In this post I mentioned the fact that Deb Hannah’s daughter framed her time in college by the events surrounding her troubled adoptive siblings. She started college at the peak of a family crisis, and graduated the day after the last of five troubled children left the family. The fact that Deb’s healthy children’s lives were so affected by the unhealthy children is one of her greatest regrets.


I completely and totally understand that sadness and concern. And the truth is, we are talking about healthy vs. unhealthy kids here, more than adopted vs. biological. Beth is healthy, and she is impacted by the less healthy members of our family. Kids who require an inordinate amount of family time, energy and resources most definitely affect family dynamics in many, many ways.


I know of a family that had 5 biological kids—boy, girl, and 3 more boys. Two of the boys (first and third) developed a degenerative disease and required time, energy and financial resources that profoundly affected the family. The girl grew up much too fast and her childhood was significantly affected by her family dynamics. She was a caretaker for much of her youth. But what could her parents have done differently? They were all surviving, all doing the best they could. They certainly didn’t choose that outcome.


Few families choose to rain pathology upon their home. While some experienced parents knowingly adopt troubled and traumatized kids, the vast majority of parents struggling with challenging children had no idea what they were really getting in to… no matter how good their pre-adoptive preparation might have been. Correct me if I am wrong … but that certainly has been my experience.


I asked Steph how she viewed her childhood. Did she emerge scathed and traumatized herself as a result of our family’s experiences? She said it was just normal to her. She didn’t realize how different our family was until high school and college.


When she views videos of some of the more traumatic times, or we simply verbally relive those more crisis-driven moments, she acknowledges that she has an emotional response to those experiences. She can feel the stress again. But she doesn’t live in that stressed state constantly. I told her how hard I worked to make things as normal for the healthy kids as possible. I worked hard to keep our life as normal as possible in between the false allegations of abuse, the hospitalizations and cops at our door, the school on my case 24/7 (the same school that my healthy children attended, at least for a while.)


If you read Deb Hannah’s book, you learn about the family vacations, home schooling, fun things and normal family interactions that occurred in the Hannah home. Normalcy bracketing inconceivable dysfunction. I know how that looks …


Steph would be the first to echo what I stated in this post. She wouldn’t necessarily wish her experiences on anyone, but she wouldn’t want to have missed the opportunities for growth and development that those experiences afforded her. I’m proud of her and I think she survived just fine!


Here is an article on altered family dynamics when parents are dealing with a chronically ill child. The article is primarily written for families who are dealing with a physically ill child but the sibling section rings true for us!