Folks, I’m one week into summer, and I have some thoughts. First of all, for all the teachers and parents who made it: HALLELUYER. For those of you with four days or two weeks left, may the Lord’s face shine upon you. We are on the other side, lighting candles for you. Godspeed.

Second, some readers struggle with satire; it is lost on you. I get it. We aren’t all fluent in sarcasm. Example: a district employee where my cherubs attend read my last post, dashed to her principal with the truly horrific discovery that I was only educating two of my five children, and lamented, “Something has to be done!” So for you, I’ll include [[non-sarcastic parenthetical notes]] so you can stop holding prayer vigils for my family.
 
I, like most of you I suspect, approach summer with equal parts delight and dread. Delight, because NO HOMEWORK FOLDERS. We’re all chilling out! We’re so chill! We’ve got our kids to ourselves and no one is our boss! And of course, no pre-dawn wake up calls to hasten the moment when some kid is all I can’t find my shoes and Did you sign my reading log and Where is my library book and Jessica’s mom eats lunch with her every Tuesday and Thursday. (Well, Jessica’s mom also cried when she went to kindergarten, and my friends and me went to brunch, so...)
 
[[I actually LOVE to eat lunch with my kids two days a week, which equals about 80 days of the school year in which the first kid’s lunch starts at 10:50 and the last kid’s lunch ends at 1:10, so let’s see, I’ve been at school two-and-a-half hours in the middle of my work day (twice a week) dodging the petrifying cafeteria monitor and pretending Brandon packed lunches because I would *never* send Pringles and a tortilla slathered with Nutella. We are legit, me and Jessica’s mom.]]

^ That was my attempt at "non-sarcastic" and I'm going to go ahead and give it a D-.
 
But there is also a teeny bit of dread, because here they all are. Every day. Up in my grill. Even on my best days, we spearhead a cooking project together, finish a craft, take a bike ride, and go swimming, and that gets us to 1:35pm. It’s like time stands still, and plus, the sun goes down at approximately 11:20pm, so it can feel like the summer solstice of doom.

I’ll be honest: I’m pretty decent at the big activities, but the filler stuff that gets us to bedtime isn’t my jam.
 
Remy: “Mommy? Can you play beauty shop with me?”
Me:     “Oh, I would, but I can’t.”
Remy: “Why not?”
Me:      “Because I don’t want to.”
 
[[Never fear. I totally love playing kid stuff with my kids. I find Legos riveting. You should see my towers. So straight. So towering. Absolutely no dimension or visual interest. This never, ever gets old. In fact, I play Legos by myself when the kids are gone.]]
 
This can backfire. For instance, say your sons decide to fill the unstructured time themselves, and you say sure, whatever, just whatever takes up another hour, and they fill a giant, inflatable punching balloon with water in the upstairs bathroom, and since the hours are infinity, you say fine, but the next thing you know, five gallons of water is pouring through your downstairs light fixture, seeping through the floor, because evidently water balloons eventually break. When the husband has a coronary and asks WHO LET THEM DO THIS, you work up a tear about staying home all summer while he works in his quiet office, and he backs off because he doesn’t want his solitude screwed with.
 
[[Disregard this. I carefully supervise every single moment of summer, and there is never a moment where I can only account for three kids.]]

I’ve culled a few structural ideas for us Mediocre Mamas who want this season to be fun and memorable, but we also live in the real world where not every solitary day is pinnable (thank you for these shame-based new verbs, Pinterest). Nor can we afford to take five kids to water parks each day, because Brandon is a pastor and I am a writer; two professions noted for wealth building, except not that.
 
There are loose structures, because for me, complicated systems are basically an invitation to fail more. I can handle one really cool fun thing a week. That is the outer limits of my capabilities, and just whatever about it.
 
So we are enjoying our third summer of “Mystery Thursdays.” The kids know every Thursday we go somewhere neat, and it is a surprise: floating the river, going to the lake, daytime movie and a picnic (a bunch of theaters show free kid movies all summer), swimming at Barton Springs so my kids might see an old, naked person (Austin keeps it weird, folks), paddle boarding, Schlitterbaun, anything that shakes it up. Some of these are free, some really inexpensive, some super pricey, but after fifteen summers as a parent, I’ve calculated the value of keeping us occupied and the summer moving along, and I am willing to pay 17 million dollars.
 
[[Of course I don’t really think we can buy our kids’ happiness and our personal sanity. I also philosophically reject babysitters, house help, date nights, a hefty book budget, movies on demand, DVD player in the car, and all forms of child bribery incentives.]]
 
With average success, we carve out an hour of Room Time every afternoon. Theoretically, the kids are supposed to read, and some do. Others probably do something involving a controller, but Mama needs the Hour of Peace and I don’t even care. This will technically fulfill the Summer Reading Program I agreed to at the end of school because I was just trying to get out the door. On the fifth hour of summer, Remy gasps: “MOMMY!! WE HAVEN’T STARTED OUR READING LOG!!!” and I think I had a stroke; I smelled burnt toast. So 1.) Room Time for reading, 2.) log your own hours, and 3.) I’ll sign them the morning of August 26th as you’re heading back to school.
 
[[Don’t spaz over reading minutes. WE LOVE TO READ. I’ll remind you I am a writer and place a stout premium on the written word. But when we have to do it and log it and sign it and turn it in, it’s like the difference between running for fun and running from a murderer. I’m totally kidding. I have no idea what ‘running for fun’ means.]]

Everyone still has a daily chore, which marks the end of Room Time. At first I said, “You have a chore a day. You can finish it whenever you want.” And the children did. Interestingly, whenever they wanted turned out to be never. They never wanted to finish a chore actually, which is shocking because they obviously care so much about cleanliness and order. Opposite Day! So Room Time ends with Chore Time, and I hope you are starting to get the picture of this Hatmaker Summer Party.
 
Then we brainstormed a list of filler activities instead of risking their lives by saying I’m bored: ride bike, rollerblade, basketball, four-square, Rip Stick, board games (or as I like to call them, Bored Games, because Monopoly is like a very slow and horrible way to die), arts and crafts, iStation (a cool online reading program our school hooked us up with), trampoline, friends, make a movie/video, iPad apps, build something, write and illustrate a book, Legos/Bionicles (my 15-year-old begrudgingly “helped” the younger boys "for a minute" and I discovered his complicated architectural war-scape five hours later), Spa Day, or any of the zillion games we have for the Wii, Xbox, and Kinect. Swimming at our neighborhood pool is in regular rotation too, as these homeowners’ fees better go toward something other than watering demerits and hate mail about our fence.
 
Therapists say healthy people have boundaries, so I set some. Kids, things I am not in charge of this summer:

• Breakfast.
• Lunch is a crapshoot.
• Figuring our your snacks. You know where the kitchen is.
• Entertaining you.
• Solving all your problems.
• Enduring fighting. You fight, the thing is gone, good times are over.
• Being your cruise ship director. 

I will stock the kitchen with the goods, so if you ask me what’s for breakfast, I’m going to show you my coffee mug and give you a blank look. I taught you how to make eggs and smoothies and breakfast sandwiches and oatmeal, and I’m sad to admit this, but there is the cereal. Enjoy your chemical concoction, a nutritional hypocrisy I’m comfortable with.  
 
Last, Mamas and Daddies, do not forget to get away from the darlings periodically and do something together. As Remy says, “Sometimes I just need to be by my lone.” Summer contains some of our best family memories, but after *a lot of togetherness* it’s good to have a breather. Do what you gotta do: pay a babysitter, trade free child care with another friend, put the littles in day camp one week, trade time off with your spouse, ask Grandma/Aunt/Sister to take them for an evening, trade sleepovers with your kids’ friends (we once engineered all five kids at sleepovers on the same night, and I turned instantly Pentecostal, waving my praise flags and I’m pretty sure I spoke in tongues).
 
Our plan is to keep it light and keep it fun. It’s so nice to enjoy my kids outside the rigors of school for awhile. For me, structure summer too much and all the joy is gone; structure it too little and I will lose my crap. There is a sweet spot somewhere in the middle where we balance resting and playing, chilling out and going out, staying at home and hitting the highway.

When I remember I only have three more summers with my oldest, everything suddenly comes into clear focus, and I realize what Bo and Hope and Stefano have always known: these are the days of our lives. May they be filled with laughter and cannonballs and good books and grilled hamburgers and fireworks and road trips and friends and happiness and love.
 
And may the children learn to make their own lunches. Amen.
 
One last note: Happy Father’s Day this weekend to all the amazing Daddies and Papas and Grandpas and Papaws! Whenever men invest heavily and sincerely into their marriages and children, love abounds. For every time you’ve attended tea parties, recitals, student-led conferences, baseball games, concerts, and then tucked the littles into bed, we love you! In your honor, please enjoy this card Remy made for Brandon after following the template at school:

You know the Beginning of School Enthusiasm? When the pencils are fresh and the notebooks are new and the kids’ backpacks don’t look like they lined the den of a pack of filthy hyenas? Moms, remember how you packed innovative and nutritional lunches and laid clothes out the night before and labeled shelves for each child’s work and school correspondence and completed homework in a timely manner?
 
I am exactly still like that at the end of school, except the opposite.
 
We are limping, limping across the finish line, folks. I tapped out somewhere in April and at this point, it is a miracle my kids are still even going to school. I haven’t checked homework folders in three weeks, because, well, I just can’t. Cannot. Can. Not. I can’t look at the homework in the folder. Is there homework in the folder? I don’t even know. Are other moms still looking in the homework folder? I don’t even care.

I feel like any sort of school energy required at this point is pure oppression, like the universe is trying to destroy me. I’m so tiiiiiiiiired and I have five kids and that is just too many to educate well. I can only handle around two, so I’m going with Sydney and Caleb because they both like to read and the other three are just going to have to enroll in Life Skills Class one day and develop a trade.
 
Yesterday Remy brought her books to me at bedtime – an hour notable for its propensity to incite rage and trauma – and chirped, “We need to read for 20 minutes!” and a little part of my soul died.
 
“No, we don’t have to read tonight.”
“YES WE DO!!! MRS. BURKE SAID!!! WE HAAAAVE TO!!!”
“We already read.”
“NO WE DIDN’T!!! YOU ARE FAKING ME, MOM?”
“When I talk to you during the day, that’s like reading. You have to listen to the words I am saying and then make sense of them. It’s really hard work for you. It’s called auditory reading. We’ve been practicing all day. I’ll write the minutes down in your log.”
 
My friend Glennon over at Momastery described nighttime reading like this: “The little one wants to ‘help read’ her book. So, let’s see. It takes her about six minutes to sound out each word, and so if the book is one hundred words, well, I don’t specialize in math but I am telling you that I am stuck in that room FOREVER. It feels like I will be reading that book with Amma until I die.”
 
UNTIL WE DIE. Children should not be allowed to learn to read until they are already good at it. And why do we have to do this at bedtime when I’m one click away from becoming that scary under-the-bed-mother in “Mama” (GO TO BED OR I AM ACTUALLY GOING TO DIE AND THEN HAUNT YOU FOR THE REST OF YOUR LIFE AS A TERRIFYING CLOWN). I know having an emerging reader is exciting.  Because of the reading! And the literacy! But at the end of the school year, when I’ve logged approximately 688 million hours with such gripping plots like The mother and the brother went to the store, which takes 12 minutes to decode, then I have to look at the ceiling and sing hymns in my brain to get through it.
 

Then Ben tells me Tuesday that he needs a Ben Franklin costume for the Living History Museum today, and I’m like what fresh hell is this?? I have no idea how I missed the correspondence on this (because I’m not checking backpacks is just a theory), but Brandon is the Costume and Project Parent and I am the Daily Grinder, which is a division of labor we agreed on to ensure our kids actually graduate one day and move out, but he is out of town on a mancation, so this is on me. I cannot even handle signing a folder in late May; a colonial costume is cause for full, unrestrained despair.
 
So Ben went to school like this today, and there is no way this will ever not be a part of his childhood. Please note my scarf hanging out the bottom of his vest, as well as the soccer socks stretched over his Adidas pants. Just whatever, man.

My shame was somewhat mitigated when I saw a kid wearing a random t-shirt and jeans with a pair of swim goggles around his neck (Michael Phelps) and another girl with a piece of paper taped to her shirt with her character’s name written in marker. I caught the eyes of their moms and was all solidarity, you guys.
 
Teachers, we need to make a deal that after April testing, we don’t have to do anything else. You don’t. I don’t. I don’t care if you watch movies in class five days a week and take four recesses a day. I mean, Caleb had to bring an About Me poster with five school days left in the year. In September, this might have produced something noteworthy, with pictures perhaps, even some thoughtful components to describe his winning qualities, but as we’ve used up all our bandwidth, we yanked trash out of our actual trash can, glued it to a poster, and called it a day. I am not exaggerating when I tell you this is the very most we can do on May 29th. This is our best work:

The emails coming in for All Of The Things – class gift, end of year letters, luncheon signup, party supplies, awards ceremonies, pictures for the slide shows, final projects – are like a tsunami of doom. They are endless. I mean, they will never ever end. There is no end of it. I will never finish and turn it all in and get it to the (correct) Room Mom and get it all emailed and I am pretty sure the final week of school will never be over and this is the end for me.
 
Brandon:
 
“You don’t have to do all that, you know. Just blow it off.”
 
Me, staring blankly:
 
“Well, what a lovely thought you’re having there in your brain. How nice for you to be thinking that thought. I want to live in your imaginary world where my failure to do the School Stuff doesn’t mean our kid is the only one not wearing a purple shirt or didn’t have his pictures in the slideshow or didn’t bring in a handmade card for his teacher like every other student. I’ll just ‘blow it off’ and our kids can work it out with their therapists later.”
 
“Touchy.”
 
“You don’t even know about all this, man.”
 
So, Mom out there sending Lunchables with your kid, making her wear shoes with holes because we’re.almost.there, practicing “auditory reading” with your 1st grader, I got your back, sister. We were awesome back in October; don’t you forget that. We used to care, and that counts for something. Next year’s teachers will get a fresher version of us in August, and they won’t even know the levels of suckage we will succumb to by May. Hang in there, Mama. Just a few more days until summer, when approximately 19 minutes into our glorious respite from homework, liberated from the crush of it all, ready to party like it’s 1999, our precious children, having whooped and celebrated and “graduated” and squealed all the way home will announce:
 
“I’m bored.”


Just in case you think this is "anti-teachers", you might want to check out what I wrote last month: Dear Teachers Everywhere. TEACHERS RULE. We ALL crossed the finish line together. Cheers!

This is the third installment in a series on adoption ethics, starting with Part 1 here, then Part 2 involving orphan care within adoption, and wrapping up today as we discuss orphan care outside of adoption.
 
Before we move on, let’s get our numbers straight. I mentioned in Part 2 the number we throw around most – 147 million orphans – doesn’t represent the orphan crisis correctly. There are an estimated 153 million kids who’ve lost only one parent (“single-orphaned”), so the term “orphan” is somewhat misleading. Around 18 million kids are double-orphans, yet still most of those are absorbed into extended families and local communities.
 
Unicef estimates around 2 million children in institutional care (some single-, some double-orphaned), although that number is admittedly low due to under-reporting and lack of reliable data from every country. Nearly half are in Central and Eastern Europe and neighboring Commonwealth of Independent States. Most of these kids are not adoptable, either because they live in a closed country or they lack the necessary documentation for international adoption. In the US, there are 104,000 children in foster care currently waiting for an adoptive home (parental rights severed), with another 300,000 or so needing temporary placement.
 
International adoption has steadily declined in recent years, with 8668 children adopted by Americans in 2012 (but 51,000 kids adopted through the foster system!). So even if we doubled the number of reported institutionalized kids to 4 million, absorbing some of the unreported children into the statistic, international adoption by US citizens provides permanent homes for 0.002% of them.
 
1 child out of every 461.
 
Those are terrible odds. Clearly, if we are truly concerned about orphan care, international adoption simply cannot be where we concentrate all our efforts. It leaves too many children behind. It isn’t even remotely comprehensive, nor does it affect the millions of families on the brink of poverty-induced relinquishment. It is very good news for a very small percentage of genuinely orphaned children, but it doesn’t even scratch the surface of the crisis, will never address the root issues of disparity and oppression, and exists as a possible answer on the back end of a tragedy, not the front.
 
Therefore, we must turn our eyes to the orphaned (or nearly-orphaned) outside of adoption as well, as this is where the bulk of vulnerable children and families are located.
 
It is unacceptable that poverty makes orphans. That is a gross injustice at the root of these astronomical numbers. If you must relinquish your child because you cannot feed, educate, or care for him, the international community should rise up and wage war against that inequity. Every family deserves basic human rights, and I should not get to raise your child simply because I can feed him and you can’t.

To that end, what better response than working to preserve (or reunite) first families where poverty or disempowerment is an orphan-maker? Preventing or repairing a tragedy of this magnitude is holy work. When we come alongside our brothers and sisters vulnerable to economic despair, empowering and equipping them to raise their own children, we partake in something sacred.
 
There are fundamental building blocks of community development that provide first families the tools to parent and thrive:
 

• Prenatal/maternal health
• Basic health care/immunizations
• Clean water
• Education for all kids, especially girls
• Child sponsorship
• Birth control/family planning education
• Community education directed at men re: valuing women and children
• Sustainable employment
• Microfinance
• Business training
• Drying up the donation pipeline (gifts that help instead of hurt)
• Suitable housing
• Agricultural finance
• Reforestation
• Supporting local churches as distribution and development centers

 
The connective thread between these social constructs and orphans is monumental. Hear this: if you work toward any of the above-mentioned initiatives, you are absolutely protecting children, refusing to “grind the faces of the poor.” THIS COUNTS. For example, in Haiti last fall with Help One Now, Chris Marlow explained the underbelly of donations. After years of exporting subsidized US rice to alleviate hunger in Haiti, virtually all the local rice farmers were driven out of business and the entire economy was undermined. The leap to orphanhood is so short from there.
 
Help One Now approached the struggling rice farmers and asked if sponsoring their children would help them regain stable footing. Temporarily taking on the financial burden of school fees, uniforms, and two meals a day for their kids relieved the pressure, freed up income to rebuild, and allowed them to keep their families intact, as their children were on the brink of relinquishment, poverty the only catalyst.
 
A growing body of global research confirms that where women and children are valued and educated, poverty is mitigated. Throwing our weight behind initiatives that empower women and educate children is one the single most effective ways to affect the orphan crisis, as it lifts entire communities out of poverty, alters the ethos of regional patriarchy, and serves as orphan prevention. (If you haven’t read Half the Sky, I cannot recommend it highly enough. Their research behind the oppression and empowerment of women is a marvel.)
 
Business initiatives that train and employ vulnerable adults have clear and lasting implications for family preservation, too. With organizations like Noonday employing women in nine different countries, and TechnoServe which provides free business consulting services in developing countries, and Making Cents International, a nonprofit in Washington that creates entrepreneurship courses for the disadvantaged and trains locals to teach them, cycles of poverty are broken and the economic stimulus affects entire communities.
 
Do not even get me started on microfinance, easily one of the most important economic developments of our time. Small loans, sometimes as little as $50, providing capital for business development and entrepreneurship, has such impressive yield in developing countries, it has benefited hundreds of millions already. It works for one simple reason: the vast majority of the poor are willing and able to lift themselves from poverty if given the opportunity. Repayment rate: between 95-98%. Stunning.
 
Regular people like us can make as many loans through a trusted microfinance channel as we want. Brandon and I made a series of loans six years ago, every single one repaid, and we continue to reinvest the same money into new entrepreneurs. We recycle that money over and over, and not one recipient has ever defaulted. In The Poor Will Be Glad, the authors write: “Access to capital is the magic ingredient allowing even the poorest person to make better business choices. Microfinance simply makes good sense.” Some of the large networks of MFI’s include:
 
Accion International
FINCA International
Hope International
Opportunity International
Kiva
 
(The Chalmers Center for Economic Development provides resources and trains the church worldwide on how to minister to the poor without creating dependency through online courses, self-study material, and short-term classroom based training institutes held worldwide in local churches.)
 
What might just sound like community development actually has massive impact on the number of poverty-induced orphans created. These efforts fortify orphan prevention, and they can provide the impetus for family reunification. These initiatives lay the axe at the root of the tree, offering front-end solutions and sustainable enterprises without sacrificing dignity, children, or hope.
 
Closer to the bulls-eye, we can support organizations committed to reunification (if healthy and possible) for children already relinquished. Heroes like my friends Jimmy and Rachel Gross with No Ordinary Love Ministries in Ethiopia work tirelessly to this end. Or let’s look for organizations like ReUnite (with WACIA: Women and Children in Africa) who work toward orphan resettlement in Uganda. People are quietly working in every country to strengthen indigenous families, support birth parents, and protect children.

Domestically, I cannot recommend Safe Families for Children enough, which offers sanctuary to thousands of children, minimizing the risk for abuse or neglect and giving birth parents the time and tools they need to help their families thrive. The ultimate goal is to strengthen and support parents so they can become safe for their own children, fostering a close working relationships between Safe Families, the local church, the referring organization, and the birth parents.
 
Far from ideal, we must also consider bolstering the quality and structures of group homes and orphanages. Research makes it crystal clear that children thrive in families but suffer emotionally, cognitively, and physically in institutional settings. Ideally, every child should be in a family. Realistically, adoption and reunification do not even remotely reach far enough, so we must also consider best-case scenarios for children that will never be placed within a family.
 
For example, Help One Now is building Ferrier Village in Haiti, small, family-oriented homes for girls aging out of orphanages as young as 13 (just opened...read this story...so good). Each home has 3-4 girls and a house mom or house parents. The alternative is inevitable trafficking or homelessness. The Miracle Foundation renovates and restructures existing orphanages in rural India with measurable, scalable interventions that guard against corruption and focus on the needs of the whole child, transforming institutional orphanages into stable, loving, nurturing homes where children can thrive. With over 25 million estimated orphans in India and less than 1000 adopted last year, we simply must consider initiatives like The Miracle Foundation who are addressing the needs of the masses.
 
A crisis of this magnitude is going to take us all - all the mamas, all the daddies, all the countries, all the workers. Some of us will raise the money, some will raise awareness, and some will raise the kids. Certain families will rally from here, and other families will pack up and move to vulnerable countries and do the work. Some of us will be starters, some executers, some funders, some visionaries. We collectively must insist on helping and not hurting, refusing to discredit the weak links in the system and instead insist on shoring them up.
 
We have to dig deep and reject the notion that Americans know best, are best, are better. We have to listen to dissenting voices and carefully assess, prioritizing first families, first cultures, first countries whenever possible. We move forward as if our goal was no orphans ever, setting aside our agendas, however altruistic. Our standard operating procedure must always include Being Good News: good for children, good for birth mamas, good for the poor, good for other countries and cultures.
 
Within that framework, we’re all going to have to fight like hell together. In the Old Testament, the Hebrew word for “justice” translates: “to set right.” May we be a people who bravely commit to set the wrongs right, because being too poor to parent isn’t right. Being too sick to parent isn’t right. Being abandoned or abused isn’t right. Being discarded because of special needs or gender isn’t right. Being manipulated into relinquishment isn’t right. Wasting away unloved in an orphanage isn’t right. Being trapped in cycles of poverty isn’t right.
 
May we apply the same standards we insist on for our families to all families, unwilling to accept disparity and injustice. I’ll play my note and you’ll play yours, and by themselves, they’ll be sort of one-dimensional, but together they will create a song that sounds like freedom for the captives, liberty for the oppressed, and the beautiful sound of chains breaking everywhere.

Welcome. With much love, care, research, and prayer, I move onto Part 2 in a three-part series on adoption ethics. If you haven’t read Part 1, go do that. In this installment, we’re discussing ethical orphan care WITHIN adoption, and Part 3 will involve orphan care OUTSIDE of adoption.
 
First of all, let’s make some room. The response to Part 1 was so inspiring from the Christian community. Your commitment to due diligence, to the search for truth, to the orphan, to first families and second families was a marvel. I was proud of us. In a movement with such deep investment and high emotions, it is no small thing to embrace scrutiny and evaluation.
 
Room: Should we shut down adoption and invest our energies elsewhere? Emphatically, NO. I am not anti-adoption; I am anti-unethical-adoption. So many children are true orphans, have no chance at reunification, or would be in danger with their first family, and adoption is their last chance. Similarly, many first parents relinquish their kids as an act of courage and selflessness, having soberly weighed their options, landing on adoption in their child’s best interest. We applaud these moms; they are to be commended. There will always be children who genuinely need a family, and adoption is a beautiful story of redemption in those cases.

Here are the real numbers: Around the world, there are an estimated 153 million orphans who have only lost one parent (“single-orphaned”). Obviously, not all these children need adopted. Most single parents raise children valiantly in their own community and extended family. There are about 18 million orphans who have lost both parents (“double orphaned”) and are living in orphanages or on the streets. So again, I am pro-family: first families when possible, and second families when they are not.

Let’s separate the wheat from the chaff: As my friend Ryan at AWAA so perfectly put it: “If there are bad actors coercing people, paying bribes, etc., then we should not call this ‘adoption’ but ‘trafficking’. When thieves run into a bank, point a gun and steal money, we don’t call that a bank withdrawal; it’s a robbery. Our response shouldn’t be to close banks or criticize all bankers but to step up bank security. In the same way, criminal activity should be described as such and not as adoption.” (<---- Exactly. This goes to my point in Part 1 that trafficking is not a God-endorsed franchise and shouldn't receive the same assessment as adoption. Let us step up bank security, because we should clamp down on less-frequent robberies instead of imagining that banks never attract thieves.)
 
Room: Should we stop adopting babies? No! Again, there are certainly babies who are either abandoned or willfully relinquished, and the less time they languish in an institution, THE BETTER. You are no villain, Baby Adopter, and many adoptive parents choose a baby to keep birth order intact or remove her from an institution early to diminish long-term effects.
 
It is simply this: the line for adoptable healthy babies is very long, and every last one of them will be chosen, even those not born yet. In the meantime, tens of thousands of older kids are waiting right this second. Unicef reports approximately 95% of orphans over the age of 5. So if our motivation includes mitigating the orphan crisis, then we need more parents willing to adopt older kids, sick kids, and sibling groups, including here and abroad.
 
Room: Adoption is as complicated as the number of people, countries, stories, and processes involved. There is no one story. What is true for China is different in Guatemala. What is happening in Ethiopia has no relevance for domestic foster care. The best we can do in a public forum like this is take a high view of adoption and insist on ethical practices, transparency, and a commitment to help and not hurt. While your personal adoption may be completely legitimate, as a community, we still must guard against systemic weak links and refuse to discredit obvious failure within the movement.
 
Room: Are all agencies corrupted? FOR THE LOVE. They most certainly are not. Plenty of agencies have impeccable reputations and unimpeachable staffs. They don’t deserve to all be painted with the same brush. While there are deplorable brokers supplying the pipeline illegally, unethically or even naively, it would be terribly unfair and unwise to lump them all together.
 
For you in serious research mode, may I point you to a series at My Fascinating Life describing best practices between the people who make decisions about the adoptability of a child, those who benefit from adoption, and those who oversee the entire process. It is a lengthy two-part series but well worth the energy, a fantastic exegesis on structural ethics. (Note: in this series, “adoption beneficiaries” includes agencies, but to be clear: I am not implying sinister motives, as no social workers or agency employees I know are rolling up in their Bentleys. We all love these kids and families. It is simply a designation for which side of the wall we are on.)
 
[Much thanks to the agency workers, nonprofit leaders, missionaries, and adoptive parents who have contributed to the following info. Especially grateful to Ryan Hanlon through my agency, America World, for his expertise. We burned up the internet in discussion last week, as my first email from him after Part 1 was something like “WTHHHHHHHHH???” and ended 73 emails later with some of the best material that follows. Let me tell you: when people get together who love children, love birth families and adoptive families, love community development, and love adoption, we are a powerful tribe for good.]
 
For those considering adoption, let’s discuss due diligence. Internationally, perhaps the primary consideration is which country. Why? Certain countries lend themselves to a more transparent process with less room for corruption. Others facilitate adoptions with virtually NO oversight by a child welfare authority, and the U.S. government has a limited role, so there is almost no process for verifying practices as ethical, which isn’t to say that they are corrupt, it’s to say that nobody has a clue if they’re corrupt.
 
PAPs (prospective adoptive parents) must research the adoption process in a country, specifically how a child is determined to be available for international adoption. Call multiple agencies, read the DOS website, talk to adoptive families that have gone through the process. In general, Hague Convention Countries have more safeguards in place than non-Convention countries (exceptions apply). In general, the more the foreign country’s government controls the process (especially the matching process) instead of an agency, attorney or orphanage, there is less room for corruption. Although frustrating, the slower and more thorough a country is, the better. If they place a premium on reunification and in-country placements and insist on exhaustive investigations to approve an international placement, we say AMEN and commit to wait.  
 
Second, with such enormous trust placed in agencies as mediators, this is no place for naivety. Once you’ve chosen a country, next find an agency with best practices in that country, because an agency has different levels of experience, staffing, knowledge and resources in every country they work, even if they run multiple programs.
 
Although this varies from country to country, some general questions to ask of agencies:
 

• Are you licensed and accredited both here and in the other country? (You might think this was obvious, but you would be wrong.)
• Has your license ever been suspended in country X? Any other country?
• Can you recommend other agencies that work in the same country? (This speaks volumes, including their reputation with other sound agencies.)
• Can you provide references of families who have adopted from your agency from the same country? (Not foolproof, because anyone can assemble a band of cheerleaders, but it’s a start. This list should be lengthy.)
• How long have you been working in country X? (Pilot programs give me serious pause; it is simply not proven, and this is no place for naive optimism.)
• How many adoptions do you facilitate each year? (Beware of astronomical numbers.)
• How many of the kids you place from county X are infants? How many have special needs? How many are older? 
• Can we see a copy of a recent audited financial statement? Annual report? 
• How does the referral process work?
• Do any of your staff get paid on a per adoption basis? If no, then how are they paid?
• What are the common reasons children are available for adoption in country X? 
• Will the children likely have living birth parents? If so, are we allowed to interact with them? What will we learn from them?
• Can we use an independent or second translator when talking to birth parents? (This diminishes the possibility of selective mistranslation by an orphanage employee and allows you to ask difficult and pressing questions about what they actually understand about international adoption. What have they been promised? Are they under the impression that this is temporary? Were they approached about adoption or did they relinquish voluntarily? Etc…)
• Who in country X determines that the children are appropriate for adoption?
• Does your agency interact with the birth parents? 
• Do you have initiatives in place for reunification or first family development, not associated with adoption revenue?
• For domestic adoption:  What does the birth parent get from your agency? Who is providing counseling? What options are presented by your agency?  

Red flags for PAPs:
 

• When you ask questions, do you feel shut down, disrespected, bullied, or discouraged? I asked my agency hard questions and got pages and pages of immediate, thorough responses. If you are discouraged from talking to other families, researching, asking difficult questions, or investigating, RUN.
  
• Are other adoptive families with concerns are painted as lunatics or troublemakers?
• Does correspondence lean too heavily on emotional propaganda and "rescue" rhetoric, as opposed to professionalism and an obvious commitment to best practices?
• An agency that offers something different than other agencies.
• An agency that only does infant adoptions or promises lots of babies.
• An agency that offers the same thing for much less money. 
• An agency that offers the same thing as other agencies in much less time. 
• An agency that claims to have special connections or processes in country.
• If you hear the word “expedited,” run for the hills. That is not a thing. That is corruption.
• Payments without receipts (common in Eastern European adoptions).
• “In general, if it smells fishy, don’t eat it…” Ryan Hanlon, folks. We cannot allow Baby or Child Fever to overtake our instincts. If your gut senses a red flag, YOU ARE PROBABLY RIGHT. 

Red flags for agencies in terms of in-country partners:

• Seeing the same situation in lots of kids’ paperwork (e.g. all the kids are abandoned or all the kids have parents’ deceased; or the same police officer signed off on the abandonment recognition, or the same hospital worker or social worker, etc. is involved in all the cases.)
• An orphanage partner who wants money off the books.
• An orphanage partner who can provide much more than anyone else.
• In-country staff or partners who prevent international staff from accessing or communicating with any relevant parties.
• Not experiencing the same challenges as other agencies (unless the reasons are obvious). 

I would heavily discourage independent adoptions. I know they are faster and smoother and maybe the only possibility in certain countries, but we want more oversight, not less in international adoption. The more people, systems, and organization in place, the higher the accountability, and I cannot stress this enough: we want the highest possible accountability here. If adoptions are not possible through formal channels, there is probably a reason. This ball is in our court, PAPs. Of the few things we can control, this is one.
 
This post is infinity long, and I’ve left out so much. Note: you cannot take one blog as your guide. You must do your own research, suss out the truth, ask, study, investigate, Google, dig, push, insist on clarity. Agencies operating above board will welcome your questions, because we all want the same thing: first family preservation if possible, and families for truly orphaned children when it isn’t. Adoption is an answer to a tragedy that has already happened, but may it never be the impetus for one that hasn’t.
 
In Part 3, we will discuss orphan care outside of adoption, and I can hardly wait. Thank you for sharing your stories this last week. I’ve treasured them, prayed for you, asked God to infuse us all with courage and humility, and begged for His kingdom to come.


What can you add? The power in our collective conversation here cannot be overstated. What have you learned? What have I omitted?  Thank you in advance for filling in gaps with foster and domestic scenarios. So grateful for you.

When I was in college, a guy drank a bottle of hot sauce for $100. He was sick for four days. That sauce came out everywhere; both ends, pores, night sweats. He had to buy expensive medicine to help repair the lining of his stomach, you guys. No matter. Because 1.) the bragging rights, and 2.) the $100.
 
For the love.
 
I’m wading into difficult adoption territory today, a space wrought with defensiveness and Big Feelings and confusion. Let’s cover this conversation with grace and truth and move gently through it together, beginning with Part One today.
 
Disclaimer up front: There are so many children who are truly orphaned, with the numbers skewed toward older kids and sick kids. This is a real crisis. There are also adoption agencies with impeccable ethics both here and abroad. Plenty of adoptive families went in eyes wide open, prioritizing transparency and thoroughness. This is not an all-bad or all-good scenario, but a little yeast leavens the entire batch, and no decent parent I know wants to be complicit in corrupt adoptions. This conversation deserves its place among believers.
 
We can begin here: Sometimes when you wave a $100 in front of someone, he or she will do anything to get it, even something knowingly harmful. Let’s stipulate that rich Americans flooding impoverished countries with millions of dollars to adopt its children will absolutely garner attention. Money has always been a magnet for corruption. While there are obviously lots of true orphans, without question, that much cash flow will generate some “created orphans” to satisfy demand, especially for babies.
 
Now three years after our first steps, I’m connected to people living in all sorts of impoverished countries, and the word on the street is not good. There is the Christian adoption narrative we use over here, including inflated statistics, words like rescue and saving, and plenty of emotional ammunition (me = guilty), then there is the in-country story, which is something altogether different.
 
I so want this to not be true, but I keep hearing it over and over in Ethiopia, Haiti, Uganda, Congo, everywhere. The missionaries and locals are saying something very disturbing: so often vulnerable birth moms are coerced and misled, families are manipulated and deceived, children are flat out bought. International adoption is Big Business. I’ve read emails describing orphanage directors who paid $20 for birth certificates and $75 to take a baby right out of his mother’s hands. Paperwork is falsified and birth families are told their children are going to school, to triage while they stabilize, to receive health care then return home.

There are very real orphans all over the earth, but most of us don’t pursue the kids there are; we pursue the kids we want, and these countries know the score. Older kids stay on waiting children lists, while the baby line is hundreds deep. It doesn’t take long for opportunists to figure this out.
 
I’ve heard of too many devastated birth parents, shocked and confused their children were adopted to another family. Basic investigations have uncovered entire communities picked through for their children, like door-to-door salesmen. I’m not hearing enough about prioritizing birth families and empowering them to raise their own children, not even from well-meaning adoptive parents. Isn’t that what we want? Shouldn’t intact families be our highest goal? Shouldn’t we want for birth families exactly what we want for our own, if it is possible?
 
But birth families are not prioritized; adopters are. The system is geared to make us happy, to keep us coming. There is this silent belief that kids are better off with us, period. We say, “God chose this child for me. She is mine. She was always meant to be mine.” No. Our children were meant for their birth families, the way every child ever born is. God did not intend these children for my wealthy home and accidentally put them in Ethiopian wombs. Does God not weep for birth moms who were tricked? Who were coerced? Who were so vulnerable? Were their children gifts for us and not them? This perspective insidiously tricks us into overvaluing our "rights" and devaluing first families or reunification efforts.
 
With much of the adoption pipeline supplied by corruption and confusion, we cannot possibly claim God’s sovereignty. We need to call it what it is: an injustice God would never endorse. It is time to stop participating in the type of adoption that encourages able-bodied parents to give up their children or get pregnant to supply a baby for a paycheck. We cannot be complicit in what amounts to trafficking.
 
When we began the process, Brandon and I assumed we were adopting kids with no parents. We were shocked to discover most kids in our pipeline had one or both living parents, including our two. Without sharing too much of their stories, I’ll tell you that both kids could be raised by able-bodied birth parents or extended family. That doesn’t change the fact that they were both relinquished, Ben in an orphanage nearly three years when we met him at age 8, but we are haunted by the possibility that some simple development and intervention could’ve prevented them from ever entering the system.
 
“It’s too complicated.” “They cannot handle their own kids.” “They are too poor.” “Life is too unstable there.” These are the arguments we bandy around about birth parents. Frankly, this is an easy pill to swallow and goes down in seconds without much consideration. Just like that, I’ve severed the biological tie and discredited the argument for reunification.
 
Yet people working in impoverished countries tell me something totally different. My friends, Troy and Tara Livesay, work in maternal care in Haiti, the poorest country in the western hemisphere. By every statistic and standard, it is a hot mess. Yet at Heartline, their organization that offers prenatal care, safe birthing facilities, and parenting and child development classes for vulnerable moms, their numbers disclose something astonishing: Out of roughly 300 births – and I’m talking very poor women, some raped, some teenagers, some single moms, extremely disadvantaged – only ONE birth mom has ever relinquished her baby. As Tara told me, “If our small, simple operation has virtually a 100% success rate, we are not trying hard enough for birth families.”
 
What would happen if we reallocated a percentage of the millions we spend on adoption toward community development? What if we prioritized first families and supported initiatives that train, empower, and equip them to parent? This would absolutely be Orphan Prevention, not to mention grief prevention, loss prevention, abandonment prevention, trauma prevention, broken family prevention. What if we asked important questions about supply and demand here, and broadened our definition of orphan care to include prevention and First Family empowerment?
 
Adoptive parents are so precious to me; this community is dear. I only feel safe raising these disturbing concerns because I know our hearts. You would not sit one of us down and discover evil motives or a calculated rejection of birth moms. The opposite is true, in fact. These are some of the best people I’ve ever known. This is no attack; rather it’s grabbing hands with my community and humbly acknowledging that where there is a lot of smoke, there is some fire, and none of us endorse international pyromania.

When the critics are primarily adult adoptees, misled first families, locals and missionaries, in-country nonprofits, and developing countries in general, we should listen.

I simply believe it is time to take our good hearts and add our good minds. Adoption is the worst place to enter armed with nothing but good intentions. Rather than get swept up in emotional jargon and moving videos, we must move forward soberly, carefully, thoroughly, setting any agenda aside and working like hell to protect children, birth families, communities, and the kingdom.
 
Dear Ones, again, adoption is complicated and nuanced, and corruption does not apply to every situation obviously. There are clearly scenarios dripping with abuse, neglect, total abandonment, and bad parents, which exist in every country. Orphans are real and some kids really need families, and I personally know scads of your above-board stories. So many of our kids had no option for reunification or extended family or in-country adoption. 

Discussing unethical adoptions, I am not saying always; I am saying sometimes, and if there is a sometimes in the mix, then we must go on high alert. We have to. We cannot simply hope we have no part in the sometimes…
 
…we must insist on the never.
 
 
In Part Two, I’ll get down to the nitty gritty: What do we do? What questions do we ask? What are the red flags? How do we evaluate our agencies, since we must place so much trust in their integrity? How do we refuse complicity in unethical practices?

[Image courtesy of Free.Digital.Photos.net]