated Christmas with our daughter, Samantha.
In 1991, my next pregnancy was identical to the last, except that two weeks after my due date, I was still pregnant. I was beyond uncomfortable and barely walking the week before I gave birth. Apparently, my body does not dilate, so once again, I was under the knife with an unplanned Cesarean section. The second incision was cut longer due to the size of our first born son, Mason, who weighed in at almost 11 lb., and stretched the measuring tape to 24 inches. We brought him home from the hospital in clothing for a 6–9 month old. He was three feet shorter than me at birth and my small frame didn't manage the experience very well. It stands to reason, that a large baby gets even bigger after he's born. It was not long at all before he was too heavy for me to carry him around. To make matters worse, I herniated a disc in my back, requiring surgery. When our pudgy little tyke could finally crawl, I taught him to wait until I sat down, and coaxed him to crawl onto my lap, so that I could hold him.
After our second baby, I started to re-think the plan about having a third child, but my husband very much wanted another one. We wondered if my back would support another pregnancy, and then, there was the issue of carrying the infant post birth. While another birth was physically possible, it wasn't really plausible, especially with already having two little ones at home. Ultimately, we decided another birth from my body was out of the question.
In 1994, a baby boy was born in another part of our county. He was starved, lethargic, and severely neglected. After being admitted to the hospital, he was diagnosed with "failure to thrive." The nurses fed him with an eyedropper once an hour to keep him alive. He almost died. Social services removed his older brother and sister from that same home a few weeks later. Their sister was placed with one of her birth father's biological relatives, who declined to take in her brothers. The boys initially went to live with their birthmother's parents and later to a foster home. They'd been in foster care nearly two years when we, a family living not too far away, began to think about adoption.
Around the time my soon-to-be adopted son was turning two years old, I found myself thinking, "If I could just give birth to a two year old." That, I thought to myself, I could manage. And then I thought, why couldn't we bring another child into our family at the age of two? Adoptable children were available in every age. Certainly, there was a parentless two-year-old out there somewhere, who needed a mommy and daddy to love him.
My husband had his own reasons for wanting to adopt. He'd had a childhood friend who suffered through a horrible foster family experience. He would never forget times spent with his good friend as they were growing up. They enjoyed time together and spent a lot of time talking about sports, life, love, and family. My husband felt a pang of guilt that he'd been raised in such a large, loving, close family, while his friend lived in a home where he was treated like a second class citizen. His friend felt overworked and under-appreciated. He hadn't felt loved or a vital part of his foster family. My husband felt sure that he could make a foster experience much better for any children that we might bring into our family. When discussing such issues as race or age, Jim didn't even have a preference. We did agree on one thing. We weren't in a hurry to adopt. Because we already had two children, we were far more concerned that any children that might come to live with us, had to fit well into our family dynamics. We would rather wait a longer time to find just the right match. I hadn't known any foster children as I grew up, but I could have been one myself; so I knew how important fitting into a family could be.
I was the third of five children and the oldest girl. My mother was only 20 years old when I was born. I suppose she would have been described at that time as a blonde bombshell. She was gorgeous. However, to the same degree that she was outwardly beautiful, she was inwardly manic. Men swooned over her and when I was very small, as rumor would have it, she had a few trysts with other men. My parents separated a few times during my early childhood. When I was ten years old, I heard rumblings that our mother was having an affair with our father's best friend. Being young, I wasn't quite sure what to believe. Then my mother disappeared. She left a note saying that she could no longer deal with being a mother and had to leave for her own sanity. Everyone drew their own conclusions when she returned, many months later, with our dad's best friend. It was during her absence that I nearly became a foster child. My dad, barely 30 years old, didn't feel capable of raising a 2 year old, a 5 year old, and three more kids aged 10, 11, and 12. He considered placing all of us in foster care, but was talked out of it by caring friends and relatives who offered to help him. The courts ultimately sent my younger sisters to live with our mother, who was often demanding and unstable, screaming and acting irrational. She began drinking excessively, which increased her mania.
My middle sister, five years younger than me, was always in trouble and ran away from home starting in her early teens. As an older teen and into her adult years, she abused drugs and alcohol and had all four of her kids taken from her by social services. My sister was ultimately diagnosed with bipolar disorder. She has since completed alcohol rehabilitation and is stable on medicine. She has been successful in marriage and work for many years now. The outcome for our mother was not as successful.
Mom continued to self-medicate with alcohol and prescription drugs. She was never formally diagnosed or treated, but the signs of bipolar disorder were clear. Her mania escalated to the degree that she was not able to have a relationship with anyone. She became a total recluse of her own choosing. She died alone, as she lay in a filthy slum for two days before anyone discovered her. When she died, we didn't even know where she was. While I hadn't lived with my mother or my sister during my teen and young adult years, the mal-effect of their mental illnesses affected my life in too many negative ways. It was for these reasons that we decided to draw a firm line against accepting children with mental illness. Little did we know that caseworkers were regularly placing small children, with frontal lobe brain damage, due to severe neglect, into adoptive homes. The caseworkers failed to use foresight to educate prospective adoptive parents about what trauma could look like years later, favoring to emphasize that things would "settle down in time."
Why We Adopted Mentally Ill Kids
The short answer to the second part of the policy advisor's question was that we didn't, in fact, want to adopt kids with mental illness. That was never part of a known choice. We were told that the worst of our two adoptive sons' problems was severe neglect and once they were adopted into a permanent, loving home, they'd be "just fine." Because of mental illness experiences within my own family, it was number one on our "no" criteria. While we resigned to take children that had mild physical disorders, mental health issues were off the table. It was the one area we didn't want to contend with. It had already made my life a living hell. The fact that our adoptive children had mental illness was not a known issue at the time they came to live with us. We weren't told and we weren't given enough history to figure it out. We just didn't know.
We did, however, have other decisions to make such as what type of adoption was right for us and what adoptive criteria would yield the perfect addition to our family. First, we researched the different paths to adoption.
Adoption Decisions
Finding a child from another country and proceeding with an international adoption was on the list of possibilities. Several countries were open to American adoptions. However, international adoption would require travel out of the country, which albeit exciting, was also the most expensive option. We didn't have tens of thousands of dollars. It was out of our budget. There was private adoption, which was almost equally as expensive. Waiting lists for private adoptions are very long and we didn't feel right about taking a placement when childless parents had been waiting years for their turn at parenting. We felt as though we'd be depriving an infertile couple of the joys of parenthood. Then I read about something I'd never heard about before, "legal risk" adoption.
We selected a local private agency that had an adoption department. The nuns who worked in foster care explained the process of "legal risk" adoption to us. This was a program in which kids came into pre-adoptive homes through foster care. Caseworkers matched foster children, who were unlikely to return to their parents, with licensed foster families interested in adopting. The child avoided multiple placements in foster care. The worker didn't have to constantly move him. The family got a chance to get acquainted with the child prior to adoption. This would provide some assurance that the placement would work out. When biological parental rights were severed, the child or children could be adopted by the family who had already been caring for them. It was less traumatic for the children this way–far less traumatic than placing children with one family not interested in adoption and then moving them to an adoptive home when the children became legally free for adoption. Legal risk adoption is considered a win-win situation for everyone.
Fostering children who were likely to become free for adoption looked like the perfect solution for us. In choosing this option, we had to come to terms with the fact that, while we may have wanted the children to stay with us, there was also a risk that the best option might be for them to return home. If that happened, we'd be expected to support the decision for them to return to their birth families. This was a risk we were willing to take.
The process in completing the application for "legal risk" adoptive-foster care was a bit more involved than we anticipated. We had to take classes, fill out forms, have physicals, arrange a home inspection, and even get fingerprinted. Our other children had to complete some of these tasks as well. Other than a positive tuberculosis skin test for me, which a chest X-ray revealed was inactive; we sailed through the rest with flying colors.
The next step was for us to do mini-autobiographies and tell them as much about ourselves as we could. Then we had to fill out a stack of paperwork which would help them piece together our family dynamics and work in conjunction with our hopes and dreams. This would help them select a child who was best suited to become a member of our family.
One of the most difficult stages was to identify the types of illnesses and disorders that we were willing to accept and thought we could manage. Parents of biological children deal with whatever situations arise without thinking, because there is a biological connection and they love their children so much. Not loving a sick child isn't an option. Unlike biological connections, adoption gave us the chance to weed out the issues and conditions that scared us the most, and that we'd rather not have to deal with. I have to admit that it felt a bit liberating to have so much control. At the same time, we felt a bit uneasy about selecting a child in this manner. To some degree, it reeked of grabbing a bruised piece of produce and then putting it back on the shelf. It had an almost inhuman quality about it. At the same time, we didn't want to get in over our heads with issues we knew that were not equipped to handle. Little did we know that the control we were being given was completely illusory.
The nuns at the social service agency cautioned that if we didn't want to deal with problems, we should not continue the process. They warned us that all foster children came with a variety of different academic, behavioral, mental, and physical disorders, due to the trauma that they experienced within their birth families or within other foster families. We could expect traumatized children, but they also assured us that we'd be trained in caring for them appropriately. We had to learn about different types of abuse and how to deal with adoptive issues.
The social workers educated us about the kinds of reasons children came into foster care: neglect, physical abuse, sexual abuse, and prenatal substance abuse affect. They also counseled us about the importance of making a forever commitment to the children, emphasizing that disrupting or dissolving an adoption was a very painful experience for everyone involved. At the time, we didn't give these words of caution much credence, but they would come back to haunt us over ten years later. Many of the children we'd be asked to consider might have more than one type of abuse, possibly combined with neglect. We considered all of these very carefully and began to form an impression of the kinds of issues we thought we could manage. We also considered the potential impact these abuses might have towards our biological children.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "Second Time Foster Child"
by .
Copyright © 2012 Toni Hoy.
Excerpted by permission of Morgan James Publishing.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
Preface xiii
Acknowledgements xvii
Foreword xxiii
Foreword xxvi
Chapter 1 An Autobiographical Perspective 1
Chapter 2 Two Boys and the Importance of Permanency 12
Chapter 3 Diagnosing Trauma and Mental Illness in Chip 20
Chapter 4 Diagnosing Trauma and Mental Illness in Daniel l31
Chapter 5 The Psychiatric Revolving Door 40
Chapter 6 The Relinquishment: The Devils Dea l48
Chapter 7 Juvenile Court: The Child Abuse Lens 57
Chapter 8 Fighting Back 66
Chapter 9 Lack of Synergy 71
Chapter 10 The Juvenile Court Response 85
Chapter 11 The CASA Debacle 97
Chapter 12 Emotional Damage to the Child 110
Chapter 13 Emotional Damage to the Family Unit 121
Chapter 14 Secondary Stress: Thrice Traumatized 129
Chapter 15 The Adoptive and Safe Families Act 137
Chapter 16 Solutions 154
Chapter 17 Changing Systematic Response 164
Chapter 18 Immoral, Unethical, Acceptable 168
Chapter 19 Journey to Advocacy 174
Chapter 20 Conclusion 185
Afterword 191
References 199
Glossary 201
About the Author 207
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