30 Parents Who Adopted A Child And Regretted It Explain What Actually Happened

I’m not a parent but I am an adopted child.

My parents would never say that they regret adopting my siblings and I but I know that they do.

My siblings and I (3 of us total) were in a really bad family situation before. We were taken from our home (for our safety) and were going to be separated.

My adoptive parents had just gotten married. They were married before with kids from those marriages and in their early fifties.

They saved us but sacrificed everything to keep us together. Now that we’re all grown, I see the burden we put on them. They severely delayed their retirement because kids aren’t cheap. They put up with years of us dealing with trauma from our previous life. They gave us everything we needed and more.

All of this while they should have been enjoying the bliss of their new marriage and closing in on the relaxation of their retirement. They didn’t get either of those things.

They got 3 damaged kids.

I don’t know why they did that for us but I am forever grateful. They won’t admit that they regret it but I can only imagine they do.

I'm the adoptee. My adoptive mom had some kidney problems that prevented her from carrying a child. Or so she thought. She was told later that she could have. She told me that had she known then what she knows now that she wouldn't have adopted me and would have had "her own" children instead. I was about 12 at the time and it was devastating.

Actual foster parent here (haven't adopted). I never regret the kids. I completely regret becoming a foster parent, probably mostly because of the county that I did. It's the bureaucratic b******t and the courts and workers that don't care about the kids that I can't stand. I've had some really tough kids, and one had to move because we couldn't keep him safe, but I've loved them all regardless of their behaviors.

Before adopting me, my parents adopted a baby who they quickly learned was deaf. They didn’t feel like they could raise the baby properly so they worked with the adoption agency to find deaf parents who were thrilled to have her instead. At first I thought it was kind of f****d up that my parents would “return” a baby, but it really worked out better for everyone in the end.

I’ve told this story a few times, but we adopted a 3 year old. He had a few behavior issues, which we attributed to trauma and sought appropriate help. He did well for several years, but when he turned 9 he began displaying dangerous behaviors. Hurting animals, hoarding things in his room, making suicidal comments, sexually inappropriate. We ramped up the doc visits and therapy, but he was still admitted to the hospital 3 times before he turned 10. When he was 10, we woke up to our house burning down. He thought it was a party. Spent a few years in a facility, till insurance got sick of paying. They told us we could pay $40k a month to keep him there or bring him home. We have other younger children and his therapist agreed it wasn’t safe. So we refused to pick him up, and now we have a child abuse (for abandonment) record.

I'm the older brother to adopted special-needs twins. They were born drug addicted and 3 months premature.

In the 6 months they lived with their mother before being removed they were physically abused severely. They came to us at 9 months old and in body casts. I was 10.

They didn't talk until they were three. Diapers until age 5. Severe learning disabilities and emotional problems.

They scream-cried all day every day until they were 8. (This had now been the entirety of my adolescence) When they cried they would drop to their knees and bang their heads on the ground HARD. This was an all day thing.

They were violent and hateful toward each other.

They are now in their 30's and have over a dozen children between them that they don't care for.

I'm not going to tell you about the difficulty of having broken siblings or how it effected my development.

I am now 40 and I haven't spoken to any of my siblings in nearly a decade. Crying in any form is a serious trigger for me. I hate children. I got a vasectomy when I was 23. I'm finally in a happy marriage but I can't handle conflict at all. I'm cold and emotionless. I feel like my childhood was taken from me. I will never accept by adopted brothers as family.

A neighbor lost her only child in a car accident when child was 17. Adopted a 6 year old girl, Greta, from a foreign country a few years later when neighbor was 50.

Greta had some emotional & behavioral problems which later turned into psychological problems, neighbor tried various therapists, doctors, drugs etc. Greta ended up running away the first time at 14. And again a few months later. Her main excuse was that she was trying to get back to the family that neighbor "stole" her from. Greta really loved using that as a reason to torture neighbor.

Greta disappeared at 16 for over a year and then neighbor is getting a phone call from a hospital 5 states away. . . .Greta had given birth and seven hours later walked out without the baby but did leave neighbor's name & contact info.

So neighbor is 67 and raising an infant. Greta comes back a year later and basically blackmails neighbor (give her money or she'll steal the baby like neighbor stole Greta). Greta then disappears for a couple of years only to leave another baby in another hospital. Both babies were born addicted to drugs as a special added touch. So neighbor is now in her 80s and is raising two kids who have behavioral & emotional issues.

A woman I worked with had been fostering a ~13 year old girl for over 2 years and had started the adoption process. Girl had a history of trouble with her previous fosters, but had been doing very well with them for the whole time they were fostering her. She was seeing a therapist regularly and everything was shaping up to be a clean adoption process. Then she started acting out suddenly. Hiding things, blaming my coworker and her husband for separating her from her brother, saying she deserved to live with her real mom. She started getting in trouble at school, being disrespectful to her teachers and that sort of thing. They had several emergency sessions with her therapist but the girl shut everyone out.

The final straw was when she accused my coworker's husband of raping her. There was an investigation and she admitted to lying, but obviously they didn't want to risk having someone who would lie like that in the house. It could have ruined her husband's life. The adoption fell through and she went back into the foster care system.

Her therapist said that it's fairly common for children who come from unstable homes to freak out at the prospect of stability once they have it, and begin acting out. Sad situation all around really.

We adopted twins and the experience destroyed our family. Psych admissions, drug use, school expulsions, threats on our lives, starting fires, involvement with gangs, wrecked cars, etc. I could go on. It's the one thing in my life I wish I could undo. We're not alone. I knew one mother in town who deadbolt locked her bedroom door and slept with a knife under her pillow out of fear of her adoptive daughter. Another family had to send their adopted daughter off for a year of residential treatment.

Standard “not my story but...”. My parents best friends adopted a son from Russia as a 2 year old. He is the poster child of fetal alcohol syndrome effects. Violent, learning issues, the shortest temper, the works. His poor (adoptive) parents tried everything. They are great parents and had already raised 3, (two of their own and 1 foster kid). This boy gave them every issue. He was violent and disrespectful towards them, towards teachers, toward fellow students, he couldn’t be controlled. They cried over him a lot. Legally disowned him at 17 after he stabbed their other kid with a kitchen knife

I grew up with a girl who was adopted from Africa, from what turned out to be a super shady agency. They were told they were getting a newborn, she arrived almost a year old and extremely malnourished and neglected. She was terrified of adults, and because of the malnourishment dealt with a lot of pain getting healthy again. The first year was hell, and too much for her adopted dad and he split. By the time I met her she was in kindergarten and a pretty normal, well adjusted kid with a loving and devoted single mom, but I know from my mom that her mom wouldn’t have done it if she knew she would be alone with that unhealthy, unhappy baby. She got remarried when we were in second grade and they adopted another kid a year later, a little girl from China through an agency several parents at our school had used.

A fellow teacher friend could not have kids of her own and her and her husband fostered a child for 5 years and went through the process to adopt him. They were two weeks away from everything being finalized and an aunt came and took the child. The kid (who called the pair mom and dad) and the couple (who thought of the kid as their son) were all destroyed. The aunt had years to come forward and never did and the judge who allowed it was a piece of work. When it comes up she never can decide whether she regrets it or whether it was just a great experience to remember. However, they never fostered again and go to weekly therapy to help them cope.

I’m not the parent. But the sibling of the adopted.

We adopted him when he has 5. Right away there was some behavioral issues but that is to be expected. I mean this kid is getting thrown into a new family and needs time to adjust.

As time goes by, he starts to steal things from me and my biological brother. Lies a lot, and then does some real red flag things like hurting our cats, hit my mom in more than one occasion.

My parents did everything they could for him, therapy, rehabilitation centers, even kept in contact with his biological sister and set up meet ups for them to stay connected.
He was just a terror to my parents, I can’t even explain how much it destroyed me to see my parents be put through everything he did.

In his teens he ends up getting arrested for robbery and destruction of property. When he gets out, Somehow the court systems awards custody to his biological mom and has my parents paying child support to the biological family because legally he is still my parents responsibility. This broke my moms heart.

We(the siblings) are all now adults in our 20s-30s and my dad unexpectedly passed away and when it was time for the funeral, we offered to pay for my adopted brothers flight and he said he would rather have the money that the flight costs then come.

The whole situation is sad. My parents were/are awesome, giving people who completely were dragged through hell emotionally by this kid who doesn’t care.

My dad did admit to me later in life that he does regret adopting him due to the stress it put on him and my mom and how his behavior took away from me and my biological brothers childhood by constantly having to deal with problems he got into which lead to a lot of attention needed to be directed toward the adoptive brother. And my mom won’t admit it, but you can see she has definitely come to terms that he just can’t be saved and he doesn’t want to be.

If I’m being honest, I can’t stand the guy. Haven’t talked to him in 7 years and don’t ever care too.

I wouldn’t say regret. We have a girl we adopted as a newborn who was unexpectedly (by us) born with FAS. Her violence and impulse control issues as a 4 year old scare me to death for the teenage years.

My parents adopted my brother after 5 years of marriage since they couldn't conceive and really wanted a kid. They adopted him when he was almost a year old, that was mid-80s back when nobody even thought that babies need to be picked up and held to ensure correct mental development. Some time after that they got pregnant and I was born.
So my brother (3 yo at the time of my birth) had some developmental issues and having a sibling made it much worse. He became jealous of the new baby and started bullying the little me. Bullying was only the start and he quickly grew into a classic example of an abuser. We have endured 25 years of mental and physical abuse, and all the while my parents did nothing, just took it like martyrs, because they thought that they picked him so they have to stick to that decision until the end.

My brother's behavior was one of the contributing factors to my father's heart attack and death a few years back. My mother tried coping by developing a drinking problem. One of my grandmas died of a stroke the same day he went over to torment her.

I have left them all to rot with each other and moved out a long time ago. I don't want anything to do with a family that sentenced *me* to a life of abuse because of *their* decisions and stubbornness. I think that man belongs in an isolation ward and not a family home.

I'm sure after all the pain he caused my mother regrets ever adopting that child.

A family member adopted a boy when he was 2-3. The process took forever so he was a bit older by the time everything went through. They were dead set on a white boy so they ended up going through an international adoption agency and ended up going to an orphanage in Russia. I am fairly sure between trying IVF multiple times and the cost of adoption they put themselves in some serious debt. After the adoption it was obvious that much of the paper work was falsified, history of the mother was falsified, so basically a stereotypical Russian movie adoption experience.

Physically he is healthy but it became obvious he had developmental, speech issues, anger issues, and autistic tenancies. He is 12 now and my family member has done everything possible to pretend that he is fine because he refuses to have a child labeled as special needs. I am fairly certain they've switched schools when teachers recommend putting him in a program.

My family members wanted a perfect child and did everything in their power to give off that impression to the detriment of the kid. With the right support early on he could have had potential, but their regret and denial essentially setup the kid for failure.

Kinda the reverse for me. My mom had me and tried to give me away until I was 4 years old. My dad kept stopping her.

I have two adopted sisters (biological sisters) who came to live with us when they were 3 and 4. Within the first week they were calling both my parents "b***h" and using other foul language.

Over the years we discovered they both had FAS, one is bipolar and one has Borderline Personality Disorder. They made our lives a constant living nightmare. Any family event that wasn't focused on them would BECOME focused on them, because they do anything to get attention, especially negative attention. I grew to hate most holidays, and especially my birthday, because it would turn into a great big fight.

I don't think my mom regrets adopting, but maybe regrets how she handled things. She's a very forgiving and benefit-of-the-doubt kind of person. I know my dad regrets it, and the majority of their biological kids do. I certainly regret telling my parents I'd be ok with them living with us.

An old friend and her husband adopted a child from Korea. The orphanage told them she was healthy and her Mom was just too poor to take care of her. They had already adopted a kid from Korea and that girl is a good kid, bright and fun. So they didn't worry too much.

Turns out they lied to them. That girl had a lot of physical and mental problems. She has severe mental delays and needs 24 hours care. She throws huge tantrums and hits everyone around. Doctors think her biological Mother was probably on drugs when she had her.

She caused them so much stress that it broke their marriage. They couldn't agree about what to do with her. None of them wants full custody and their older daughter doesn't want to live with her; she's tired of getting hit for no reason. Last time I heard from her they were looking for permanent placement in a private in patient care facility.

Well I'm not the parent but..

I was adopted and sometimes I regret it. I'm a Korean adoptee living in America and let me tell you, I wish I was still in Korea. Besides the racism and stuff that came from living in a white community, the endless questions like "Are you adopted?" really cut deep.
Sidenote: sometimes I get the worst flashbacks ever and they're mainly because of racism and stuff against Asians in regards to the fist parts.