‘Forever family’ dream can be tragically elusive
System failures set already traumatized children adrift
Demetrius Napolitano stood outside his adoptive mother’s New York apartment.
It had been years since child welfare officials removed him from her home. Years since he had reentered foster care and cycled, hurt and angry, through 25 placements and five high schools.
And yet Napolitano couldn’t let go. She hadn’t been perfect, but she was his first image of family.
So he kept returning to her door. “I was always going back,” Napolitano said, “for that comfort, that validation, that connection.”
His experience was far from the fairy tale of adoption – the happilyever-after in which yearning parents build a family and a child receives a forever home. For Napolitano, that promise was a lie.
A USA TODAY investigation found that while the majority of adoptions in the U.S. remain intact, tens of thousands of children like Napolitano suffer the collapse of not one but two families: their birth family and their adoptive family. Those failures occur across the spectrum of adoption, affecting children adopted internationally, from foster care, through private agencies and by relatives.
More than 66,000 adoptees ended up in the foster care system between 2008 and 2020, according to a first-of-its-kind USA TODAY analysis of federal and state data.
On average, 12 adoptions failed every day. And that’s an undercount.
Researchers have had some suc
More than 66,000 adoptees ended up in the foster care system between 2008 and 2020, according to a first-of-its-kind USA TODAY analysis of federal and state data. On average, 12 adoptions failed every day. And that’s an undercount.
cess measuring failed adoptions in individual states. But USA TODAY’s investigation – bolstered by data collected from all 50 states and the federal government – provides the most complete picture of adoption failure in the U.S. to date. It found a disproportionate share of the children affected were older or Black – like Napolitano – or had been labeled “emotionally disturbed.”
Broken adoptions have been on the government’s radar for more than 20 years.
“Any level of instability in adoption has been and continues to be a major concern to state child welfare systems and to the federal government,” Aysha Schomburg, associate commissioner of the federal Children’s Bureau, said in a statement to USA TODAY.
Yet the federal government has done little to get its arms around the problem. Despite funneling billions of taxpayer dollars each year into adoption assistance for families and incentives for public agencies that boost their adoption numbers, the government has put minimal effort into finding out why adoptions fail. It doesn’t comprehensively track the outcome of adoptions, nor does it require states to do so, which forces even the most dedicated officials to guess at how best to protect children and support parents.
Through more than 100 interviews with adoptees, birth and adoptive parents, researchers and advocates, USA TODAY found breakdowns at every point in the process. In some cases, state and local government officials or private agencies approved parents for adoption despite warning signs. Some downplayed children’s medical, mental health and abuse histories or pushed hesitant parents to move forward.
Catherine LaBrenz, assistant professor in the School of Social Work at the University of Texas at Arlington, said states are shirking their responsibility to address structural problems in the child welfare system, including those connected to broken adoptions.
“If the state were a parent,” she said, “they’d be charged with child neglect.”
Parents and children also struggled with a lack of support after adopting. Roughly half of states provide postadoption services only to families who adopt from foster care, leaving parents who adopted internationally or privately with fewer options if things go wrong. And as the demographics of adoption changed in recent decades, with fewer babies and more foster care adoptions, the resources did not adequately adapt to families’ changing needs.
For more than 60% of adoptees who entered the child welfare system, USA TODAY found the reported reasons included the child’s disability or behavioral problem, the parents’ abandonment or relinquishment of the child, or the family’s general inability to cope. The kids paid the price.
An informal survey of more than 27,000 current and former foster youth by the research and development lab Think of Us found that young people from failed adoptions fared worse than others from the foster care system. They were more likely to find themselves couch surfing, homeless or hungry.
A majority of children who came into foster care after adoption never returned to their adoptive home.
Napolitano was a toddler the first time he entered the foster care system. He told USA TODAY his biological mother had grappled with drug addiction and couldn’t provide for him and his siblings. At 5, Napolitano moved into what would become his adoptive home. He was adopted at 10 – only to be removed three years later after he said he endured physical and emotional abuse.
His adoptive mother, Gladys Johnson, told USA TODAY that Napolitano experienced “quite a bit of turmoil” before coming to her home and acted out from a young age, with his behavior becoming more intense after he met members of his biological family. She said she did not abuse her son and thought his removal would be temporary.
“I love him very much,” she said. Napolitano said it was “trauma on top of trauma” when his adoption failed. He didn’t know how to let out his emotions and struggled with grief and anger. He banged his head against walls and punched windows.
He sabotaged relationships, assuming people would leave, yet clung to his fractured relationship with Johnson. He returned to her home again and again, trying to weave his way back into her life. For years, he said, she turned him away. They are rebuilding their relationship now, but scars of the past remain.
“Even to this day,” he said, “I still feel like I’ve been searching for a place that I can actually call home.”
‘Adoption as a market’
The government’s role as a major player in adoption is relatively new.
Through the latter half of the 20th century, private adoptions facilitated by agencies, attorneys and doctors dominated the landscape. But societal shifts in the stigmas surrounding pregnancy outside marriage and single parenting along with easier access to birth control and the legalization of abortion all reduced the number of babies available, said Ellen Herman, a history professor at the University of Oregon.
International adoptions have also dropped from nearly 23,000 in 2004 to fewer than 3,000 in 2019 – and even further during the COVID-19 pandemic, federal statistics show.
“People don’t like to think about adoption as a market, because we’re talking about human beings,” Herman said. “But there are forces of supply and demand, and there are major historical developments that shape both of those things and that shaped, for example, the rise of foster care as a source of adoptable children.”
A major bump in adoptions from foster care came in 1997, when Congress passed the Adoption and Safe Families Act. The sweeping legislation was designed to reduce the number of children languishing in foster care. It set deadlines for when states should seek to terminate parental rights, pushed states to find permanent placements for kids and offered incentives to increase foster care adoptions.
Within five years, foster care adoptions rose nearly 70%, according to a 2004 report to Congress. And they continued to climb.
Today, more than half of the roughly 120,000 adoptions each year come out of foster care, according to the USA TODAY analysis. In three states – Arizona, California and New Mexico – foster care adoptions account for more than 75% of all adoptions.
As that landscape has shifted, experts said the government has a greater responsibility to provide support to ensure those adoptions are safe and successful. Foster children are more likely to have experienced trauma from neglect, abuse or forced separation from their biological families.
The federal Children’s Bureau declined an interview request. In response to questions from USA TODAY, Children’s Bureau Associate Commissioner Schomburg issued a statement saying the government has funded projects to implement and evaluate post-adoption services and develop national training for child welfare officials, mental health professionals and adoptive parents.
But she said adoption is “largely a state issue.”
Many families receive adoption subsidies that help cover the cost of services, such as medical care, therapy, tutoring programs and more. But access to those services can vary widely depending on where they live.
For six years in a row, parents surveyed in Florida said access to and assistance with post-adoption services were top areas needing improvement. In a smaller state survey, adoptive parents identified tutoring, mental health treatment and support groups as services they had difficulty accessing.
In Tennessee, pre- and post-adoptive parent support groups operate in every region. Adoption Support and Preservation staff provide families with a meal and facilitate a discussion group with parents while the kids meet separately, said Nicole Coning, CEO of Harmony Family Center, which contracts with the state to provide those services.
While prospective families vastly outnumber children available for adoption through the private industry, there is a shortage of families willing to adopt from foster care. Each year, roughly 20,000 children age out of the system as young adults, USA TODAY’s analysis shows.
Ebony Mack, an adoption social worker and clinician at C2Adopt in Virginia, said the scarcity of prospective families can push officials into decisions they wouldn’t typically make.
“I recall gritting my teeth through a couple of choices,” she said.
Mack said it’s brutal to choose between placing a child with a less-thanideal family and the child remaining in an institution.
“When you have less families, you’re just like: ‘I just really want to see if this works out for this kid. I just really want this kid to have an opportunity to have a normal life, to be in a family, to not be in an institution, to not go from group home to group home,’ ” Mack said.
“And then those kids are more likely to return to foster care.”
An agonizing decision to make
Amy VanTine flinched when she heard her 11-year-old adopted daughter’s rage-filled screams echo through the family’s home in Colorado.
She listened for her daughter’s bedroom door alarm. If it didn’t go off, there should be little to worry about. VanTine and her husband, Mike Bouchard, had already stripped the girl’s bedroom of heater vents, dresser drawers, hangers – anything she’d used as a weapon. Then VanTine heard a second voice. “Stop it! Stop it! Stop it!”
She raced up the stairs to find one of her other children curled in a ball outside her daughter’s bedroom. Her teenage son was shaking, his fists clenched. For years, the family’s home had felt like a war zone. And the teen had had enough. “Stop it!” he continued shouting.
VanTine and Bouchard had adopted their daughter out of foster care in 2015, Colorado records show, although she had lived with them as a foster child for several years before that. USA TODAY agreed not to name the girl because she is still a minor and suffered neglect and abuse at the hands of her biological family.
What started as difficulty sleeping and hoarding food became lying and threats to run away. The girl had been in numerous forms of therapy, but nothing seemed to help.
When VanTine raised concerns before the adoption was finalized, she said officials seemed unconcerned.
This is typical behavior, VanTine said a caseworker told her. She just needs a permanent home.
But the girl’s adoption from foster care wasn’t the magic pill her parents had hoped for. By fall 2016, VanTine’s daughter raged from the time she woke up until she fell asleep. She lashed out. She threatened to take her own life.
VanTine reached out to the county’s post-adoption services worker, saying the family was “in desperate need of some respite and help,” according to an email dated Sept. 28, 2016. The email didn’t go through. Frustrated, VanTine contacted the couple’s previous adoption worker, who told her the postadoption position was vacant. Adams County records show the job had been vacant for nearly three months at the time VanTine reached out.
The family’s previous adoption worker helped them get in-home services.
It still wasn’t enough.
Therapists recommended the girl be treated in an institution, records show. But Medicaid would not cover it, saying it wasn’t medically necessary and her diagnoses were “best treated within the home and family environment.”
The 11-year-old reentered the child welfare system in January 2017, about four years after moving in with the family, records show. In 2018, the couple relinquished their parental rights and returned the girl to foster care.
“We sacrificed our own want and need of wanting her as our child ... so she could be safe, and our other children could be safe,” VanTine said, crying. “It was heart-wrenching.”
VanTine, who has spoken publicly about the challenges her family faced, said the government was too slow and too late to help when it could have made a difference. Instead, she said, the child welfare system operates like an assembly line: “Get the kids in, find the placement, close it out, not our problem.”
Adams County spokeswoman Christa Bruning declined USA TODAY’s request for an interview with the girl, who is now 16. Bruning also denied a request to interview agency officials, noting it was “not in the best interest of the child to discuss specifics of any case.”
Age, race, mental health
USA TODAY’s analysis of failed adoptions shows that three factors have contributed to broken adoptions: the age, race and mental health of the child.
One part of the analysis examined more than 60,000 children adopted from foster care between 2008 and 2010 in 16 states where a study found a child’s ID number can be tracked before and after adoption.
Age was the most significant predictor of adoptions failing among this group. USA TODAY’s analysis found a child adopted at 10 faces a nearly seven times greater risk of reentry into foster care than one who was adopted at 1.
Sixto Cancel, founder and CEO of Think of Us, wasn’t surprised by the influence of age and race. Cancel, 30, who is Black, grew up in the foster care system. From 11 months old to age 9, he said, his identity was that he was a foster kid. It wasn’t easy for him to see himself as an adopted son.
“I was 9 years old when the judge looked at me and was like, ‘Do you want to be adopted?’ ” Cancel recalled. “And I had wanted to say no so bad.”
USA TODAY’s analysis of data from the 16 states found Black children face a more than 50% greater risk than white children of having their adoptions fail and returning to foster care.
Child welfare experts often question whether one risk factor could be adoption of children by parents of a different race or ethnicity, but research finding higher rates of disruption or failure in transracial families is scant. USA TODAY’s examination did not find a clearcut influence on outcomes.
Researchers who examined statelevel data suggested that children of color may spend more time in foster care, be moved around more and have more difficult experiences that affect their adjustment in an adoptive home, and that a child’s race may affect how adoptive parents evaluate behavioral problems.
Licensed clinical social worker Melanie “JaeHee” Chung-Sherman owns a private practice in north Dallas that sees adoptees of color who identify as part of the LGBTQ community and are transracially adopted. She said she works with adoptees who have been harmed by adoptive families who view themselves as saviors or who ascribe to the idea of “color blindness,” failing to recognize the effects of racism and oppression.
“It’s heartbreaking and disappointing and rage-inducing,” Chung-Sherman said.
Mental health also played a role in adoption stability, USA TODAY found. Children labeled in federal records as “emotionally disturbed” are nearly 40% more likely to reenter foster care, according to USA TODAY’s analysis.
The data does not specify what diagnosis the child was given; the emotionally disturbed category combines conditions such as anxiety and bulimia with schizophrenia, which makes it difficult to pinpoint specific problems caseworkers should watch for.
Susan Branco, a licensed professional counselor and assistant professor at St. Bonaventure University in New York, said officials need to move beyond the myth of the happy ending and ensure families are prepared and children are supported. Too often, she said, children in the system – particularly children of color – are treated as expendable.
“These children are then left to fend for themselves in a world where they haven’t been cared for,” said Branco, who is an adoptee. “Lots of systems let them down. And none of it was their fault.”
“Even to this day, I still feel like I’ve been searching for a place that I can actually call home.” Demetrius Napolitano