no one said parenting is easy

i recently watched an evening news special on adoptive parents "returning" their Russian children back to their motherland. Children are not a pair of shoes to be taken back to a store. They are not an impulse purchase. They are human beings, and as the cliche goes, no one ever said being a parent is easy.

I understand that many of these Russian children are not "perfect." Many have a host of mental problems including ADHD, ADD, and fetal alcohol syndrome. This is all the more reason to the love them.

During the special I watched, an adoptive parent videotaped her "daughter," who was obviously in distress, as the young child cried and paced 'round the house. It was obvious that the girl needed comforting, yet the parents taped the incident like you would record the noises a lemon car would make. The parents said, "we wanted proof of how terrible she was acting." What I didn't notice in the video was compassion or a parent entering the frame to help settle the child down. The child was clearly have a panic attack and needed help, not labeling or documentation to show what was wrong with the parents' "purchase."

The news report (I'm pretty sure it was on DATELINE) showed a variety of other adoptive parents saying how rough its been with their adoptive children. Parenting them is such a challenge. The kids have meltdowns. What I wanted to scream back is that, parenting is difficult whether you adopt the children or birth them yourself. There is no perfect child. All kids have meltdowns, regardless of age. Again, I realize that these children suffer from a plethora of problems, but what did the American parents think? Did they assume that they would whisk these children away from Russia and all of their old wounds and fears would simply vanish? Did it ever occur to the adoptive parents that perhaps the children might be scarred from spending their formative years in a cold institution?

These parents seemed to think because these adoptions had high price tags that they were guaranteed the perfect child. How ludicrous. It seems our capitalist ways have even affected our parenting. Buy the perfect child. If it doesn't meet your needs, take "it" back.