Life Quest Foundation: Help Keep Adopted Families Together

The Life Quest Foundation is focused on helping adopted families stay together. Most people don't want to talk about the pain and the trauma that can accompany adoption. However unglamorous it may be, it still deserves to be talked about and it still deserves compassionate efforts to help those who are affected by it. One of the most difficult aspects of adoption is the array of attachment disorders that many of the adopted children suffer from. One of the most encompassing disorders is Reactive Attachment Disorder (RAD). For those who are unfamiliar with RAD, it is a devastating disorder that affects mostly adopted children who have been unable to develop or form healthy emotional bonds with their parental figures. RAD is a trauma response typically due to emotional neglect or abuse at an early age. RAD can, however, also develop in adopted children who have been adopted at birth. This happens when the child develops a traumatic response to the abandonment of their biological parents. Children with RAD have trouble managing their emotions, keeping themselves and those around them safe, and forming meaningful connections with other people. Children with RAD rarely seek or show signs of comfort and may seem fearful and anxious around their caregivers because their fight or flight response is usually always active. This can happen even when, or quite typically—especially when, their caretakers are loving and caring.

The Life Quest Foundation was born so that families could receive scholarships in an effort to keep their families intact by using temporary out-of-home placement. This placement is temporary but often necessary to work through the disorder. This often means that parents have to painfully put aside what they want their family to look like, or the idea of what raising their adopted child looked like, in an effort to actually put them first so they can keep the family together. If out-of-home placement means that parents can still maintain a parent/child relationship with their child with RAD, but at a distance that feels safe for them, then that option should be available before relinquishment becomes a reality. Because of the far-reaching effects of RAD and the life-threatening scenarios that face the adopted children and their families, these children with attachment disorders are then put back into the foster care system, only to have their disorder validated and worsened with more inconsistency and more broken families. Too many adopted children are relinquished or given back to the foster care system because families are burdened with the effects of attachment disorders and do not have the resources they need in order to get the help their adopted children and their family needs to ultimately stay together.

If The Life Quest Foundation can help one child with Reactive Attachment Disorder, then we have saved a family. Every child deserves a family and every child deserves the opportunity to keep their family, despite how much trauma they have to work through.