I’ve had a lot of emails from other frustrated adoptive parents, many are complaining about a lack of available out-of-home placements in their area, leaving these exhausted parents to try and keep their families safe while managing out-of-control behaviors in disturbed children.

Bluntly put, there are some children who can not, should not live at home and this doesn’t mean that the adoptive parents failed to parent. Don’t condemn yourselves; there are plenty of others who’ll be happy to do that for you, but no one who’d be willing to live like you’ve been living.

Outsiders to the adoption world, especially within the older child adoption arena, do not understand the level of anger that we live with on a daily basis. There are times when we are not safe from our raging children.

For the safety of our families we must sometimes find out-of-home placements. Safety not being the only reason, I’ll cover more reasons later.

I can only speak from my own experiences but I have found that a county’s local mental health facilities or the psychiatric ward of a hospital are good starts. If a child has threatened someone, call 911. You, as a parent, have no choice. You have to protect everyone, not tell the police later, “Well I didn’t think he’d do it.”

Often children threaten to harm themselves and that too needs immediate attention of professionals.

Usually it’ll result in a two week evaluation period, not enough to get help, but maybe buying the parent enough time to seek more help.

If the child, and I use the term ‘child’ loosely, is breaking the law, call juvenile authorities. Don’t think this behavior will stop without help, likely it will escalate and you, as the parent, have a legal responsibility to do the right thing, no matter how hard it seems at the time. It is infinitely harder to enable a child and then live with those results.

Another possible out-of-home placement is the National Guard’s Youth Challenge Program. I’ve used it twice on two sons who were having a difficult time in high school. It taught them discipline and got them educated. I highly recommend it.

I’ll explore this further in upcoming posts.

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