Of course I understand that there are reasons why parents would willingly give up their rights to their children. People do it all the time when they put their babies up for adoption. My husband adopted our oldest child. I had her when I was young, her biological father was not ready to be a father, and he was all too happy to sign away his rights and allow someone else to take over that role. I don’t blame him for that; he was young too.
I guess I always just assumed that this happened only with babies, though. Mothers and fathers who were not ready for children and wanted to make sure their child had the best possible life. I imagined it was, in most if not all cases, something extremely difficult done out of absolute love for the child, a completely non-selfish and beautiful act.
I recently discovered that parents can voluntarily relinquish their rights to their older children too. Children they have already lived with, cared for, and (hopefully) loved. Children they have had an opportunity to bond with, to grow attached to.
Apparently there are a lot of reasons parents would want to give up their children. Alcohol or drug addiction, financial struggles, physical disabilities, mental or emotional health issues. I suppose these are understandable; I don’t like to judge another person’s actions if I can avoid it, as I never fully understand what they are going through.
But, I learned recently of a mother who decided that she just didn’t want her child back in her home. She had other children, and even though this child had been abused and neglected and it was not her fault that she was having such difficulties, the mother decided that she couldn’t deal with her anymore, and that she couldn’t risk her other children for her either.
What sort of message does that send? Isn’t that essentially telling the child that the other children are more important, and that he or she is no longer worth the effort?
Here is a similar case of a family in Illinois who decided to give up their adopted child because she was a danger to the other children in the home. And a case of a couple in Nebraska who used the state’s safe-haven law to drop off their twelve year old at a hospital. Interestingly, the state of Nebraska originally failed to include an age limit in their version of the law, resulting in a number of children over the age of ten being abandoned under safe haven protection. The law has since been revised, but are there really that many parents willing and ready to give away their children if the opportunity presents itself?
I can’t imagine giving up any of my children, and I always thought that any parent in their right mind would fight to keep their children with them, to love them, provide for them, and protect them.
At what point does a parent decide that their child is no longer worth fighting for?