international adoption
my feelings and experiences with a phenomenon that's not well-known, but still well-regarded
author’s note:
i am a korean adoptee and i have some strong feelings about adoption and the shared experiences of adoptees. while i write with an authoritative tone, i should note that all opinions here are my own. while i think what i have to say will resonate with a lot of adoptees, it doesn’t speak for any individual except for myself. this is my first full draft, and it will be adjusted and added to over time.
for those deeply affected by traumas that are common in adoption, i should note that this writing contains references to violence, suicide, abuse, and sexual assault.
ask the average american about their general perception of adoption or adopting internationally and the response will be warm. it makes sense. the common understanding of adoption is that there are children out there whose parents cannot care for them for a variety of reasons, and people out there who would love to be parents. why not match them up? well, in theory, i totally agree. with the problem framed this neatly, the solution makes sense. in all, it seems like a win-win, right? to not act would be the morally wrong thing to do.
lol, well, i certainly will not be the first adoptee to have a dissenting opinion on adoption. one only has to google “adoptee perspectives” to see that uh, at least on the internet, the consensus seems not-so-good on the experience growing up adopted, especially for those adopted across racial lines and internationally, which is what i’ll be focused on today.
but why would i and a visible and palpable majority of adoptees on the internet have a negative reaction toward the major institution that attempts to gave us a chance at a ‘normative’ childhood?
well, let’s go back to a notion i shared in my last post about how the average person, in lieu of direct experience, will default to society’s standard view on an issue, topic, etc. i mean, these ‘operating assumptions’ are cool placeholders so that we’re not distracted thinking about irrelevant shit all day, but they’re totally inadequate tools to use to understand or analyze the thing we’re focused on in any rigorous way.
my opinion of international adoption can be best understood through the following lenses: history of the practice, who adopts, and culture of the places where these children are placed.
history of international adoption as a practice
one of the most efficient ways to establish a baseline understanding of something new that goes beyond answering the question of ‘what’ the thing is in the most basic way possible is to consider the history of how the thing came into being, and how it’s been influenced by people and practice over time to the thing we see and experience today. thinking in this way addresses more granular questions like: does this thing find its origins as an organic practice among people, or is this thing created and marketed to people by a large organization? how did this thing grow from an idea in someone’s head to an institutionalized practice that spans multiple countries and continents? what were the beliefs and worldviews of the people who made this concept popular? who in society is familiar with this concept, and how were they made familiar? and how can we compare anecdotal accounts of something in the micro to our abstract understanding of it in the macro?
when you start exploring big questions like these that really get to the essence of what something is and what it’s all about— then you can really begin to have a nuanced impression of it to compare to direct experience. a wonderful perspective for tentative reflection, but still not enough to be able to speak on it with authority.
but diving right in to the history of international adoption in its contemporary form, it’s origins are surprisingly recent and clear— it’s not like this was an idea independently developed among multiple groups of people that coalesced into popular western consciousness over a long period of centuries: this was a practice created and modeled by one family, the holts, and their resulting organization, holt international:
The wide spread of international adoption began in 1955, when Henry and Bertha Holt, an evangelical couple from rural Oregon, secured a special act of Congress enabling them to adopt Korean “war orphans.” - adoption law: a history of fictions, brandeis university
ok, so before we go any further, this is really worth emphasizing. you know what would lend a practice like ‘international adoption’ credibility? maybe like a group of scientists in a related discipline conducting a 30-year study whose results are corroborated multiple times by other credentialed researchers, recommending that international adoption be made a thing. or maybe some sort of consortium headed up by social workers, anthropologists, and early childhood development experts doing fieldwork and drawing the conclusion that the greatest reduction in harm to orphaned children can be made through international adoption.
but no, again, this practice, as clearly noted above, was started by an evangelical couple and had a ‘special act of congress’ enacted to start all of this. it truly speaks to the stratified notions of credibility and respectability in american society on the basis of race; that if you’re a white christian with grandiose good intentions, you can somehow tiptoe your way into the right spaces to have a special act of congress passed— like lol, are you forreal? how did you get backing based on a statement of good intention alone?
as a thought exercise, can you imagine a black congregation asking to do this? lol, first of all, no, because the first thought that would pop into their mind is that it’s none of their fucking business to poke their head around in a messy international military conflict for a small self-actualization project. secondly, you think any holder of power in government in 1955 is going to get congress off their ass to do something special for a group of black activists? like, man, it really shows how much pull the holts had if their little pet project was able to entangle 6-figures worth of children, and not to mention the millions of relatives affected by this practice over the course of less than 100 years. really shows how much a single party’s idea can have downstream effects on millions. kind of acts as a reminder to be calculating, cautious, and compassionate when conceiving of ideas that can affect the lives and deaths of others, lol.
but with origins like this, i think you can anticipate the sorts of downstream questions that come along with knowing how abrupt the emergence of international adoption was. like, if hundreds of thousands of people have been internationally adopted since 1955, how the heck did it scale up so fast? if that many babies and kids have been adopted in so few years, what kinds of systems are in place to protect children? in a world where you’d be handing over a human child to a regular, flawed, adult human couple, how do you select parents that will nurture these children to become autonomous adults capable of love?
and the sad conclusion i’ve come to over 15 years of researching adoption and adoptee issues is that these important questions are simply not addressed as a part of how the international adoption system is structured. the system is not meant to serve the safety and well-being of children. i can clearly say that the systems we’ve got here and how they’re set up point to an industry that primarily serve the desires and egos of those interested in adopting.
great example of that focus on parents as customers over the safety and well-being of children: did you know that up until 2000, adoptees did not get automatic citizenship? that changed in 2000 when the Child Citizenship Act was passed in congress, but it left a huge loophole: anyone over the age of 18 at the time of passing were not included. so for all of the negligent agencies and adoptive parents that didn’t get citizenship for their children by 2000… well they better not have been born in 1982 or before, because they’re now fucking stateless. no citizenship. no passport. stuck in legal limbo and immigration proceedings with ICE because we collectively cared more about adoptive parents than children. good shit. [thanks to the tireless work of adoptee activists and their allies, work is actively being done to rectify this]
the current international adoption system serves as an arm of the larger american capitalist system and mindset. and that’s not conjecture, the proof is in the numbers. the only way to get international adoption numbers as high as they’ve gotten is to treat children as commodities, source children for adoptions in questionable ways, and to have cracks in a system that go unaddressed to continue to push children through to placement despite the risks. humanity gets lost when metrics are the focus.
and in the case of sourcing children, it’s been found in many, many, many investigations i’ve read that a significant share of children available for adoption placement internationally are essentially stolen from poor families by adoption agencies, christian orgs, and non-profit humanitarian orgs. it’s certainly not guys with furrowed eyebrows dressed in black with gloves stealing babies, but it does take on more mundane forms of ugliness in the form of getting impoverished women to relinquish their babies through religious pressure, guilt, coercion, and abuse.
in essence, the greatest human cost burdens are placed on children and their natural families to satisfy the desires and aspirations of overwhelmingly white adults. think about how long it would realistically take to make the determination that a white couple is not going to be abusive, neglectful, or capable of committing murder. to be able to draw a conclusion with reasonable certainty, it would take multiple people multiple years to make a comprehensive decision. it’s simply impractical. so the system, as it stands, often puts children in the hands of emotional, physical, and sexual abusers in the name of satisfying the desires of would-be adopters, and being able to invoke the rhetorical device of ‘we have done something positive for the care of this child’. the system is inherently broken because its screening practices are virtually non-existent, and adoption agencies are able to operate opaquely under the guise of doing humanitarian work.
lol, so we’ve established that the current mainstream manifestation of international adoption is too poisoned by egocentric notions of self-actualization for white people to be a helpful model for children en-masse because they are not the center of the model. they are not who resources and infrastructure are built around. if that were the case, wouldn’t it make sense that the best thing for a child is to be kept with their natural parents? anyways, with my feelings on the institution of adoption defined through the lens of its history, let’s move on to the question of who adopts internationally.
who adopts internationally?
it’s a question core to understanding the adoptee experience. what kinds of people decide to adopt a baby from another country? or zoomed out a bit further, who even has international adoption on their radar as an option? given that this practice is basically 70 years-old, who has it reached?
conservative christians (both catholic and evangelical)
well, based on published research, the overwhelming majority of adoptive parents are white and christian, with christians adopting twice as often as non-christians. and with those demographics, you’ve got some general commonalities that apply across a majority of adoptions [in lieu of having data on hand, i would pull a figure like 70% out of my ass]:
conservative enough in their worldviews to believe in an inherent goodness of the church, normative notions of patriotism, hawkish in foreign policy if there are any beliefs at all, and a generally chauvinistic, nationalist worldview
fear and disdain for black people and culture, or things and people otherwise foreign
belief in strict rules and norms and keeping up appearances to outsiders
‘vengeful god,' old testament models of punishment
strange repression of emotions and sexuality that is intense in magnitude, and has a high likelihood of boiling over and disrupting the family’s attachment in some manner.
cool.
i mean, looking at it, if you’re white, that’s pretty typical of parents’ worldviews before 2000, so this approach covers a good amount of americans, and uh, maybe most turn out fine.
but the crux of the issue is probably something you’ve already picked up on: what if the child is a different race, would the same approaches and worldviews work in raising an emotionally healthy adopted non-white child?
well friends, i am here to definitely say no. no, they do not. you cannot treat a nonwhite child like a white child in america. you cannot raise a child without an understanding that they are a different race than other kids. you cannot do these things without creating a racial dysmorphia that takes a lifetime to get over. i mean, it makes sense to me: it’s intuitive shit.
see, here’s the funny thing about race, especially with how it functions in the country with a history of chattel slavery/lynchings/jim crow: it doesn’t fucking matter what white mommy and daddy tell you at home, race DOES NOT function based on perceptions of yourself, it depends on how others see you.
so what do you think happens when, in some of the best case scenarios, a child who has been internally raised as white is treated as a subhuman novelty by others outside the home? that creates an internal dissonance: you’re told something that’s stated as a fact, that you’re in the land of the free where all men are created equal, but when you go out into the world, you find peoples’ actions are the exact opposite? that level of dissonance between expectation, your own perception, and social reality is a key ingredient to the severe mental illnesses a good number of international adoptees deal with. anxiety, depression, ptsd, etc.
alright, so let’s assume the issue of mental dissonance due to bad expectations set is the only major manifestation of parenting that does not serve the child. aside from that, the parents are generally warm, loving, supportive, and follows through with all of their major obligations as parents. really, among adoptive parents with ‘generally conservative worldviews’ from an american perspective, this is the best we can expect. and if this is the ‘best’ these folks have to offer, what kinds of things do adopted children deal with who do not have some of the best conservative parenting has to offer?
well, from there the median conservative adoptive parents will have any combination of the following happening in their household: singling out the child on the basis of race, cracking racist jokes or putdowns using language hostile to the culture the child is from, talk about the child’s native country as a backward and savage place. these sorts of things are typical in american households, but when this vitriol is directed at something the child associates with themselves, then it builds very negative associations with that culture’s customs and people. lol, no wonder so many korean adoptees feel weird around asian people in their adulthoods. imagine hearing those sorts of things a few to many times a day for the entirety of your formative years. that’d fuck anyone up real good. and this is just the middle-of-the-road conservative parenting. what about some of the most damaging parenting experiences in international adoption?
i’ll keep the list brief, but it runs the gamut of every sort of abuse and neglect imaginable. beatings. deprivation of food and clothing. sexual abuse. cases like these are unusually and alarmingly common to the point where some countries sourcing children for international adoption were like “yoooooo, these white people are wildin’ and we need to shut this shit down yesterday.”
these experiences are common enough where i expect behaviors indicating past trauma among adoptees as the norm, not the exception.
liberal white parents of a variety of faiths and non-faiths
so if conservative adoptive parents tend to manifest the most toxic behaviors of repression and denial their culture embodies with their children, then are families that are more ‘liberal’ in their beliefs more reliable and credible as people?
lol, absolutely not.
see, for every educated liberal adoptive parent that seems both curious and self-aware like the parents of fang ‘jenni’ li, there are like 9 real nuts. and while i am also someone who has dealt with mental illness in my own life, and hate to toss around dismissive terms so seemingly lightly, but… these people are real weirdos, and in absence of any clinically perceivable formal illness, the only differentiating factor explaining their extreme quirks are their confidence in their white subjectivity and desires. so like, 10% non-weirdos who seem to operate like reasonable human beings with a somewhat nuanced understanding of how the world operates. the distribution isn’t good. ask any adoptee adopted across racial lines who is honest with themselves.
again, think about it. who is aware of adopting? who tries with all of their intellectual might to explore the complexities and complications of what international adoption could bring, only to decide “this seems like a good idea?” frankly, there are so many perspectives to consider here that if you’re able to come to a clean answer, then i’m gonna think you’re either naïve, which is something that can be navigated, or just a selfish fucking idiot with no perception of how your actions can have downstream effects on others for years to come, which is not fixable. unfortunately, as i said with the number i made up above, a vast majority of the adoptive parents who you could classify as ‘liberal’ are the exact brand of ‘white moderate’ that MLK warned of who believe in ahistoric, nebulous bullshit like ‘healing divides’ and ‘uniting’; feel-good platitudes tied to passive beliefs held for signaling purposes more than earnest views that inform how they operate. the black lives matter lawn sign, but calling the cops on black children selling lemonade without a permit-type shit. at the end of the day, their children of different races don’t inform any sort of larger compassion or solidarity with oppressed peoples that affect their actions in the material world, but they would vote for obama for that third time.
functionally, they are identical to the majority of conservative adoptive parents discussed above in that their priorities are centered around their own perceptions, subjectivity, and feelings, and not around the well-being of the child. regardless of liberal-leaning political beliefs, their ability to manipulate, gaslight, and exert control is truly concerning. and again, this MO is not uncommon; this sort of boorish, inept confidence only comes from a social system that allows absolutely wild behavior from only a single group of people. lol, and honestly, i really feel for the adoptee clinicians who try and break the cycles of trauma that previous generations of transracial adoptees have gone through, only for a ‘liberal, open minded’ parent to not want to follow through with a treatment plan because it makes them feel politically or ideologically uncomfortable.
here’s an example of how even the white liberal adoptive parents we like to give the benefit of the doubt end up really fucking shit up: white liberal lesbian couple poses their black adopted kids for photo ops with cops in the wake of unjust police killings of black people, and then murder-suicides all 6 of those beautiful kids and themselves. a god damn terrible waste of beautiful human lives.
regardless of any mental illness that is worthy of compassion, the fact that the situation was able to escalate this far serves as symptoms of two systemic problems:
1. the complete lack of rigor when testing white peoples’ fitness to do anything because they are culturally granted the benefit of the doubt at all times, even something as high-stakes as being legally allowed to raise someone’s children. there is no way to quantitatively test someone’s love and dedication. it’s because of this that rehoming, which deserves an entire piece on its own, occurs. fuckin’ mediocre people givin up on kids they adopted and trafficking them through facebook groups. that’s the real fuckin’ epstein shit going on under peoples’ noses.
2. the fact that ‘child welfare’ systems are set up not to protect vulnerable children against abuse, the systems were created for white wish fulfillment. we have an entire system structured around white peoples’ self-actualization that brings in the additional stakes of disrupting a natural family and uprooting children. and like, with the knowledge of the kinds of things that happen when people ‘fall through the cracks,’ why the fuck would we not be bringing this process to a screeching halt to figure this out like chernobyl?
yes, because again, white colonial perspectives, regardless of party affiliation, inform the very basis for why the current international adoption system exists. it exists because people currently in power like the idea of it; it’s a rhetorical panacea for morons who see it as a binary foil to abortion and it allows regular white people to exercise fantasies of control. the white colonial facets of our collective worldview and discourse must be eliminated if we wish to live in line with the professed values of caring about children's well-being in the world at-large.
in summary on who adopts
so across the political spectrum, at best, we’ve got a whole host of problematic worldviews, beliefs, and experiences that stand in direct conflict with the sorts of experiences young non-white adopted children will face. at worst, we have depraved freaks who are violent abusers who traffic children and create child pornography. on top of that, we have a system designed around white peoples’ fantasies, and the mechanisms to protect children [or lack thereof] convey who the intended beneficiary is of industry efforts.
if, based on my observations, the adoption system appears to have the makings of an institution that is centered on white feelings and based on a very idealistic interpretation of a very ugly and complex set of circumstances, then i cannot support it. i hold any gap in rhetoric and reality up as a measure of how bad a strategy or mindset is. and uh, given the track record producing of a bunch of mentally ill young adults at best, and sexually assaulted and dead children at worst, then it speaks to the larger system and who gets involved in the raising of these children.
where are children placed?
so where do children who get adopted end up living? i mean, in the context of this piece, they get adopted to homes in the united states. and while being american evokes certain cultural images and associations in a global context, the united states is obviously a big country. you’ve got world-renowned cities, you’ve got rural areas, and you’ve got suburbs in between, each with their own distinct regional quirks and flare.
and with all of the places, cultures, and energies in the united states, the places where adoptees are placed are remarkably consistent: a vast majority live in very, very white suburbs and rural areas.
it makes sense. let’s reflect back on who adopts. they’ve usually got conservative values, they’re usually christian, and they have usually adopted internationally with some notion that they are doing paternal charity work through the lens of their perspectives and beliefs. that’s one way of looking at things, especially if you’re a party that’s not on the damaging receiving end of these ways of operating.
so like, with these sorts of beliefs and worldviews, of course adoptees are rarely placed in diverse, cosmopolitan cities and outlying areas on the coasts. instead, adoptees are placed most often where small-minded white people live: rural areas of michigan, minnesota, oregon, and a bunch of other states where there aren’t many people of color, let alone immigrant p.o.c.
this is where white delusions of other people’s behavior manifest, as mentioned above. white adoptive parents, even if they’re not explicitly abusive, simply do not have the ability to comprehend that their children could be conceived of solely in racial slurs outside of the home.
and that’s sort of the core of what leads to the mental health spiral of most adoptees: how can a child become a healthy adult when that they are constantly stepped to because all children around them know that the chink or the brown kid is the easiest to single out?
and that tacit consciousness of hierarchy, combined with desperate attempts in our culture to make sure we are not at the bottom is probably the most common mental manifestation of racism the united states. being the only non-white, adopted kid really, really gets you fucked with in an environment where people would never be able to point out korea on a map.
so what happens when you place vulnerable children with parents who do not have the cultural context to raise a non-white child raises a non-white child in a very white environment, and they are fed into a meat grinder of a society that uses them as a symbol for how righteous the collective culture is, but they’re pelted with physical and mental abuse from peers every day?
well, the sad truth is that they don’t make it.
adoptee suicides are much more common than in the general population. studies have found that adoptees attempt suicide at 4x the rate of non-adopted people.
i too have dealt with feelings of suicide myself as a result of the way i was treated by people in my environment growing up.
in addition to my own feelings, i have known at least 5 adoptees personally who have taken their own lives over the course of my own short 31 years here on earth.
oh, and here’s a real fucking kicker: this level of tragedy even hit the holt family. joseph tae holt, son of the founders of this shit, died by suicide in 1984 at age 32. can you fucking imagine growing up as the only ‘chinese person’ around in the 1950s and ‘60s? fffffuck that shit.
and really, that’s the highest the stakes can really be raised. what does it say about the intersection of being adopted, non-white, and american that suicide is a leading cause of death?
i think it really speaks to 2 things:
as americans we love to act in knee-jerk and cathartic ways without thinking about how it affects others; the things we often like to collectively treat as ‘jokes’ and ‘roasting’ can lead people to take their own lives. words have impact and meaning.
the adoption industry is frontloaded to handle placing children with machine-like efficiency, but no infrastructure has been or is set up to support adoptees after being placed. i’m sure all of us who are internationally adopted, regardless of how ‘good’ or ‘bad’ our experiences are, could use plenty of support resources like therapy by culturally competent professionals, and grants to travel to home countries for some deeper sense of cultural connection. but of course, that’s not how things are structured.
actually, i think some of the best commentary on adoption from pop culture is, ironically, from the sopranos.
tony soprano’s nephew christopher finds out that his fiancee can’t conceive, and when she suggests that they can adopt so that his lineage can continue with the crime family, he responds:
“that’s great! some kid with chinky eyes called moltisanti! he'd get his ass kicked every day!”
and while i think most adoption jokes are tired and cliche, this hits on something very poignant: christopher acknowledges the hostility of the world around him, not just in the crime world, but in new jersey as a whole, would never take a fucking chinky-eyed kid with the last name moltisanti seriously. he doesn’t see the value in trying to raise a strong son in a place that would destroy him.
and as someone who has lived that experience, someone with an italian name and chinky eyes, i can tell you this: i got that fuckin ass wooped every day. i mean, most of it wasn’t physical, thankfully. and i was always scrappy and willing to blow up enough where i was never completely wrecked in any given moment. however, just the constant antagonism of some fucking prick with something to prove wanting to fight the chink is so god damn exhausting. all-day, every weekday, and in every space outside of the house from elementary school until around the middle of high school, when i was able to quarantine myself with nerds in honors classes.
but i guess the thing about me is that i’m still here. i’m here in part because my mind is strong. and my mind is strong only because of the little bits of love i was able to accumulate and form into something that held the world together long enough to leave the shitty, hostile place where i grew up.
and for me, leaving home was key. i’d had the luck of being exposed to more of asia in high school, during what i’d call an asian american nationalist phase in response to the antagonism of living where i lived. the little bits of being exposed to say, japanese and korean people, offered me samples of how much more peaceful, kind, and wonderful the world could be in environments where i was not racialized: as someone who blends in in these spaces, i began to taste the liberation that black thinkers have spoken of poetically for centuries.
but without exposure to the possibilities of the outside world, the horizons of the international adoptees are limited as well. many deal with mental illness and suicide because they’ve never been able to materially experience any bit of the world where they are not treated like shit because their immediate environments are that oppressively toxic and stifling.
so in summary, the places where adoptees are placed are not the sort of places that can work in tandem with parents to cultivate a well-adjusted human being with dignity. if anything, they are direct contributors to the negative mental health of adoptees because the reality of socially interacting in them as a non-white person is physically and emotionally dangerous without any wider community consensus on… non-white kids being human beings, lol.
conclusion
so when looking at transracial and international adoption from 3 primary angles, its history, who adopts, and where kids get adopted to, the results speak for themselves— the practice is rotten to its core. the entire industry and its administrative infrastructure are rooted in satisfying the consumer demands of mostly white christians. that would be a neutral phenomenon if it weren’t for the 400-year legacy of chattel slavery, and an almost equal amount of time colonizing native american land, and overseas territories in the 20th century. with that sort of historical backdrop, maybe it’s not a good fucking idea to send kids to a country whose inhabitants can’t find the country on a map, and whose adoptive parents are too lazy and arrogant to read 5 minutes worth of wikipedia before adopting children.
when people like pro-lifers and adoptive parents defend international adoption as an institutionalized practice, they are endorsing the worldviews and mindsets of powerful, but ultimately racist and provincial people with small perspectives that have never done anything substantial to ensure the mental and cultural nourishing necessary for international/transracial adoptees to live a dignified life.
with how i was straight-up treated like shit as a kid, and the lessons i’ve learned from it, i realize i share more in common with the poor asian families that get their babies stolen by predators than the white society i was raised by and was told that i would be accepted into. i have no illusions of who i am to this society; i accept that i represent a lot of what americans hate, regardless of how i was raised, the expectations set for me, or the contents of my actual character.
i stand in solidarity with all oppressed peoples, non-white natural parents who were tricked into giving up their children, and non-white adoptees who have been harmed deeply by american society’s racism and the systems that exposed them to that harm.
the current institution of international adoption that finds its origins in the 1950s with the holts must be dismantled. it is a relic of a worldview meant to serve the wishes and whims of a paternal white christians who care more about antiquated notions of civilizing the world and having children to mold in their empty image than doing good in the world. my life has been a long arc of pain, discovery, and redemption, and i can’t say that the experience of adoption has offset the positive and transcendent experiences to make for a net-negative existence. however, if i am one of the best case scenarios that one can expect from a practice— and i feel incredibly worn-down and exhausted by the magnitude of the alienation that one generally experiences as an adoptee— then is it really worth uprooting entire families and creating millions of dollars in infrastructure in an uncertain attempt to satisfy another family simply on the basis of where they live and what they look like? like, in the most basic way, a lot of peoples’ knee-jerk reaction to hearing what i’ve said should be “why are we doing all of this shit? to what end?”
put another way: let’s say my own individual adoption was ‘worth it’, was it worth the broken lives of many adoptees who get placed but have NO systems or people to support their healthy development? with the number of the stories i hear, and the magnitude of the pain and injustice some of these people have gone through, the only logical and compassionate conclusion i can come to is no.
let’s get rid of it.
the people who have the greatest interest in the healthy development of any child is their biological parents. all capital, political will, and policy should be directed toward family preservation, fanning out to extended family of the child. we should aim for minimal damage and upheaval in these circumstances. there is no reason to disrupt a family, move a child thousands of miles to be parented by people unequipped to meet their emotional and physical needs in the white gun country.