Posted by: justenjoyhim | October 30, 2007

People say the strangest things

A few I’ve had, not recently but ones that stuck with me and I intended to blog about:

One person who thought that more kids should be adopted because her contention was that adoptive parents wouldn’t be as abusive as biological parents.

Not that I am fond of being in the same company as these people, but I did have to point out that “adoptive” doesn’t keep people from being assholes at all, and there are plenty of abusive adoptive parents as well — consider the case of the caged children in Ohio for a current case and Joel Steinberg for an older case. There are plenty more, of course, but I don’t particularly want to list a bunch of them, just as I don’t want to list a bunch of child abuse cases perpetrated by anyone. But yeah, that was a real “head-shaker HUH?!” statement.

I got the other one when someone was at my house and saw a book about adoption and said to me:

Are you still reading about adoption?

Hmmmmm . . . .

Naaaaaahhhhh. What is there to read about adoption now that we’ve adopted Nate? I think I’ve learned everything there is to know, after all.

Maybe I’ll go through the house and toss out all of those books I have about adoption that I haven’t gotten to yet. OUT THEY GO!!

Phew! That lightens the to-read book list for me a bit!!

Ummmm . . . yeah. Interesting.

Posted in Adoption, language

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Responses

People are awesome.

I know I stop reading about parenting once I’m actually parenting.

Oh wait. No.

By: Jenna on October 30, 2007
at 9:37 pm

Although there are legions of adoptive parents who are assholes, we don’t tend to abuse our kids in the big numbers. I understand that it’s not a nice thing to point out, but the huge majority of abused children are abused in their bio families. Glossing over that fact doesn’t help those kids.

Adoption is a different way to build a family, and some of those differences can be good. It’s about loss AND gain, and for many children the gain is safety.

(And, yes, I know many consider me an asshole.)

By: Sandra Hanks Benoiton on October 30, 2007
at 10:08 pm

Jenna — yes, exactly.

Sandra — I wonder if that’s proportional or just because the majority of parents are bio parents.

At any rate, the person’s logic was definitely faulty. All of the first moms that I know who have gone on to have children that they’ve parented are wonderful moms, so — as I’m sure you know — we can’t just take kids away “in case of” possible abuse, sort of like what they’re doing in England. Yikes.

I definitely don’t want to point fingers one way or another, but just wanted to say that there are no guarantees either way, via adoption or bio. I think she was trying to compliment me, but a straightforward compliment would have been better :) .

By: justenjoyhim on October 31, 2007
at 6:43 am

I like to read about most things I do. Duh! ;-)

By: Guilty Secret on October 31, 2007
at 7:51 am

I had a similar experience the other day. We had friends over for dinner and were exchanging updated phone numbers and email addresses. I grabbed the closest notepad, which happened to be one from the Korean American Coalition. “What’s this?” one of the friends asked rather suspiciously, I thought. “KAC-DC, a Korean community advocacy organization,” I replied. She didn’t say anything back - I think the look on my face sent a message not to go where I’m pretty sure she was headed, which was “Why do you need to be involved in that now that the kids are here?”

Nothing like adopting and then putting your head in the sand!

By: Margie on October 31, 2007
at 9:37 am

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