Adoption is not working out. How to terminate/disrupt the adoption.

First of all I want to say that I am so sorry to hear that you and your family is going through this! How old is she and how long has the adoption been finalized? My first thought is has the State offered any services to help wrap around services in home therapy etc? IF you have not tried these services I would contact your worker (adoption) and explain that you need help with her! Our 9 yr old that we are getting ready to adopt was disrupted/dissolved in her previous adoptive home. We are having no problems with her currently! Trust me though its not always easy and great! I know her previous adoptive parents had a very difficult time with there decision and are still experiencing grief and loss. Do you utilize respite for her sometimes that can help tremendously? I would suggest to contact the lawyer that finalized the adoption or a lawyer prior to contacting the agency or State. I am guessing he is going to suggest or contact the State or Agency to begin petitions to dissolve/disrupt the adoption. Best of luck to you and your family during this difficult time! Please feel free to message me if you need anything or additional support/advice.:grouphug:

How long has she been with you?Has she been in therapy for any of her issues? Were you aware before you adopted her that she had issues? February is really not very long since finalization for a child to get used to being in a permanent situation. It will be damaging for her to be removed from your family at this time. Are the 3 girls siblings? Will you be separating siblings then? Or did you adopt 3 unrelated children?

it is possible this child is deliberately trying to sabotage her placement. This type of behavior is not uncommon with older children, especially those who have been in a few homes previously. They test you to see what they can get away with, how far they can push you until you throw in the towel---then when you do throw in the towel they can say-'see I knew they weren't for real'. If the group was just placed in Feb it has only been 3 months since placement. My experience has been that it takes much longer than that amount of time for kids to adjust to rules, a new home and new expectations. Are the kids in therapy to deal with separation and loss, not just from family but from previous placements? For a child who has been with a family for some time to be moved to a new home is a loss, even if they knew the placement was meant to be temporary. Some kids think that if they are 'bad enough' that they get sent away from every home they are placed in, caseworkers will give up and send them back to their bio parents. My two boys thought that. They also thought if they were 'bad' and got arrested they would go to jail---and their mother was in jail, so jail to them was not a bad place to go if mom was there and they could be with her. My advice is to use the agency to help get counseling set up if you don't already have it in place. I would suggest both individual counseling for the specific child and family counseling with the entire household unit. Look for support groups for foster/adoptive parents and participate in them. Many of the support groups have a sitter present with the kids while the parents are meeting. It would do the kids good to see other kids who are in the same situation they are so they will know that they are not alone. They may meet some friends along the way. Kids are always testing boundaries so a big thing is going to be making sure you are always consistent and stick to your guns as far as rules and expectations and consequences too. I wish you well

Others have already said some of what I was thinking. These children are still adapting. This particular child may need extra help adapting. I also can't help wondering this: What would you do if this was your biological child? I feel for this girl. She's already lost her first family. Since she's older, she may well have been in many foster homes. It's been hypothesized, and I tend to agree, that sometimes older adoptees will test their new families to see if the families will actually be forever.

I was looking at your previous post from last year. It looks like you've had these kids less than a year. You knew they needed therapy for a number of issues. You brought them cross country from Utah to NC. I hope you got them in therapy. If so, I wonder what the therapist says? But since you are asking us, it makes me think that maybe they aren't getting treatment. These kids are dealing with a lot. They've not only lost their family, but every thing that was familiar. I lived in SLC for 7 years. It's a different culture that permeates everything in society. Even if you aren't mormon, or if you're a jack mormon, the mormon religion affects you there. Just like anywhere that one religion is dominate over all others in participation - the political power is in the hands of members of that religion which influences policy, schools, etc; it affects the social structure, you're an outsider if you aren't part of that dominant religion, etc. I've talked to many mormons and life as a mormon elsewhere is a lot different than life as a mormon in Ut. So even if you are mormon, you've moved them to a new social construct. Even if they weren't actively being raised mormon, that's true. Take my word for it.Add to that, that you and your wife are basically strangers. So now, they are living in a different place - the trees, the landscape, the climate even is drastically different, and they are with people they don't know. That's huge for kids and each kid will handle it different. Some are people pleasers and will do anything to please the new home so they are liked and kept. Some will be like me - I have trust and abandonment issues. I tend to sabatoge relationships. I withdraw emotionally from them in order to protect myself from hurt when the person leaves. It becomes a self fulfilling prophecy.I feel for this child that you have already given up on. Have you stopped to ask yourself why she's stealing? I'm guessing here, that maybe she's never really had anything of her own that was hers and was respected as hers. That makes it hard to respect the belongings of others. But even more important than that is that her actions are filling a need she has. What is that need? If you can identify that, you can help her. Punishment won't work in this situation it will just make it worse. You have to figure out the why. I'm guessing again that a lot of it is due to insecurity. And I'm wondering why you have locked cabinets in your home that she's stealing out of? It sends a message to me of distrust. And while I get some of why you don't trust right now, your lack of trust in her actually is exacerbating the problem. I would bet she doesn't trust you either. I know I've rambled a bit here, but I woke up thinking about her, worried about what is going to happen to her. Moving her to a new family is just going to make her issues worse.You made a commitment to her. Get her help instead of kicking her out (which is how it will look to her if you move her to another family).

First, I should have added in my original post that she has been in therapy since they were placed with us in June 2013. They see the therapist 2 times a week but we are now bumping it up to 3 times a week as her behaviour is getting worse, she is stealing at school, being disrepectful to her teachers and other authority figures. We have even had the DARE officer come out to the house to talk to the girls about stealing, lying and being disprectful to authority figures. We knew she had issues before, but these issues have just recently started since the adoption has become finalized and it seems that they are getting worse. @dmariehill, we have asked ourselves why she is stealing, the therapist have also been working with her on the stealing and her behaviors but it is getting worse. We told her when she stole the gift that belonged to one of the her teachers that if the school wanted to they could expel her, call the police on her but they wanted to work with her and get rid of the behaviors. This is the story of the locked cabinets. The cabinets were not locked when we they were placed with us last June. We began to notice that food was missing out of the cabinet and then we began to find food and candy wrappers/containers under her bed, between the mattresses, shoved in the back of her closet and in her school backpack. We discoverd that she was coming down at night and gourging on food. She was also digging through the trashcan as we threw out leftover Halloween candy and put it at the bottom of the trashcan and covered it with other stuff and we found the bag it was in up in her room a few days later and she did not see us put in in the trashcan. She is predispositioned for diabetes as her twin who was adopted in Utah already has diabetes and her paternal grandmother died from diabetes, so we limit the amount of sweets/carbs they have. After talking with the therapist, her doctor and the med management physician (she had gained 12+lbs in a month), it was decided that we should lock the cabinets so that she would not be coming down at night and gourging herself on food. We keep healthy snacks out for them to have like fruit and vegetables. She has been known to test the cabinets, she recently took a opened can of frosting (as my wife made a cake a couple of weeks ago as part of a celebration for the girls) out of the refrigerator and hid behind some stuff in the dining room. We only found it because we were looking for something and checked there and found it hid, God knows how long it had been there. We found the spoon that she had been eating it with stuffed in her backpack. When confronted she denies everything.

Can't imagine why she is having issues - what's the big deal loosing the twin you grew in the same womb with. Was she an identical twin? If not, she does only has the same risk factor as a sibling, not a twin. Have you ever considered that she doesn't see stealing as wrong because she feels like she was stolen and that was fine - so why can't she do it too? She might see it as you did it to her yet you tell her she can't? You know, the best way to not have issues with her eating sweets is not to have any junk in the house. It really is possible to only eat healthy, and if you do splurge once in a while - get rid of all the ingredients as soon as it is done. (I grew up in the above type of environment so it is very possible to do) Her adoption means there is no going back, it's done. It's a trigger, a huge trigger considering before that - there was a chance...start thinking about it from the point of a scared little girl who has lost everything in a short amount of time. Kind regards, Dickons

How devastating for her. She not only lost her first family, but she also lost her twin.Do you know what her life was like before you got her? One of my cousins who was adopted used to sneak food, too. Why? He was fearful of not having food. So, when he had it, he would gorge on it.... Not saying that is the case, but it is a possibility.Are your children working with a therapist who is knowledgeable about adoption issues? They need someone who understands adoptees.Also, dmariehill is right on point about Utah. I lived their for two years. It was like being in a foreign country without leaving the US. It was a great experience for me, but it was a huge culture shock.... So, your children most likely feel like they've moved to another country.

Double post . . . Are you ever going to fix this problem, Adoption.com?

We are in the process of fixing it now, but in the mean time if you use the post reply button instead of the quick reply it will not result in a double post.

Thank you. I know that. But, it's habit, so I sometimes hit that button that used to work under the old ownership.

I also hide sugary food and for the same reason. I monitor the usage. I've also had disrespect, stealing and food gouging. What kind of therapy is she in? I highly recommend EMDR. It doesn't work overnight but it's worked wonders for my youngest. The food gouging will stop when she feels she will always have food. My oldest went hungry with his bio mom and he would gorge. I couldn't empathize because I never went hungry as a child.

As a someone who has had great issues with insecurity, fear of abandonment, anger, even attachment/commitment , it seems to be from the outside looking in that your daughter is dealing with a lot of trauma, she's feeling lost and insecure and probably doesn't trust anyone currently in her life enough to be able to express what she's feeling.I have a very hard time with someone referring to a child taking food in their own house as stealing. The food belongs to the family. At best, she's taking it at inappropriate times or against your wishes. But it belongs to the family, it's not stealing. I agree with Millie that the food gouging/hoarding etc will stop once she feels secure. Hiding food from her, locking it up, acting like she's bad to take it - all these things increase her feeling of insecurity. Punishment doesn't help.This is a child who has had a lot of trauma so far in her life, and the fact that she's a twin and no longer with her twin is a big deal. If things are getting worse instead of better, maybe it's time to consider a new therapist, a different way of thinking.I can tell you are frustrated and overwhelmed. But the problems you're describing are overcomeable and this child deserves to have more help and to have more commitment from the family that promised to care for her. Try not projecting your thoughts onto her motives. It's easy to look at behavior and decide it's deliberate, that it's manipulative or intending to inflict harm. Step back if you can and instead see it as a desperate child trying to find some way to control her environment, some way to feel some semblence of security and normality in a world that seems crazy to her, a child who might be building walls to keep you out so that you can't hurt her like other adults have in her life. She's wounded right now and she doesn't have the tools to deal with it. Honestly, a year isn't that long with the laundry list of issues that were in your first post.

Speaking Foster/Adoptive Mom to Foster/Adoptive Mom I can tell you that these behaviors are very normal and common for a child who's been in care. I'm surprised your foster parenting classes didn't discuss this in depth it was a main topic of our classes for weeks. I know it's hard, its hard living and raising a traumatized child even after a year when they feel like yours. You do need to remember they had another family at one time and this loss isn't something they just over in a year. Dickons is right - If she can't have the junk foods don't have them in the house. If I do something for a special occasion it's all gone by that same evening. So I'd eliminate the (strong) sweets. I know it seems overwhelming just take some time to really reflect and even though the behaviors are getting worse right now with time that to shall pass. I'm not sure you can "disrupt" and adoption once it's finalized. You pretty much have to find a home for your child now. She's not in care anymore so your not "disrupting" your re-homing. You've made the commitment to these children and as an adoptive parent I can say no matter how bad it gets I'll never turn my back on my kids. I said that they were mine and it's my job to prove it. That doesn't mean I don't sympathize with you. I wish you and these girls all the best.