Topics: Why would children say no?

It is hard to believe that as recently as Wednesday of last week we were still hopeful that we would be in Ukraine for another 3 weeks and come home with children. So many big changes have happened in the last 6 weeks since we flew out there, it feels like a lifetime.

This week, we have started to get updated documents for our next dossier, and today Julie posted on the wall a checklist so we can keep track of which ones have been requested, notarized, and apostilled.

As we talk with people here, we are getting a better idea of some topics that we should spend more time discussing in the blog. Here is the first.

Why ever would children refuse to come with us?
Obviously, this is a question that continues to haunt us, and from any adult's perspective this decision is crazy, but frankly speaking it is not hard to put ourselves in the kids' shoes. They are in a situation where their basic daily needs are met and where they have grown comfortable and perhaps even confident. Even with a sense of the benefits that could be gained, the decision to give up a reasonable situation for one that would certainly turn their world upside down and leave them completely out of control is not necessarily easy. This is especially true for children whose first experience in a family was horribly negative and whose life without a secure attachment to a parent has programmed them to see control as the key to survival.

There are some specific factors that influenced the situations we saw. It is common for jealous peers to try to sabotage adoptions by scoffing or abuse, and it is hard to know how much of this was going on. The first boy appeared to be hanging onto a dream that his father would come for him; if this was a coping mechanism, it would have been even harder for him to deny it. The second boy clearly was deeply conflicted about his decision, and he was the first child that our facilitator had ever seen refuse an adoption without giving any kind of reason. (Interestingly, he had seen only one girl say no, apparently because girls seem able to bond more quickly to the prospective parents.) This decision could have been the result of something our facilitator pointed out as an unfortunate byproduct of the orphanage lifestyle (and of welfare more generally): thinking that the government will always take care of my needs and losing the inner strength to take responsibility for myself. Even though all the social workers we met were passionate about adoption, we did not get the sense that the orphanages, which are inspected but not managed by social services, actively cultivate the idea that adoption into a family is the natural next step.

On another level, whatever children join our household will have an ideal opportunity to meet and to trust Jesus Christ; the same deceiver that makes all sorts of empty things seem preferable to adoption by the King would certainly have been motivated to pull the wool over these kids' eyes. We definitely had a sense of spiritual battle around us during some of our days in the regions.