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The Limits of Hope: An Adoptive Mother's Story

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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.

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.

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.

This book should certainly be compulsory reading for anyone who, Like Loux, expects adoption of an older child or children to be an idyllic process in which cute white kids are touchingly grateful to have been granted a home.

It's hard to criticize someone who has had to deal with as many problems as Loux has, but nonetheless her interpretation of events seems highly dubious. She was clearly not informed by the social workers and agency about the level of problems that older children may face, or about the history of the two she adopted - yet at the same time she doesn't seem to have made any attempts to inform herself either or even to have anticipated the possibility of serious problems.

She indicates that both she and the rest of her biological family had "given up on" and were desperately unhappy with the two adoptive children even before the adoption was finalized, but she doesn't seem to have considered that backing out might have been fairer to everyone concerned. She doesn't speculate, either, on how the fact that the family were clearly unhappy with the two adoptees may have affected them - she only mentions in passing that her biological children later confessed to having resented and teased them.

She concludes that perhaps some children are too damaged to be placed in family homes; perhaps it would be harder to accept that her family just wasn't the right one to cope with these two kids.

I first heard the Loux family story by watching Dateline-NBC profile in November 1997. I frantically put in a tape because of its apparent application to the work that I do which is in the area of Fetal Alcohol Syndrome. I was struck with the fact that the adoptive daughters of Ann and Mike have almost every facial and behavioural characteristic of children/adults with this syndrome but never once did anyone suggest that the damaged caused to these young girls happened primarily prenatally due to alcohol exposure. The early childhood traumas, although significant, have likely played less to do with the long term outcome than the Loux family has understood. I welcome an opportunity to share what I know and I hope the family looks into the possibility that the girls "damage" is Fetal Alcohol Syndrome and not due to "bad" parenting. My heart bleeds for Ann...who still believes she is to blame for the outcomes. Prenatal alcohol exposure causes brain damage that is permanent and irreversable.

This book is very disturbing. It is certainly disturbing in the way it was intended to be, as it details the problems experienced by a fatally idealistic family and their two adopted daughters who came from a background of abuse and neglect. One must, of course, condemn the fact that the family was kept in ignorance of the girls' problems. This is explained as a product of the time, in which everyone involved in adoption is described as believing that a loving family is all that is needed to heal even the most severely abused. Now such secrecy would be criminal; 30 years ago it is still an indication of inexcusable ignorance on the part of all the adults involved in the process. The truly disturbing aspect of the book for me, however, is the attitude of its author, the girls' adoptive mother. Although she claims her daughters and the rest of the family were abused by the system, she seems not to see the significance of her own failures. She admits much that must be painful to admit; for example, she sees in retrospect that the two newcomers were always seen as separate in important ways from her already-formed family of two parents and three children. Does she understand how truly awful that must have been for the girls, how lonely it must have been always on the outside, how terrifying to encounter expectations they couldn't possibly live up to? The insensitivity of the mother to her daughters' problems is mind-boggling, never mind that it happened 30 years ago. With all allowances for the difficulties she encountered trying to parent these troubled children--and I would not try to minimize that--she still falls short in understanding that they are the true victims. Instead one has a sense that too much of her rage is on her own behalf: rage that *she* didn't get the support she needed, rage that the girls turned out to be much for difficult for *her* than she expected. It is quite painful to read her monotonous detailing of the girls' delinquent and self-destructive behavior, not only for the obvious reasons, but especially because of the eager tone in which she recounts the outrages and how difficult it was for her to deal with them. She has yet to reach the point where she understands that, whatever her sufferings, those of the girls have been worse, because the destruction is of them, because they entered the family with various handicaps and with no resources to deal with these, and because they were the children and she was the adult. I guess I cannot contradict her claim to love them deeply, but I would like to see her gain a better understanding of their pain and see how her own must take a back seat to theirs. Of course she has been cheated of a normal mother-daughter relationship with them, but life has cheated them of much, much more.

I am the sister of an adopted girl who brought great challenge and heart break into our family. I truely related to this book and in a way felt healed by reading it.

An emotionally honest account that puts parenting in perspective. A must-read for mothers everywhere who have experienced the guilt and helplessness of parenting, both biological and adoptive children.

As a soon-to-be adoptive mom of two sisters (now my foster daughters), I read this book thinking, "There but for the grace of God..."

It is impossible not to read this book and wonder if things might have turned out differently for the little girl who would up a prostitute and cocaine addict. Rather than blame the Louxs, I would indict the system.

Where was proactive support on the part of the adoptive agency? Instead of being offered preventative and supportive services at the outset-- "the kind of services many adoptive families find valuable"-- Ann's first request for help brought a reply that there was nothing wrong with the kids that a lot of love couldn't straighten out. No wonder she started blaming herself when the problems continued and she had difficulty loving the girls, and loving them enough.

The title of this book is inaccurate, for Ann never really gives up hope that her daughter, Margey, will give up her dangerous lifestyle. A better title would be, "The Limits of the System." I hope pre-adoptive parents will read this book as a realistic account of what can go wrong in an adoption, and as an incentive for seeking out the services in their communities which offer counseling, education, and support to adoptive parents and families. But be sure to read "Adopting the Hurt Child" by Gregory Keck for a hopeful word on healing wounds from the past.

The girls who were adopted were not yet 3 and 4 years old, so it is easy to see how optimistic the author was being to readily adopt them. I can't see how the mother giving up a career to sit at home with her kids would be any more helpful to these girls. (She had 3 biological children in the same age range who faired well with her working part time). If anything, it enlightens readers to just much the first few years of life can impact the character and psyche of a child. In this case, the differences between the biological children and the adopted girls were huge. However, in my personal experience, children being reared from birth by the same parents can also have have huge differences in their behaviors.
I feel that the author was just being brutally honest in her assessments of these two girls. I would recommend this book to anyone, but would hope it didn't dissuade anyone from pursuing adopting an older child. Just remember that, unlike many wards of the court who have physical limitations clearly outlined, some children have suffered abuse that may not be clear for months or even years. It is a commitment, to say the least. Also, the time frame is relevant. In current times, these children are studied and tested, and their histories are reported openly before adoption is considered. I know this, because I have looked into adopting an older child.