The Limits of Hope: An Adoptive Mother's Story [Hardcover]

Ann Kimble Loux (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: July 22, 1997

"Adopting a child is an act of love. When that child is no longer an infant but has a history of abuse and neglect, integrating it into an existing family is a challenge. Loux tells the story of her family's decision to adopt two sisters removed from their alcoholic biological mother. The adoption agency refused to provide any history of the children's birth parents, though both girls had major psychosocial and genetic problems that caused great stress for the adoptive family. This personal account tells of Loux's attempt to raise these girls along with her three biological children. Unfortunately, it is full of self-pity and guilt. The most interesting part is the conclusion, where she suggests alternatives to traditional adoption for the care of troubled older children."--Library Journal

Editorial Reviews

From Library Journal

Adopting a child is an act of love. When that child is no longer an infant but has a history of abuse and neglect, integrating it into an existing family is a challenge. Loux tells the story of her family's decision to adopt two sisters removed from their alcoholic biological mother. The adoption agency refused to provide any history of the children's birth parents, though both girls had major psychosocial and genetic problems that caused great stress for the adoptive family. This personal account tells of Loux's attempt to raise these girls along with her three biological children. Unfortunately, it is full of self-pity and guilt. The most interesting part is the conclusion, where she suggests alternatives to traditional adoption for the care of troubled older children. Gregory Keck and Regina M. Kipecky's Adopting the Hurt Child (LJ 10/1/95), which offers practical advice for adoptive parents in this situation, is a more useful book. An optional purchase.?Barbara M. Bibel, Oakland P.L., Cal.
Copyright 1997 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Kirkus Reviews

An adoptive mother's agonizing account of her efforts to parent two troubled siblings. Loux (English/St. Mary's Coll.) challenges the notion that a nurturing environment can overcome genetic temperament and early deprivation. After giving birth to three healthy children, she and her husband decided that they would like to give a home to disadvantaged children. Dissuaded by the prejudices of their parents from embracing a biracial or Asian child, the Louxs adopted Margey and Dawn, three- and four-year-old white children from a local Catholic agency. From early on, the girls were unable to integrate successfully into the Loux family. As youngsters, their impulsive and erratic behavior impaired their ability to function in school or in any social context. Impetuous and reckless, both girls wrought havoc on the lives of the Louxs and their other children. As Margey entered her teens, she turned to drug abuse, lawlessness, and indiscriminate sex. She now works as a prostitute to support a drug habit and--despite stints in and out of jail--is, Loux says, ``much happier with her life than [when] she was living with our family, and probably happier now than in any of the scenarios I wanted for her.'' Dawn, too, left home early and is currently grappling with her young husband to raise two developmentally disabled children with minimal financial resources. Their mother contends that her harrowing experiences in raising ``hard to place'' children, whosebackgrounds were shielded from her, are far from unique. Loux questions the wisdom of adoptive policies that do not prepare parents for the realities of raising high-risk children and goes so far as to propose that children like Margey or Dawn might do better if raised in group homes. A forceful and disturbing memoir, but the reader doesn't get a full damage report on Margey's and Dawn's impact on the author's marriage and biological children. -- Copyright ©1997, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 280 pages
• Publisher: University of Virginia Press; First Edition edition (July 22, 1997)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0813917107
• ISBN-13: 978-0813917108
• Product Dimensions: 9.2 x 6.2 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.3 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (17 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,268,576 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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14 of 14 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars An important perspective, yet it should not be generalized, November 3, 2000

By A Customer

This review is from: The Limits of Hope: An Adoptive Mother's Story (Hardcover)

Ann Kimble Loux's book, The Limits of Hope, is the story of her adoption of two girls, ages three and four, after she and her husband had had three biological children. It will no doubt be read by many people in many different ways. Some will come away with a sense of outrage at a system that would place children with a traumatic history with a family and fail to convey to them any of that history. Some will be outraged at the lack of preparation the family had prior to taking on the challenge of raising two such damaged children. Some will be shocked at the apparent inability of an upper middle-class family, with highly educated parents, to get access to appropriate information and services they needed for their children. Yet others will be heartened to read of a family that stuck with their difficult children, when so many such adoptions are disrupted (i.e., the adoption fails and the child is back in "the system").

At the time when Ms. Loux adopted her daughters, it was common thought that even children with traumatic histories would be fine as long as they were given some stability and love. It was also common practice not to disclose to the adopting family any confidential information about the children's prior life. This has changed. We now know that early childhood trauma is not something that will just heal itself (for most children), and prior to the adoption of older children, comprehensive information about their backgrounds and histories is given to the adoptive family. However, much of what Ms. Loux has to say about her experience is still relevant. More and more, older and older children are being placed with families for adoption. It can be a lifeline for those children - but the families need to understand what they are undertaking. Ms. Loux seems to believe that these children probably cannot be raised in families, because she views her children's adoption as, essentially, a failure. While her assessment of her family's experience is no doubt accurate, I would take issue with generalizing it to the entire population of hurt children who are finding loving, permanent families.

There is practically no discussion in the book about how Ms. Loux dealt with the schools - no individual education plan meetings mentioned, no special education. There is little mention of therapeutic services for the children or the family as a whole. These are serious omissions, either in the book or in the provision of care to the girls. Clearly, children with as many problems as these children had needed therapeutic intervention and special education services. If the omission is in the book, it is a shame, because information on dealing with these service providers is invaluable for parents with special needs children (and virtually all older adopted children have special needs). If the omission is in the care, it is disturbing: Ms. Loux and her husband were both educators, and her brother is a psychiatrist. It was difficult to understand, while reading the book, why Ms. Loux was not getting more, and earlier, help from her brother, and why the family was not receiving more services.

The tone of the book was relentlessly despairing. I could not help but wonder whether there was no joy in the family's life. Was the negativity the result of the difficulties, did it contribute to it, or was it part of a spiral over which no one was able to gain control? I also had no sense of how the presence of the adopted children affected the biological children, or the parents as a couple, and those are things that would have been of great interest to readers. As a parent of one child adopted "through the system" and two biological children, I wanted to read about the ways the adopted and biological children affected each other - both good and bad. Another issue which would have been important to address is that of the dual career family. Both Ms. Loux and her husband had full time careers. It is possible that a dual career family cannot meet the needs of children who are suffering the effects of early childhood trauma. It may be that someone needs to be more available: both to the children on a day-to-day basis, and to the schools, the therapists, and when necessary, hospitals and partial hospitalization programs.

For families who are considering adopting an older child, or who have already done so, this book is important in that it points out, with brutal clarity, the difficulties that they may face. What is missing is the positive aspects of such adoption: despite the extraordinary difficulty of raising such children, there are the moments of joy, of accomplishment, of triumph. While Ms. Loux at times bemoans her inability to have adjusted her hopes and expectations to the reality of who her children were, she does not seem, even now, to have come to peace with the fact that their dreams are not the same as her dreams for them. All parents have to come to terms with that; even more so adoptive parents of older children. Prospective adoptive families need to hear: "Your life will change in ways you cannot imagine. You must think carefully about your biological children and how this will affect them. But if you hang in there with your child, and can be proud of his/her victories, however small, because they are his/hers, if you can focus on your child and his/her needs and wants, you may save a life, and enrich your own." Ms. Loux has made it clear, however, that if people think that they can adopt children whose early lives have been traumatic and incorporate them into a "normal" upper middle-class home with little upheaval, they are setting up everyone - the parents, the families, and the children - for a terrible fall.

9 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars accepting limits, September 1, 2004

By 

Michael E. Major (Suisun City, CA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Limits of Hope: An Adoptive Mother's Story (Hardcover)

In many ways the authors eperiences are scary in their simularity to mine. My wife and I adopted two little girls, age 4-5 at the time, from the county after taking months of parenting classes and being given access to all the information that the county had available.... Still we had no realistic idea of how difficult it was going to be and how radically our lives would change. It was like trying to heard cats, they were extreamly impulsive, rebellous and raged at us for everything wrong in their lives, often including physical abuse of us and our house. A few years later we had an unexpected biological child who is in most ways just the opposite of J n L and things really got lively, runnaway, theft, drug and alchol use. At about age 14 we borrowed enough to send the eldest from a mental hospital to a behavior modification program in Utah. She spent about 1.5 years there, it did not make her a "model Child" but did change the direction of her life. Upon her return she made a serious suicide attempt and my wife, declaring she had had enough, took the youngest child and left me with the two adoptive teenagers.
At about this time my mother in law loaned us a copy of "The Limits of Hope", it was a real eye opener for me because her eperiences were so simular to ours. I did not reach the conclusion that a group home would be better for them, we had tried that with the oldest, she just ran away at will from them like she did us, but it did help me to understand that it is not realistic to expect them to be like their younger sister and to try a different direction. I lifted the thousand and one rules, complete with rewards and punishments, that we had imposed in a failed attempt to provide "structure" and just settled for open communication and letting them suffer the consiaquences of their own actions. I have had to bail both of them out at one time or another, wound up home schooling them both but the anger level has gradually subsided as they learn to take charge of their own lives. The eldest is now a sophmore in college and the youngest.....I still have hope, limited of course.
So, while I reached some different conclusions than the author, the book came to me at a critical time in my life and helped me understand that I needed to see my adoptive children as they are, not as I/we wished them to be. And, it helped me admit to myself and them that I did feel differently about them than I do about their sister and give up the romatic notion that we can treat all of them the same and expect the same results.

8 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Hurrah from another outlaw, October 22, 2000

By A Customer

This review is from: The Limits of Hope: An Adoptive Mother's Story (Hardcover)

As a parent whose experiences are similar to Loux's I was grateful beyond words that someone has had the courage to publish a story like the ones I hear in whispers about "my friend, my sister, my cousin" who has experienced a troubled adoption. I mean the stories where there isn't an upbeat ending about the power of faith, or hope or unconditional love. Why do I hear so many of these stories and see so few in print? It's time that people who have spent countless days and nights and dollars in a fruitless quest to reach a troubled child be heard and believed and not blamed. Thank you Ann Kimble Loux.