When Adoption Goes Wrong

The whole story is a sad one at its best..adoption is a wonderful thing to do for a child that really needs a home and love, but the agencies and the over seas adoption agencies should by bound by law to disclose all info on the child so the parents know what they are getting in a child. Peggy should have beaten down doors to get the help she new she needed but instead turnd to drinking and then murder...who knows that child could have turned around and she would have had her happy home again!??

The whole situation is a sad one for Peggy and for the child, she may have never been able to have a wonderful life if she did live. adoption is a great thing to do, Its up to the system(s) here and abroad to give all the information about the child to the perspective parents and let there be helpl in place before signing on the dotted line.
Some children will never recover from the trauma they have suffered before being adopted and that is very sad. Its not always the environment of the adoptive home or biological home that is to blame on the behavior of the child...children are not made out of the same mold and so each are different and unique and each have their own personalities...sometime that can go in a different direction and no matter how much counceling and theropy you get the child into, they are going to be who they are. But, Peggy new something was wrong and should have done something , and now she will pay for it for the rest of her life.

Demanding a perfect child and selecting them based on their previous behaviors as described by the adoption agency is the major problem with the adoption process. Basically this is like ordering a product of E-Bay in the sense that you do not know what you are getting until it arrives. Honestly the country of origin does not matter and neither do any of the inborn traits, be they psychological or hereditary. The parent developed alcoholism as a result of the inability to cope with the surrounding environment.
No child should be put in a situation where the parent has a lack of self control and there
is no excuse for what happened. Needless to say, patience, compassion and understanding
is what would have worked in this case and if a parent does not have the ability to adhere
to these, they should not be parents. Further the fact that the parents did not go there in
person and see the child, should be ample reason for the deviation that occured later in their
lives. Seriously lack of parenting can cause any child, biological or adopted to be a delinquent.

you need to understand RAD (reactive attachment disorder). it is NOT the adoptive mother's fault the child would not attach. it is a result of being in an orphanage.

what she did is inexcusable.

but she was not responsible for the child's behaviors. it's a shame that she was not prepared, as it's fairly common. maybe if they had services in place, to teach her how to cop with the behaviors this wouldn't have happened.

or maybe it still would have, no one can say.

but when children are bounced around foster care, or different care-givers, or are raised in an orphanage environment, or severely neglected, their brain development is screwed up, and they are unable to bond or form healthy relationships with anyone.

Its not the child.Its the drunk adult. She murdered a little defenseless child. Childrenn often seek negative attention when positive attention getting fails. Go read Maslov sometime or Rudolf Driekuers or Alfred Adler.I am a reformed drunk that now works with problem children in Asia. They can turn themselves around give the proper enviroment. Its not where the child is from that matters and thats the point that Newsweek is missing. Its where that child is that does.

I am shocked by what grainofsalt had to say. Hilt put her daughter out of her misery? Are you out of your mind? The difference between adults and children are that adults have matured and learned tools to deal with their emotions. If they have not matured and learned not to react to every little thing that bothers them, then they should not be parents, either for adopted or biological kids. You need to be a very evolved person to adopt a child because it's harder to bond no matter what. No person is doomed from the start. Many people have a predisposition to mental illness but through a loving, structured and creative environment, they can really thrive. Children's brains are developing constantly. They are amazingly resilient if provided the right environment. It sounds like Hilt was abusive to her second child, so of course she did not thrive. Parents in general need to take responsibility for their children's behavior, adopted or not, and realize that usually, it is a result of their own incomplete development into responsible, loving and fulfilled adults.

I have adopted two Bio american children. This happens here too. We actually have both of them back in foster care because of their acting out on each other and our inablitlity to deal with it without therapistsssss!!! I was very into the whole adoption thing back 6 years ago but now I tell everyone who in thinking about it to be very informed!!! I went to a seminar for Bryan Post and he was wonderful with tips about attachment and how to disapline the Hurt Child.

A child is not any "better" or more "deserving" than an adult. A sociopath is a sociopath at any age. In many cases, such as when alcoholics, prostitutes or other unadjusted people unfit to be parents fail to use contraceptives or have an abortion, such children should have never been born in the first place because they were doomed from the start. I am more sad about the miserable life little Nina had than her death. Someone who is damaged beyond repair, whether by unfortunate genetics or lack of proper environment at an early age, would probably only grow up up into a full-fledged criminal. What was this horrible thing that Peggy Hild had done? She put a miserable creature out of its misery, possibly preventing it from causing more harm to more people in the future. She did far more devastating damage to herself by killing the child than to anyone else. So many people hold life as sacred, no matter what the cost, but I think that if someone brings nothing but devastation to themselves and all others around them, they are better off dead. The fact that the person in question is a child should make no difference. It's not their "fault" that they are the way they are, but that is no less true for an adult sociopath.

To zarazame: I was a "Special Needs" foster parent for 5 years. I saw the state try to get many kids adopted off their rolls by glossing over the children's problems. In nearly every case, the children end up back in foster care, more damaged by th failed adoption. The adoptive parents end up broke, devastated, made to feel like failures by social workers, and in many cases, divorced. We had a child in our home the state was trying to convince us to adopt. In the year that she lived in our home, several social workers tried to convince us that we were blowing the child's behaviors and issues out of proportion. She wasn't really that bad. We were stressed over my husband's work or my dad's illness and that made us see her as worse than she really was. She would be just fine with love and patience. Her bowel incontinence and frequent urinary infections were because she was scared of losing us. When attending a court hearing to try to stop the visitation of her parents who were documented abusing her at a supervised visitation (!) we learned that the child had been so badly sexually abused that she had required recontructive surgery and her physical problems were directly related. We learned that she had been removed from the home at the age of 5, unable to speak, unable to walk, still sleeping in a crib and still drinking bottles due to extreme neglect. And the state had been involved with the family for three years monitoring her older brother before anyone realized that there might be something wrong with the fact that a five year old didn't walk or speak! Even after we found all this out, we were unable to convince the state to get this child real help. Two weeks later, when she was trying to hit another child with a baseball bat and telling him that she wanted to stomp on his brains when she beat them out of his head, we had her removed from our home. Six months later, she was the featured child on Dave Thomas' adoption website, telling how sweet, loving, and adorable she was.

The problem is that these children are not only foreign adoptees. I was a "Special Needs" foster parent for 5 years. Only one child I ever had was in the special needs program due to birth defects, and one was there due to permanent disabilities received from an accident. The others were all in the program due to abuse by their parents. Some had physical issues, but all had emotional and psychological issues. Several times the state tried to get children adopted out by glossing over their problems, and nearly every time, the children ended up back in the program, even more damaged by the failed adoption. No real efforts were made to help these children, just move them from place to place whenever necessary, and then put them on the streets when they turn 18. In many cases the birth parents were allowed to continue contact with the children, even in cases where there was documented abuse occuring during the visits. My worst case was a 9 year old boy who went from being the size of a 5 year old and failing his grade when he came to live with me to being an average sized 13 year old making straight As. The state decided that since he was doing so well, he could go back to his father. He cried and begged not to go, saying that he would end up in prison if he went back. Today he is in prison for first degree murder. His father and stepmother were accessories to the crime.