I think we need to be careful when making judgments like this. When choosing to do domestic adoptions, one finds a large percentage of available children to be black or mixed race ethnicity. So it is no surprise that some white families will end up adopting black children.
And once they have done so, it's no surprise they might want their kids to have black siblings, since they already have white adoptive parents. I don't think this should be seen as a negative thing at all.
And I really don't believe that most adoptive parents choose their children because they 'want it to be about them' or anything like that. I think we end up being brought together in some fashion and it fits together, for many various reasons.
I really hate for this adoptive set of parents to be seen as some representative 'example' of adoptive parents anywhere from now on. :cry:
I don't think most parents are like those examples, I am scared these two might have been like that. I think they did have a lot of honest hopes and desires in choosing to have a family and in how they raised the children, I'm just worried that maybe they couldn't live up to their own hopes, and that in some ways they might have tried to imprint too much of themselves onto the children. I don't think these things are normal in parents, adoptive or otherwise, but I do think it can happen sometimes. I would think they both felt that taking the children to political rallies was a good thing...I guess I think they probably rationalized everything as being a good thing for the children, but it doesn't come across right now as a child-focused family, it feels like all the focus is about the adults and their interests?
We're missing a lot, but the glimpses we are getting seem to lack balance. It's not like we don't have a lot of insight into the kids because they've been hidden for privacy, because the kids have been in the family videos, even one of a teen boy dancing in his underwear. What's missing is glimpses of the children as individuals, their likes and dislikes, their hobbies as opposed to what the moms enjoy doing.
What we've read of the abuse allegation of the girl with bruises on her front and back, aside from the bruising, the girl has added in an allegation of cold baths, head held under water. The other children are all over the place in whether or not they will corroborate her story (no we don't get spanked; yes we do get spanked but with open palms (which wouldn't leave marks like that; she only got a time-out and didn't get spanked (so where did the bruises come from?). I think it was at this point that one of the moms said the girl in question had been lying a lot? With all those variations on what punishment is like in that home it sounds like the other children were told what to say/what not to say and they're too young and confused to all have the same story like they were supposed to. And then there's the bruising which does appear to corroborate at least part of the girl's story.
Then we have a pattern of the women moving every time cps are called. Allegations made to cps and the children are taken out of school and homeschooled. The children aren't seen around the home, playing in the garden or anything like that. The children are taken to rallies and festivals and other things the adults were into.
There was also an allegation at some point that the children were punished by being confined to bed without food for a whole day?
And then three months ago the Dekalbs start to have interactions with the family. A girl running to their house in the middle of the night saying she was being abused. The whole family going over there together to apologize and insist everything is fine. But not long after Devonte is going to the Dekalbs and saying food is being withheld and he's starving, and he requests an amount of food that seems to be enough for six kids.
CPS is called by the Dekalbs and three days after CPS knock on the door (to no answer) the family car is found over the edge of a cliff in suspicious circumstances.
This isn't about other families, adoptive or otherwise, black skin, white skin, mixed race, whatever.
It's about this Hart family.
As far as I am concerned, adoption is just another way people have children and children have families. Adoptive parents are parents, and I prefer them to be called parents than 'adoptive parents' because that's what they are. Regardless of the adoptions, it sounds like things might have been very wrong in this family for a very long time.
I don't think these women adopted for money, I think they genuinely wanted to help some children who needed a good family. I think there's a high likelihood the children also suffered abuse, and if there's so much confusion over the beating over a bath incident, even if Jen and Sarah said that Devonte had food hoarding issues that come from his early childhood, I'm not sure I'd believe them? Not because i don't believe any child has that issue, but because of the bruising, a child scared in the middle of the night running to another house instead of a parent or sibling, more than one allegation of food deprivation being a part of punishments in that house.
