How many bioparents cause trouble after the adoption

a shortened version of our story: Bubba and Flowergirl came when they were 4 and 2. change of goal happened at 11 months, TPR occurred at 17 months. dad relinquished in the courtroom and mom who wanted the trial by jury had her rights terminated. the judge put a no contact order on the family members who were significant in the case. we adopted right at the 22 month date. they've been ours now for almost 5 years. about 2 years ago, mom started contacting us. she is out of state now. she called and i blocked her number. she sent 2 sets of letters and then nothing until a couple of months ago--actually right at the TPR anniversary. then i received 2 more sets of cards and letters. i wonder when the next stuff will arrive. causing trouble? not really--just having a hard time understanding that the kids are no longer hers. by her own admission, she tells people that her kids are in care and will be coming home. in the last letter to me, she told me she now has a 3 bedroom place so the kids will be okay when they come home. does she have the potential to cause trouble? yes. she's violated the no contact order 5 times without consequence because, really, no one is going to drive half-way across the country to talk to her about it. she still comes back here from time to time though. the police are aware of the situation. we've been told that they'll come immediately if we can detain her long enough for them to arrive--she's broken her probation by leaving the state so many years back. worry? no. i refuse to spend my life wasting my joy on worrying on what might happen. i'm taking Scarlett O'Hara's approach--i'll worry about it tomorrow, or in this case, if it happens. we can choose to live our lives by the what-ifs or we can follow our hearts and do what we love. it's very freeing.

My advice - be honest with your kids. ALWAYS. Don't sugar coat the truth, or expand on it either. Keep every piece of paper, email, letter and related information about your case. My kids (adopted at 3 and 4) are very interested in their files - starting at about age 16. They want to see the letters back and forth, emails, their evaluations, visit notes etc. Allow contact when it is safe. Is it hard? Yes of course. BUT not allowing contact often means adopted children and teens harbour fantasies about what their first families were really like, or the reasons they were taken. Contact over the years with addicted and dysfunctional people can be hard -- but it is also very REAL. Real issues, real problems make it easier for kids to deal with their life history. Your kids are going to love their (either real or idealized) birth family no matter what - they are part of their history, and part of their genes, part of their smile and their talents and to love themselves they have to at least their birth parents had some redeeming qualities. You have to be the trustworthy foundation that those relationships get built on. Are your teens going to scream that they hate you and that you aren't their real mother/father anyways? Yep. But if you have built the bonds of attachment, been safe, secure and ALWAYS honest with them, you will survive those years relationship in tact.

My advice - be honest with your kids. ALWAYS. Don't sugar coat the truth, or expand on it either. Keep every piece of paper, email, letter and related information about your case. My kids (adopted at 3 and 4) are very interested in their files - starting at about age 16. They want to see the letters back and forth, emails, their evaluations, visit notes etc. Allow contact when it is safe. Is it hard? Yes of course. BUT not allowing contact often means adopted children and teens harbour fantasies about what their first families were really like, or the reasons they were taken. Contact over the years with addicted and dysfunctional people can be hard -- but it is also very REAL. Real issues, real problems make it easier for kids to deal with their life history. Your kids are going to love their (either real or idealized) birth family no matter what - they are part of their history, and part of their genes, part of their smile and their talents and to love themselves they have to at least their birth parents had some redeeming qualities. You have to be the trustworthy foundation that those relationships get built on. Are your teens going to scream that they hate you and that you aren't their real mother/father anyways? Yep. But if you have built the bonds of attachment, been safe, secure and ALWAYS honest with them, you will survive those years relationship in tact.

Greenrobin, I agree and life is too short to waste time worrying about what will happen. But I do want to prepare myself for what I'm getting myself into. I guess I envisioned that things would be far more black and white with kids in care because their parent(s) were very clearly abusive, abandoned them or were unable to care for them. But the cases so far I have been involved with have been much more in the gray area. Biomom of my first FD was given essentially 3 years to get clean. In some areas, her rights would have been terminated rather than being given another chance. Probably if we were in Texas, we would have adopted her. It seems easier to explain to a child that we adopt that their parents couldn't care for them or keep them safe when things are black and white. But when that's all based on what one judge decides and a judge in another area would decide something different... What bothers me too is to say that their parent(s) really wanted them but a judge decided that they should live with us. I was adopted privately as infant so I can relate a little. I met my birthmom at 19. She told me she regretted giving me up and that she only did it because of pressure from her boyfriend and family. It took me some time to process that but I think it did help because it made me feel less like "my birthmom didn't want me" that some adoptees feel. When the 16 year old was here, she used to complain that the only reason she and her siblings were in care was because of poverty. There is an considerable income difference between us and them. Biodad's lawyer hadn't shown up for many of his court appearance. Hopefully if we do adopt, things will be more straight forward and black and white. I would just hate to have to answer questions about things like that to our adopted child

I am dealing with 3 different sets of birth parents post adoption, and none of them have ever shown up at my house or called me when they weren't supposed to. I can barely get most of them to write a card/letter or send pictures. My experience, and the experiences of many friends who have adopted through foster care is that birth parents have other issues going on, and it makes it so that they either aren't interested in contact, or they can't seem to make it enough of a priority for it to actually happen. Definitely not something I would worry about prior to adopting. Although, mine were all infants when they came to me. I do wonder if it would be different if the bp had more of a bond with the child before they came into care.

I adopted my 3 as teens. When I met them they all had 100% locked in plans to go live with their mom at 18. None did. They rarely talk to her. She has never sent a card, present or come to see them in 7 years. At this point they get it...and they aren't interested in living like animals in an abandoned house with no utilities.

So far, in our close knit FP community, I have yet to hear about serious issues with BPs post adoption. I have a FP friend who has a baby TPR occurred on back in February. In that case, the aunt who decided not to come forward until 8 months in the case has caused a little bit of a stink, but nothing like showing up at her home, sending letters or calling her all the time. In our case with the boys, I totally expect biomom to try to call after TPR (the trial is next week) and ask for visits and to talk to the boys on the phone. However, even with her lengthy criminal and violent history, I do not expect her to show up at the house....or at least I'm not going to waste my energy over-worrying about it. We will just be conscience of it and take necessary precautions, ie. make sure doors are locked at night, etc. Nothing different than we do now.

I think when the child turn 18 years old. The parents might feel they can legally see their kid. I know my mom kept calling, until foster mother died. I'm sure she would have done the same thing, if I was adopted. She actually kept calling before I turned 18 years old. After foster mom died, I felt I could finally see my parents, without foster mother getting mad and telling everyone how ungrateful I was. That she took care of me all those years. My parent were non violent, so that wasn't an issue. My adopted brother mom still seen him every once in awhile. I think she was a bad influence. But I think he was able to be happy about being adopted. So maybe the few times she seen him helped. I think if the bios are bad, you might have change numbers and address, but I think in most cases, the leave the kids alone.

I love the first 2 comments!! We haven't had an issue with bp's but we chose to keep contact with one bgrandparent and she has overstepped her bounds a few times. She is not dangerous or anything it just creates ugh feelings when she doesn't stick to what we've agreed on and we were VERY reasonable.

This is really true. The parents had issues that brought the kids into care. They were offered the resources needed to work a caseplan but many are not able to complete one. It isn't that they don't care enough, they get sidetracked by other issues. For some reason, many birth parents do not use privacy settings on facebook. We checked the birthparents pages, from time to time, and recently found out birthmom had passed away, from the birthdad's page. It is really sad but there is probably a greater possibility of something like that happening then the possibility of a birthparent showing up unannounced at your home.

I think this last bit is telling for many of our kids. The truth is that very few heroin addicts make it to 40. The rehab rate is very low for long-time users. They then end up either OD'ing or dying from other drug related issues. BE's brothers' bio dad just passed away last month. There was no obvious cause and I don't want to ask the grandma if she has found out, but I'd guess it was heart failure. He, like the bio mom, is greater than 10 year addict. So, either he OD'd and his roommates cleaned up signs of that, or his body gave out from the addiction. So, I will be very surprised if bio parents from either of my kids will be alive when they turn 18. I am on the "let the kids know the true bio parent" side though. I got so excited the other day when I found a picture of Chubbs' bio mom on FB. She isn't on FB but a friend tagged her anyway and somehow the FB search found it. She looked good. I was excited because I finally have a photo of her that is not a strung-out mugshot. Now, her and bio dad just got arrested again a few counties over, but I am not sure if it was drug related or not. It was thievery, but sadly, it is very hard for these folks to get gainful employment so they may have just been stealing to survive. I want to believe that. But, I don't know what would keep them going having lost 5 kids. The bio dad DOES have a FB page and he still lists every single child on there. What is amusing about that is he never even met Chubbs. He wasn't in hospital with bio mom and they abandoned him at the hospital. He has seen baby pic courtesy of me but I have never even met either of them. Now, contrast THAT case with BE's bio mom. Now, if we get to adoption, his family will stay involved but I will have to set stronger rules. But, they are pretty agreeable anyway. Bio mom is not involved much with any of them either. And, his older brothers will be able to share plenty of stories about the true bio mom that I am not too worried about allegiance there. I'll end my tomb with the this, I think it is NORMAL for our kids to want to meet their birth parents. I found out at age 12 that my "grandma" was not my grandma. Ever since that day, despite the fact that this woman abandoned my mom and her 4 year old sister when my mom was 2, I have wanted to meet this woman. For me, it goes deeper. I come from a very dysfunctional family, and pretty bad mother. But, I am not like any of them. So yeah, I built up a fantasy of this woman myself. It was easier for me to believe that she left the family for her own safety than to believe that any woman could just abandon her own children. But, she never had children again after that so it really makes me think she just didn't want them. And, well, like mother like daughter, sadly. I'd like to add, I know a ton of families whose kids kicked off from home and never came back or rarely came back, once they turned 18. Some did it for adventure, some did it because they didn't want to be with the family anymore. And these are kids in seemingly "ok" families. So, I think that is a risk for any parent, not just us foster/adoptive parents.

I can't speak for the adoption side of things yet, but I don't see how it would be considered "weird" for a parent to walk away from their child whether voluntarily or not...unfortunately it happens in divorces, or boyfriend/girlfriend cases where they break up. There are plenty of children who are not part of the system that have no idea who their father or mother is, because that parent voluntarily walked away. That isn't unique to foster care. I too felt going into foster care that I would think most bios were terrible people, and had the assumption that most of the "crimes" were against the children themselves. Obviously, I've since learned that it is more often than not drugs, mental illness, homelessness, pretty much anything but direct abuse of some sort to the children. A lot if not most of these parents love their children, in their own way, and most don't voluntarily give them up, unless they have a mature attitude of knowing their own limits. I agree that it makes the issue of adoption harder...I know for our current case if it were to go to adoption and the mother were to really fight it, it would be hard. I know the mom well enough and like her, although I don't think she can parent. It would be hard to explain in the future that both his mom and grandma really wanted him, but a judge decided they couldn't have him.

We had an issue recently, we are almost a year post-adoption. They wanted me to co-sign on a car for them. When I said no, mainly because their last vehicle was repossessed just months prior, all hell broke loose. They wanted the baby back, they claimed they were coming to take her from our home, threw around lots of insults...it ended very simply with a phone call to the police and a restraining order. Hopefully things will change in the future but for now, we are setting firm boundaries. I would eat glass for breakfast every morning to be this girl's mama. Sorting through a challenging birth family relationship is not an issue.

Thanks for the feedback everyone! I was wondering, perhaps bios being involved (or obsessed enough) with their kids that that does factor into whether parental rights are terminated? Even if the bios aren't working their case plans or are still very much addicted to drugs like in the case of my first FD. The kids deserve permanency, but perhaps not at the risk that their bios will become stalkers or that they will be told they were taken away from their bioparents without giving them a fair chance? If that's true, it's sad for the kids. I understand now how different my life would have been if my birth mom had kept me and I grew up in a dysfunctional family. I don't think any of the bioparents have done enough to prove that they could adequately care for their kids to get them back and that my first FD, Lucy and Linus would be so much better off growing up with us than the life they will experience with their bioparents.