At Children's Home Society & Family Services, Molly Rochon and her team of adoption professionals remain steadfast in their resolve to find loving families for all their waiting children.
That is because there are big adoption bonuses to be made. Remember, there is a bonus check at the end of every adoption rainbow!
Ok, think of it this way. You have a teen aged boy, young man who was ripped from all he knows and has spent the majority of his life being shipped from lock up to lock up (the politically correct comfort term is residential placement) where he keeps being cut off from all he knows, raised in a cage like an animal (comfy foster care term is "cabin") fed the cheapest and worst food (agency profit takes precedence), beaten, raped, drugged with the looming vision of life on the streets when he ages out at 18. Would you be angry (that is the comfy term for chronic health)?
"When it comes to families, we just have more boys [waiting] than girls," said Rochon, senior country relations manager at the St. Paul agency. "We place more girls. It's just what families want."
Boys in foster care tend to be more aggressive as a form of survival and also become sexually active at a very early age in foster care. See, foster kids are not allowed to be embraced. A human cannot exist without human touch, human compassion, therefore it becomes a situation of seeking out self compassion, by any means necessary.
How many more? In 2006, families expressing a gender preference chose girls over boys 391 to 166. In 2009, the split was 213 girls and 88 boys; in 2010, 121 and 38. Last year, it was 78 girls and 31 boys.
The drive for daughters, Rochon said, cuts across the agency's international and domestic programs and is noted regardless of the child's age; families frequently express interest in a girl "as young as possible."
Baby dolls are much more fun to play with!
Could it be that there simply are fewer adoptable boys in general? Nope. Boys are more commonly eligible for adoption than girls. Said Rochon: "It's just unexplainable."
It is explainable, you just do not want to talk about the hell these boys experience in foster care.
U.S. Department of State figures support her contention. From 1999 to 2011, the department's Office of Children's Issues tracked nearly 234,000 adoptions worldwide: 141,000 girls and 83,000 boys, with the rest unspecified.
Rochon wouldn't be less concerned were the phenomenon reversed. "It troubles us that people who want to have a family limit themselves in ways that result in many children waiting longer for families," she said.
Why don't you talk about the boys who are being returned by foster and adoptive families because the child placing agencies are withholding and fabricating social histories of the hell these boys have suffered in foster care?
The trend may surprise many who have long believed the opposite is true, which it is in some parts of the world. China's one-child rule, for example, has created extreme ratios favoring boys.
Worse are tragic consequences of gender preference, such as a 22-year-old woman in Afghanistan killed in January by her husband and mother-in-law after delivering her third girl (no matter that the male primarily determines the baby's gender).
Distractionary slant of reporting which has nothing to do with the situation at hand: boys emotionally, physically, psychologically and sexually suffer in foster care.
And yet, adoption experts say a quiet shift to girls has been taking place for quite some time. "I wasn't the least bit surprised," said Joe Kroll, executive director of the St. Paul-based North American Council on Adoptable Children. His agency finds homes for foster children, many of them older, which makes placement harder regardless of gender.
Kroll adopted a daughter in 1975 from Korea, when "people kept boys and let girls go." Now girls are placed more than boys by a "ballpark" of 52 to 48 percent, he said.
In 2010, 64 percent of waiting children with AdoptUSKids were male, said spokeswoman Kathy Ledesma.
While Lutheran Social Service of Minnesota doesn't allow gender requests, the issue has come up. "There is some thought that it's due to the way the landscape of adoption has gone -- the kids are older, with some behavior challenges," said spokeswoman Rachel Walstad. "There may be a perception that those behaviors manifest more aggressively in boys."
Conversely, some parents may see daughters as future caregivers. "There's a perception that girls will take care of you when you're older," said Amy Brendmoen, a Children's Home Society spokeswoman.
No. The perception is a girl will not attack you when suffering from post traumatic stress episodes of foster care.
Dan and Jane Kramer once believed that a girl would make their family complete. The Kramers, formerly of Minneapolis, live in East Lansing, Mich., where Dan, 43, teaches at Michigan State University and Jane, 42, is a photographer. Jane was adopted through LSS. They married in their mid-20s.
After the couple struggled with infertility, Dan brought up the idea of adopting an infant girl from China. While he was eager to experience that special father-daughter relationship, "I wasn't there yet," Jane said. "I tried to convince myself that we didn't need a family, we didn't need kids."
Why don't you come down here to Detroit and adopt one of these boys who have been processed through Wolverine. Whatever happened to "Made in America"?
After her father died suddenly in 2004, Jane reconsidered. By then, wait times for infants were up to three years, so they looked at older children of both genders. But the girl dream remained strong. "In our hearts, we still envisioned a girl," Jane said. "We had a name." Their nursery was decorated in floral.
After saying no to a healthy older boy, Jane called her father-in-law and asked, "Why do I feel so awful?"
Because you know that boy will end up living on the streets when the foster care system kicks him out with his garbage bag of worldly possessions on the street when he turns 18.
"When you first tried to get pregnant, you just wanted to be parents," he said. "What's changed?"
What changed? The internet with sites like Legally Kidnapped.
Suddenly, everything in the nursery "was so insignificant," Jane said. "We just wanted to have a child." They adopted Eli, now 8, on her 39th birthday through Children's Home Society. Joyful doesn't begin to express their life with him. Eli plays soccer and baseball, studies Mandarin, "and has really brought us out of our shells," Jane said.
"At some point, you have to let that dream evolve."
At some point, the truth will come out.
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