I agree, KTmom. We need to know more, before we criticise. A lot of the bad things said about the adoptive mother have come from the child. A lot of the concerns from the adoptive family have been down to things the child has said or done. So where is the truth here, and why do people continue to accept the word of someone whose word they suspect? I see this all the time - a friend will say, "I can't believe a word X says to me," and then proceed to say that they haven't spoken to Y, since X said that Y said something mean about them.
Hello? You are accepting the word of someone you don't trust? The reason this happens, is we lose trust in X at some point AFTER we have listened and believed the things X has said. But too often we don't go back and edit the information we have previously believed.
In this case - there are two possibilities, plus the spectrum in between.
1) The child was not a problem but the adoptive family was. Of course there will always be a settling in period especially for a child who doesn't speak the same language, or for whom the new language is not their birth language. There are also cultural differences, and a child who is 7 years old and especially a child who has spent much of his life in an institution, is going to already be very set in some ways which will, at least initially, be incompatible with the family's framework. In other words - if the family is inflexible but in a different way, there will be serious problems in integrating child and family, and these will not get better.
OR
2) The child really is a problem. This does seem a possibility, given the history of the child - in an institution in Russia where there are already too many children in institutions and where the past claimed standard of care hasn't been that great. The child is 7, so he's already established a lot of his own behaviour patterns, many of which will be coping strategies. He may or may not have been beaten with a broom handle - if you disbelieve the child in one area, you should be sceptical in others. If the child was a problem, this may still not have been readily apparent to the adoptive agency, especially if he was just one of many. Such a kid would have learned how to please people in order to give himself the best chance of being adopted - getting out of the institution would have been his top priority. And if the family were genuinely afraid for themselves and had really tried everything they could, and if the adoption procedure was not yet nailed in place (he still had a Russian passport - was there a probationary period about to expire?) then it's possible that they put him on the plane in a last-ditch attempt to get him off their hands while they still could legally.
There could well be fault on both sides too, anywhere along that spectrum.
A child who has been in an institution ANYWHERE in the world for so much of his early life, is a child who has a lot of adjusting to do when he finally is placed with a family. I also think it's likely they responded to the threats by taking them far too seriously - kids make threats, and a child who has been in the position of tis kid in an institution could well have fantasised about burning down the orphanage and releasing all those kids to live free, not fully understanding the long-term ramifications of "how do we look after ourselves now?" He may have used threats as a coping mechanism, back in the orphanage. Heck, I've had kids threaten me, or threaten others, when very young - it generally doesn't mean a thing. We've become far too touchy about this in recent years, but kids will be kids. Of course we have to teach them to not make such threats, but you teach them by giving them better ways to deal with frustration.
As for dumping the kid on a plane - it sounds like at no time was he left unsupervised, because I know at least here in Australia, it has been possible to chaperone a kid until they are put on the plane at which time the cabin crew will look after them until they are handed over to someone organised to meet them at the other end. Maybe it doesn't happen so much now, but this is how a lot of kids in past years were sent from one place to another in school holidays.
However - he had only been with the adoptive family since September, so there are a number of questions here. When did the problems begin? What was the agreement between the family and the agency? Was there an opt-out widow which was about to expire? What other help did the family try to get for the boy?
Other questions arise here - if the boy still had his Russian passport, who is responsible for his health care costs? I know if this had been Australia, unless the boy was legally adopted by the family, he would not have been covered even under our generous national health scheme. And legal adoption takes time. It doesn't happen at the point the child is handed over, it takes months or even years later.
No - we need to know more about what happened here.
One thing really concerns me (well, one more thing) - the article talks about the thousands of adoptions to the US from Russia, but all the media in Russia seem to focus on, are the very few where something isn't working out. If you look at the average family where kids were NOT adopted, the difficult child rate is not exactly low. So why does adoption get blamed, when an adopted kid goes off the rails? Sometimes you need to look at other factors:
1) Some kids, by law of averages, will turn out to have problems.
2) Some kids are available for adoption because for whatever reason, their parents are unable to parent. Why are the parents unable to parent, and is the reason hereditary in any way?
3) The time spent in an institution does harm to some kids, and makes them a more difficult prospect to manage when adopted. This means that a lot more intensive work has to be put in, with no guarantee of success. So what changes can be put in place, to how institutions manage their child-raising?
If we can learn from this, as a world community, maybe some good can come out of it.
We need to look on it as a learning opportunity, not an individual witch-hunt case.
Marg