Reporter Julia Duin suggests that churches somehow conned families into adopting children without warning them about the challenges they might encounter. “Parents,” she writes, “now say that the churches that encouraged them to adopt in the first place aren’t there for them now.” In particular, she says, parents weren’t prepared for the mental-health issues that the children in their care might have.

For some, churches are always the problem. Despite decades of efforts to recruit, train, and support families to foster and adopt children who have been neglected, abused, or abandoned, churches still get the blame when things go wrong. Some of these attacks are drearily predictable. Writers like Kathryn Joyce have made careers out of suggesting that Christians are engaged in child-trafficking, and that the only reason they want to take in orphans is to gain more adherents for the faith. But the most recent attack on churches—in the form of a feature-length article in Newsweek—is perhaps the most absurd yet.

Reporter Julia Duin suggests that churches somehow conned families into adopting children without warning them about the challenges they might encounter. “Parents,” she writes, “now say that the churches that encouraged them to adopt in the first place aren’t there for them now.” In particular, she says, parents weren’t prepared for the mental-health issues that the children in their care might have.

This is a story that might have been written a quarter of a century ago, when Americans faced the aftermath of a rise in international adoptions. Christians had been adopting children from places like Romania, where they had endured neglect in institutions and had developed severe attachment disorders as a result. Just two years ago, in fact, The Atlantic ran a moving piece on the subject, describing a child named Izidor who was adopted from a Romanian institution at the age of 11 in 1991. He was never able to adapt to live in the home of the San Diego family who took him in. Ultimately, his violent outbursts and their inability to afford a psychiatric hospital for him led him to move out at the age of 18. As he told the author, “I’m not a person who can be intimate. It’s hard on a person’s parents, because they show you love and you can’t return it.” In the mid-to-late 1990s, the news was full of stories about such damaged adopted children. Indeed, more than one parent tried to send their child back.

So troubling were these experiences that child-development experts developed a program about 20 years ago to help kids who had experienced this trauma to learn how to function in a family. Foster parents and child-welfare systems around the country now use Trust-Based Relational Intervention (TBRI) to help children adopted internationally and from foster care.

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