The blessing of adoption

Tina Thompson was 8 years old when she first met her parents.

Wearing a dirty, ratty coat that she refused to take off, she walked into a restaurant ready to visit a new family that might adopt her. She ended up spending the night with them—and never left.

Her new father drove to her foster home to collect her belongings: a grocery bag of dirty clothes and a teddy bear. Tina’s long struggle to find a loving home was over.

Born in Feather Falls, Tina spent the first few years of her life surrounded by drugs and abuse. Her biological mother suffered from paranoid schizophrenia and her stepfather was very abusive. She has never met her father.

When Tina was 5, Butte County Child Protective Services came to the house and took her and her sister, Rosie, into custody. The girls lived in seven different foster homes before they were separated when Tina was 7 and Rosie was just 3.

Thompson is now a 32-year-old married mother, one who speaks proudly about her experience as an adopted child. She represents just one of the approximately 150 adoptions that take place every year through the California Department of Social Services Adoption District Offices.

November is National Adoption Awareness Month, which is one of the reasons Thompson is telling her story. Since 1990, November has been a time to raise awareness about children waiting to be adopted, much as Tina and Rosie were 25 years ago.

If your image of adoption is of a loving couple taking home a new baby, you haven’t been following changing adoption trends in the past 25 years or so, said Patty Conlin, a CDSS adoption worker.

In previous years, there were indeed more infants than older children waiting to be adopted, but that’s no longer the case. Today there are few babies available for adoption—which partly explains the popularity of overseas baby adoptions—but plenty of older children, far more than the number of available homes.

This shift has occurred because of a combination of factors. Improvements in the quality and availability of sex education, as well as the increase in the amount and availability of birth control, has resulted in a decrease in the number of teenagers giving birth, Conlin said.

At the same time, the increase in drug use, specifically methamphetamine, has resulted in more and more children being taken into custody at older ages, she added.

Children with special needs also represent a large percentage of those waiting to be adopted. CDSS deals mostly with “special needs” adoptions, which include children over the age of 3, children with siblings or handicaps, and ethnic minorities. These are often children that need support the most, Conlin said.

The problem is that there are simply too many children and not enough adoptive families. Currently, CDSS has around 500 children waiting to be adopted, with far fewer people wishing to adopt.

The need for children to be placed in permanent, adoptive families is vital, Thompson and Conlin both said.

“It’s really important for children to feel loved,” Thompson explained. “You need to feel that you belong in a family that loves you and supports you.”

When children live in foster care for extended periods, the effects are often damaging. Fundamentally, there is no security; as much as many foster parents do their best to be loving and supportive, their relationship with the children is conditional. If it doesn’t work out, the kids are moved to another foster home.

“Studies show that children raised in foster homes are less likely to go college and more likely to be homeless and jobless,” Conlin said.

When children are moved from home to home throughout their childhood and then become legal adults at the age of 18, they often don’t have stable families or homes to return to, she added.

Adoption, of course, is permanent—an unconditional commitment.

Recognizing the value of adoption, the government has gone so far as to dedicate more funding to families who adopt children aged 9 or older, and who have been in foster care for at least 18 months.

Thompson described her experience in foster homes as “fine” until the very last home she was placed in, at the age of 7, where the parents beat the other foster children on a daily basis.

“I remember digging through the garbage because she wouldn’t feed us,” she said. “She’d lock us outside and wouldn’t let us in until bedtime.”

This kind of treatment deeply affects many children, and it’s important to keep in mind that these children do have a past, said Tina’s mom, Lauri Thompson.

Tina’s parents continuously offered to help her find her sister, who was adopted separately, and get in touch with her mother, and they assured her that they were there to talk. “They were so supportive,” Tina said. “They went through a lot.”

Tina quickly connected with her new family. Her mother, her father, Stan, and her new younger brother, Adam, bonded instantly, she said.

However, when she turned 14, demons from the past surfaced, and she began acting out. After she was suspended from Pleasant Valley High School, her parents took out a second mortgage on their home to send her to a two-year program at Cascade, an expensive boarding school above Redding.

“I fought it every step of the way,” Thompson said. “But it was one of the best experiences.”

Though she learned a lot, when she returned home Tina ran away and was on the streets of Sacramento for two weeks. Her parents decided something else had to be done. They sent her to a six-week-long pathfinder wilderness camp. It changed her life, she said.

The family also received counseling and support through CDSS, which aided Tina in her transition and helped her parents through these rough patches.

Thompson has since reunited with Rosie, who was a bridesmaid in Tina’s wedding last July. She’s also studying to become a wilderness counselor.

“My parents saved my life, and they are my angels,” she said. “I really believe that if it weren’t for them, I’d be dead.”