There've been multiple exposés of this whole underground network of people just giving kids away to strangers on Craigslist, bypassing the legal process for surrendering parental rights - almost universally someone who adopted a child and then regretted it It's so so fucked
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It SHOULD NOT be the case that adoptive relationships are any different than biological ones but IN REALITY they are In theory we do all this vetting and training to try to eliminate potential adopters who will throw out a kid like trash but it still happens so damn often
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It's like stepparents I remember reading all the articles profiling great stepparent relationships and loving blended families and saying "We wish people would retire the stereotype about the evil stepmother from fairy tales"
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Then I got to college and actually had a prof who had written a book exhaustively doing research on stepparents that said "No sorry the fairytales are accurate"
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"Congratulations to your family if your family is an exception but our ancestors wrote about evil stepparents all the time because that's a basic common pattern that happens and our society hasn't changed that much" Abuse and neglect of children by stepparents is fucking rampant
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(It's arguably misogynistic that the stories focus so much on evil stepmoms when it's stepdads who are responsible for the most horrific and yet sadly common stories of abuse But the stats about how often stepparents are involved in CPS reports are really really stark and grim)
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I'm not saying this as some great defense of the ties of blood, as someone who has plenty of literal scars from blood family
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I almost want to say it in the much more cynical sense - bio parents with 100% of all the weight and pressure of our culture saying you MUST love your kids because they are your FLESH AND BLOOD and a PART OF YOU nonetheless still abandon their kids alarmingly often
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And it's like if you relax that enormous pressure by even just a little bit, you give them that one psychological out - "He isn't even really your kid" - people's eagerness to dip out when things get hard becomes overwhelming It's depressing as hell
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I’m biased because I’m an adoptive parent, but it seems to me there’s a critical difference between adoptive parents and step-parents, in that step-parents may or may not want to be parents at all, whereas adoptive parents at a minimum have the desire to be parents
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Obvs adults in all types of families abuse children in all types of families, but I seriously doubt that adoptive parents abuse at the disproportionate high rate that step-parents do
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