Karen Springs provides cutting-edge research about how adoptive families wit kids adopted from overseas have progressed. In her new book—THE BACKSEAT OF ADOPTION, she shares How the families she worked with in Europe are currently progressing.
All Rights Reserved. @sherrieeldridge
Karen Springs provides cutting-edge research about how adoptive families wit kids adopted from overseas have progressed. In her new book—THE BACKSEAT OF ADOPTION, she shares How the families she worked with in Europe are currently progressing.
All Rights Reserved. @sherrieeldridge
Good evening, my friends through adoption. It's so nice to be with you again, coming to you from the crossroads of Indiana, Indianapolis. I'm really excited about the guest that I'm going to interview today. I know you're gonna love what she has to say. She's a colleague of mine, a fellow author, and we, um, met Face, face-to-face about a year ago when we spoke at the Christian Alliance for Orphans.
And she is one of the most humble people that I have ever met. And because she would never tell you all these things, I'm going to do a little bit of breaking on. She is a Pacific Northwest native, and she lived in Ukraine for over 14 years, where she advocated for orphaned and at risk children. She worked with hundreds of families.
She has managed humanitarian and child advocacy projects in Europe, Central Asia, the Middle East, through Orphan's Promise. And so now after more than 14 years of working in orphan care and adoption advocacy, she set out on a road trip across the U. S. to explore what happens when, in the time after people adopt children.
This is one of the things that is said about her. Adoption is a tangible way for families to live out their faith in God and fight social injustice. But is a heart to serve enough to help these families overcome the challenges they will face? After more than 14 years, like I told you, okay, she set out on this road trip, and she's using her own experiences and those of the 63 adoptive families.
She interviewed for her book. Did I tell you the title is called adoption through the rear view mirror. She says that she unpacks the lessons we can all learn through brokenness and beauty of adoption. I love that. And this. Poignant and touching book, you'll discover that your family is not alone in the challenges of the adoption journey and surprising treasures can be found in the harder aspects of adopting parenting and gaining a rearview mirror perspective of the lesser discussed aspects of adoption.
I want a perk on that. So anyway, welcome, Karen Springs. I'm so glad to have you here.
Thank you, Sherry. It's a pleasure to get to be with you today. Well,you have had quite the background in being an advocate and all over the world, really. Yes. Now you've got this wonderful book put together. So. What is the main thrust of your book?
Yeah. Well, you shared a little bit in the kind of the background synopsis of the book, but as you shared, I lived and worked in Kiev, Ukraine for a little over 14 years. And in that time I did a lot of different things, but all in the sphere of orphan care and adoption advocacy. A big part of my story, I was 23 when I moved to Ukraine.
I didn't have a lot of experience in the field. I was a naive post college graduate that just wanted to go serve God in a foreign country and went to a place where I had relatives that were already serving. And then God just opened door after door that had me entering into orphanages, interacting with kids and gaining a heart for adoption.
And so I joke that I became the naive advocate at a very young age where. I just started blogging. It was in the time when blogging was just really taking off and I was writing articles for the organization I was working with and just saying everyone needs to adopt. And so I got very involved with promoting adoption, both in Ukraine, among Ukrainian families, and then also in America through various connections through the internet was really just advocating for adoption.
I say that I went from just this very passionate, naive advocate and not really knowing. A lot about the world of childhood trauma and so much happens in, I would say, from the time I moved to Ukraine in 2004 to even, you know, where we are today, 20 years later in 2024 in terms of just understanding the effects of trauma on Children and how it affects them.
Adoption forever changes a family. And I didn't know any of that at 23, nor did a lot of the families that I was working with who came over to adopt. So after working with adoptive families for about 10 years, and part of my story was after advocating is I opened a guest house for American families that were traveling to Ukraine to adopt.
And I just wanted, I knew adoption was expensive and I wanted to help alleviate some of those costs. So I, opened up a bedroom, I put together a blog that said, Hey, if you need a place to stay, you can stay with me for free in Ukraine. And so I started hosting families and over about seven or so years, I hosted close to 200 families that came to adopt.
So that was my exposure to adoption. And then also working with kids in a lot of variety of different ways. And then. Fast forward, as you and many of your listeners know, right, adoption, the rose colored glasses come off very quickly and people start to have real life situations. So one person one day said, you know, Karen, with all the experience you have, you should, you should write a book.
So it kind of was this little seed planted and I had created a chart kind of on a map on my entryway doorway that marked where all the families were from. So I had this like map of the U. S. because most of the families that stayed with me were from America. And I realized like, wow, these families that came to Ukraine to adopt are between California to Virginia, you know, from Washington to Florida.
And how cool would it be to just reconnect with these families and learn their stories? And part of my work in Ukraine, working with Orphan's Promise, I did a lot of producing of stories and storytelling and a writing and a video format as well. So I've always considered myself a storyteller. But we always in the adoption realm, I found that we were always telling the really positive stories.
And even I was guilty of always blogging about the ones that were very rosy looking, you know, from the outside. And so as the years went by and those rose colored glasses for myself had come off, I said, what would it look like to reconnect with these families and just have them give me an honest reflection of where they were now and what did they wish they had known?
What do they wish other people would know before they stepped out? And, you know, what had God taught them through this journey? So I kind of like had this idea, like, what would this look like? So I sent a test email to probably, you know, 50, 60 of the families I knew the best and just said, Hey, if I was to show up at your house and stay for a day or two, would you want to sit down and tell me like.
Everything would, would you be comfortable sharing with me about your adoption journey? And I got so many emails back right away saying, this is an amazing idea. We're so excited. Yes, there's so much we wish we would have known. There's so many things we would want to tell other families. And so that really started the journey.
I kind of started a GoFundMe campaign to raise money for the trip. And I took a three month, four month hiatus from my life in Ukraine. And I did this road trip across the United States and I reconnected, yeah, with 60 plus families that had stayed in my home in Ukraine and I'd stay anywhere from a day to two days with their family and would kind of just interact, you know, kind of see how family life was and then would sit down and have just a formal two hour long interview with the parents.
And it would just be a time for them to share and be real. And so I took copious notes. I did audio recordings. And so I spent about four to six months interviewing families and then another year and a half processing that information and editing the book. So that's the long answer to your question, but I feel like it kind of maps out the book.
Yes. Well, what did the parents want you to know? I mean, what was the main thing? You talk about the rosy colored glasses. Obviously, they had fallen off for the parents. What do they tell you?
Well, you know, that's the beauty of anything is that there was so many different stories, you know, so many different experiences.
And that's what I really wanted to do was I think sometimes when people write their own story, right, if you write your adoption memoir as being an adoptee or somebody else writes their adoption story as being an adoptive parent, it's one person's perspective. So if you had a great experience, right, someone's going to read your book and be like.
Wow, that's amazing. Or if you had a horrible experience, they're going to read that book and say, Oh, I'm never doing that. Right. So when we just read one person's story, we can kind of get like one view. And so that's what I really love about what I was able to do is I was able to capture both those voices.
I was able to capture the voices of like, We had no idea what we were doing. We should have never done this, right? We were not ready for, you know, hindsight's 2020. We see things very differently now. Then there was others that were like, no regrets, right? We see how God has worked in this. There were stories that were smoother, right? Less bumps in their road. And then there were others that were very, very broken. And so because of a lot of the very candid and hard things that families would share about their children, I made the decision early on that I would keep the stories anonymous, that we wouldn't share names of families or children, mostly to protect the children from anything being shared about them.
What emerged through the interviews was just different themes. So in the book, I look at 10 different things that kind of came up in adoption and kind of like sieved through what families were sharing. So like for instance, one topic that a lot of families felt like they were ill equipped for was the integration of perhaps biological children that they already had in their home.
And then a newly adopted child or children, uh, they hadn't realized the effects of what their Children in the home already, how that would affect them or how it would affect the new Children. Just that sibling dynamic. They felt like they were ill equipped, maybe not had read a lot on that or trained in that regard.
So that was a topic that became very clear because I would say the majority, I'd have to dig through and find my statistics again, but the majority of the families that adopted already had, I would say two to three children in the home and living at home at the time of their adoption. So that was a big topic that was uncovered.
And I'd say another one that was maybe not surprising to me, but was a very refreshing topic for families to be able to talk about freely was the topic of attachment, but not in the realm of the child attaching to the parent, which is the very much talked about in the adoption community. They hadn't realized the challenges they would have attaching to their child.
So even as a child was perhaps settling in and seeming to do well, and this was the surprising part about this, is it was often children who didn't have misbehavior. It wasn't like they were causing havoc in the home. But the parents were just really struggling of like, why am I not feeling connected? I don't feel this emotional love for this child like I feel for my other children.
And now I feel guilty about that. And so this whole like guilt, shame, like I'm a horrible person. I don't love this child. I'm just like parenting this child. And that was a really important topic in the book as well. And I think families since that have read the book and kind of written back to me saying, you know, that was so important to be heard in that space of like, wow, I'm not alone.
I'm not the first person to not feel emotionally attached to my child. And what do I do with that? And the book obviously talks about hope in that area too, not to give up hope, but it just kind of acknowledges some real challenges that parents face. I'm curious about the lesser discussed aspects. What would those be?
Like some of them said, I wish we wouldn't have adopted. That's pretty common, isn't it, for parents to feel that way? Yeah. I mean, it doesn't mean they're loser parents
or anything, right? For sure. Yeah. They're in good company. So I think the lesser discussed aspects was definitely the attachment piece, the not feeling connected to the children.
I think another one that I talk about later in the book, and it was a risky topic for me to take on, but one that I felt I needed to, was the topic of spiritual warfare. I was writing, you know, primarily interviewing Christian parents. I know I've had some non Christians read my book, and they're maybe a little thrown by that chapter and don't have a place to put that.
As a Christian, I see the world through a spiritual lens that says, right, there is good and evil, and there is an enemy that's out to kill, steal, and destroy, and that has tried to wreak havoc in the lives of young children who have not been in parental care, specifically in Ukraine. And so I talked just real candidly with some of the families of some of just the spiritual things that they had seen in their home that had really caused them to pray in different ways, to seek counsel and pastoral support in different ways.
So that's another topic that many other adoption books that I've looked at have really delved into is this topic of spiritual warfare and what does that mean to battle that in the home.
Yeah. So how can they pray in different ways, Karen? What did you teach them? Well, it really, the thing is, it's not what I'm teaching.
I'd say it's what the family's taught me. And it's interesting. I'm getting ready to give a talk on this topic in another month or so, so I was just rereading that chapter. And there was one story, it's quite a dramatic story that I always say, it's not your typical adoption story, but their daughter had very much been exposed to the occult.
And once she had come to the United States, had even just dabbled in witchcraft, like had gotten some spell books and had things going on with Ouija board. I mean, it was like dark, very dark, what she had kind of brought into their home. They sensed like there was darkness and there was things happening that were out of the norm in their home.
And so in a specific evening when she was having just kind of this rage and kind of almost out of herself, the dad just really looked at her and said, I want you to speak the name of Jesus. Right. He started praying over her and there was a clear fight in her of like not wanting this. And so he was able to just pray in the name of Jesus, get her to call out for help from Jesus.
And really just saw the moment cool, like a huge shift in the spiritual atmosphere. And then they were able to talk to her. They were able to then find out that she had brought in this spell book to their home and that she had done kind of a seance type practice in their home. And so they were able to just pray over rooms of houses.
And they really said that they saw a shift after that. Yeah, several families talked about just anointing their children with oil, you know, and praying for them and asking their child if they wanted prayer, teaching them to pray in the name of Jesus. So a lot of it was just through teaching. One mom, I remember just, you know, as her kids became more spiritually curious, just started teaching them scripture of like, what does it mean to read scripture and to declare and pray scripture in these times of when you're feeling a certain way.
And as one mom said that. You know, she believes in counseling, she believes in therapy, but without really that intervention of Jesus coming into her kids lives, she really didn't see change until they were able to submit themselves and become Christians. So it was just cool to kind of affirm, you know, a lot of things that we as, as followers of Jesus know, but to see it played out where when you bring a child into your home that isn't necessarily a person of faith.
You're now giving them this spiritual covering that might be fight against that spiritual covering. So what does it look like to be very intentional in your prayers and finding people to pray with you and for your children?
And isn't it true that adoptive parents really need each other? Don't they need to gather together?
Isn't that their main support?
Yeah, that was huge too for families. A lot of people entered into adoption not necessarily having that community and so there were those that were more intentional, I would say, to seek it out and really found solace and comfort by other adoptive parents. There were other families I felt like that maybe had not yet found that support group and still felt a little isolated as they were in maybe still in the earlier stages of their adoption.
But yeah, a lot had said how joining support groups, another fun thing about my book, and we have a mutual friend, Jane Schooler, and she helped with some of the early like reviews of my book. She gave me some initial feedback. And one thing she said very early on as she was reading my chapters, she said, Karen, each chapter just feels like it lends itself to have a discussion afterwards.
Like, I think you should really include discussion questions. So each chapter concludes with about four to five discussions for either personal reflection, where you could journal on the questions, or you could have like a small group of other adoptive families and go through the book and ask each other.
the questions and it would lend to a 10 minute, 30 minute, hour long discussion depending on how many people are in your group. So I really appreciate Jane offering that advice because families have appreciated that. That's great that they can do that and I'm just really curious about what your experience was with the adoptees when you were over in Ukraine.
What was it like to be with the orphans and what were they like when you came back in the U. S. and could you interview them also? What was that like? So that was the attention I kind of wrestled with early on. And I think as I recognized that like, you know, I'd spent so much time with parents, my focus was parents.
I didn't want the book to be like, he said, she said, right? Like, parent's story, kid's story, and have to like try to weed through, okay, like, because obviously there's going to be different perspectives. And I felt like my role for this project was to tell the parent's story, acknowledging that there is another side to each one of these stories.
I did in a few of the homes where I knew the children better, where I'd had a pre established relationship, and I felt like they were older. And could maybe voice a little bit more. I asked them if they'd be willing to sit down with me. So I believe in the end, I interviewed about five or six kids that were in the 18, 17 to 20 range, where I sat down and was able to ask them some, like, what would you want people to know?
And there is, I'm trying to remember which chapter it's in, but one of the chapters kind of flips. halfway through where we hear the perspective of the kid and we hear some things that they wish parents knew, or especially because of the situation in Ukraine. And right now, unfortunately, because of the war, adoptions in Ukraine have been halted for the last almost two years, which is, is very sad.
But prior to the war, it was mostly older children, you know, getting adopted from Ukraine. And so, you know, when you're adopted at 10, 11, 12, right? You're like a pretty formed person. And so a lot of the young people that I interviewed had been adopted at those ages, you know, between 10 and 15. So they were able to just share, yeah, the fears that they had and what was hard for them about getting Siblings overnight or what was hard about suddenly like they had a lot of freedom in the orphanage and now suddenly they're like under rules and all these expectations on them like they didn't know how to be in a family, you know, no one ever taught them and so suddenly it's like there's all these expectations on them and they're just trying to figure it out too.
So there is a section of the book where we do hear from a few of the older adopted kids and some of their perspective. But yeah, there was a mix of kids I would say that were pretty well adjusted. Others that very much missed Ukraine, you know, missed things about even though their lives in Ukraine weren't perfect by any means and they were hard, you know, it was still home.
And I think, you know, even if home is hard, it's still home. And we have to keep that in perspective. I think that's another thing that families learned is like some families can enter into adoption with a bit of a savior complex or a bit of like, I'm rescuing you. And I think the heart of rescue is beautiful.
But if you recognize, like, especially when you're taking a kid out of their culture, right? If you can't really look at it as rescue, right? They're grieving, like they're saying goodbye to a lot of things. And so parents really need to have a space of an awareness of that to say, you know, you are providing a family, you are an answer to prayer in many ways.
What does this look like? But how do we also acknowledge that they've lost a language? You know, for many of these kids, they lost their home language because of the age that they were adopted at. or their language, they don't now speak Russian or Ukrainian as well as they once spoke it. There was that aspect as well.
So how do they get over the trauma that they experienced before they were ever adopted if they were later, like a teen or whatever? Any tips about that? I mean, EMDR or any ideas about how adoptees can recover their trauma brain and get better? So I would say with just pursuing counseling, some families attempted counseling right away, as you and other listeners know, right?
Counseling is really only beneficial when the person in counseling is ready to want to be there. And I think a lot of families maybe tried too soon, tried to put their child into maybe a counseling situation where they weren't ready or didn't even know what that would look like or mean. So, I mean, there is the aspect of counseling.
I did talk to, I believe, a couple of families that did EMDR and saw benefits with it or were exploring it. There was one family, and I write about this family in the book, that did a therapy that was somewhere based in Colorado called fight or flight therapy that uses light, light therapy. So it's all around staring at bright lights and like a rewiring of the brain with light intensive light therapy.
And they saw a massive reduction in their son's anger and aggression through this like daily light therapy that they exposed him to. So that was an interesting one. EMDR was mentioned a few times. Counseling. There was one other thing I was thinking. Oh, and a lot of people went through Karen Purvis's material and did the trust based relational intervention, the TBRI.
And had seen benefits from going through that and changing some of their parenting strategies, just to connect better with their children. It kind of back to what I was saying with the spiritual warfare for those kids. And there were a few that had truly received Christ and were growing in their relationship.
You were seeing a beautiful healing. That was taking place through that. And that was really cool to, to see just how God was healing many of those wounds through relationship with him and being in a secure environment.
And, you know, with adoptees, an area that is very difficult to ever gain access to or to experience is self worth for adoptees.
And I am a firm believer that. It's only through Christ, it's only through the power of God breathing life into that person that we can ever know who we are in God's eyes. To know that we're the awesome daughter or son of the Most High God, but it takes faith in Christ. Yeah. And it's beautiful when you get to see it happening, right?
Before your eyes. That's very cool.
Yeah. Here's my little personal thing here. I was a baby when I was adopted. So what was it like when you went to the orphanages and saw the little babies? I mean, were there lots of them? What was it like? So my very first trip to overseas was in 2003. I was still in college and I went to Russia.
And in, I was outside of St. Petersburg, just near St. Petersburg. And on that trip, I worked in an orphanage. We did some volunteer work and there was kind of what you would imagine, like a room with some cribs, not a lot, maybe eight to 10 and babies. And I remember being so gripped by, you know, the infant and God really put, you know, on my heart, these children and praying for them and knowing I had some kind of role in the future and yet maybe not knowing what that would be.
But fast forward, I moved to Ukraine. So the way the Ukrainian institution system is set up is they have like baby homes from birth to say three or four. And then they have the boarding school in, in English, it translates as boarding school that are from like school age or preschool age through 16 to 18.
So all of my work was primarily in what would have been the boarding school orphanage situation. So kids ages four or five and up. There was a season when I first moved to Ukraine where I was doing some volunteer work. There was a baby hospital in Kyiv where I lived and there was a ward for either sick or abandoned babies that had like also probably eight to ten infants.
And there was a woman who was doing regular work because there wasn't enough nurses to hold and care for. And so we would go in once a week to just help and change diapers and feed. So I think it was early on when I'd first moved to Ukraine, I had that baby hospital experience. But other than that, most of my work with kids in the institutions and we would do summer camps every summer.
And those would always be for kids school age and above. So more of my interactions were with older ones. So Karen, I
mean, you've done so much in your life and what is your vision for the future? I mean, you've got this wonderful book. I'm sure you've got lots of speaking engagements opening up and can you give us any hints about what you'll be doing?
So shortly after the book was completed and I was in the publishing process, I moved back to the US. And so I made a transition back while I left my position with Orphans Promise, who I was working with for the time that I lived in Ukraine. And then about 2019, 2020, I started working with the organization Worlds Without Orphans, which was, is a global advocacy group.
That promotes family based care around the globe and partners with different networks and nations to see really nations come together to solve their own orphan and vulnerable children crisis. So I started working with them, uh, 2019, 2020, and then God actually called me into the world of education and I am now teaching in a Christian school.
I'm still an advocate. I still speak when there is opportunity. I've had several, whether it's these types of engagements or church engagements, just sharing about God's heart for the orphan. But day to day, I'm teaching in a Christian school. I'm a Bible teacher, which is, I'm a lover of God's word. So I'm enjoying that aspect.
But I am also actually currently World Without Orphans is putting on another global forum that will be taking place in Chiang Mai, Thailand in February, which is gathering leaders and from around the world that are working in their nation on behalf of the orphan and the vulnerable. So I am actually going to be sharing on this, the topic of spiritual warfare at that conference.
I'm a part of the organize, the production team have been helping to produce some of the videos and things that will be happening on the stage at the events next month. So though my full time job has me more up in front of kids talking every day in front of young people talking every day, I still am a bit connected in the orphan care worlds and I'm helping with this global forum right now that's taking place next month.
That's pretty exciting. So if people want to have you come and speak, you can always reach out to me at my website is karensprings. com. And there you can read about my book. You can read about my background. There's a couple of videos that share more about the vision. There's a couple other interviews that I've done on there.
And you can message me directly through my website if you would like to get in touch. But published the book in 2020 and in December, this last December, I was finally able to get the audio book up and running. And so I just launched the audio book, which I know some people are more audible listeners than readers.
And so I've had some great feedback from some of my early listeners. It's just five and a half hours to listen to the book. If you don't want to read the paperback version. For adoptive parents who are in the car with kids, right? It's perfect. Yes, exactly. My sales on books are better for the audio than the regular book.
When I published it, I think I didn't know exactly what I was doing, and I thought, Oh, do I really need to do an audiobook? And several people are like, No, you do. Like, it will make a big difference. And even just, I mean, in the month since publishing it, I'm like, Oh, wow. Yeah, they're right. You do actually sell these things.
People are looking for audiobooks. So it's my voice. I'm reading it. I was able to work with a professional producer that goes to my church and he was able to do all the audio for me. So I'm really pleased with how the final production turned out. That's wonderful. So if you could tell parents, maybe some adoptive parents that are discouraged today, what would you say to them?
Yeah, what's funny, the second you said that, a quote from one of the people I interviewed in my book came to mind, and, and she's a lot further along on the adoptive journey, she's raised a lot of adopted children that are now in their late 20s into their 30s. And she really went through the throes of it when they were in their teens, like really hard, in twenties, hard, hard stories.
And not all of them are super rosy now, but a lot of them have gotten, have progressed a lot further down the road towards healing. And she says that she always tells parents to remember that this is just a video clip. This is not the whole movie. And so whatever you're going through right now is just one clip of the story that God is writing.
And that was really the title of the book, right? Adoption Through the Rearview Mirror. It's this idea of when we look back, we see how far we've come. And so maybe the moment that you're in right now as a mom, like, You are so struggling. Like you don't see forward. It's so hard to see, but I just believe if you continue right in faithfulness, uh, seeking God, seeking resources.
I mean, don't like you said, don't do this alone. Like seek help, seek community, right? But I really believe like, you're going to look back, you know, maybe not a year from now, maybe not two, maybe it's going to be five, maybe 10. Like that's the amazing story. I was just reading this morning, the story of Joseph.
And if anything, it's that reminder of like, we have sometimes have to go through many years of difficulty to look back and see the story that God was writing. And as I say, that's why our windshield is really big and our rear view mirror is small, right? So we can like keep going forward. But we can look back and then we can see where we've been and where God has taken us from.
So I would just say, right, if you're still in the messy middle, just keep walking forward. And it doesn't mean it's going to be perfect or amazing, but you will see God at work. Wonderful advice. Could you say a prayer for them, for the adoptive parents that you're coaching? I would love that. And that we can close out.
Heavenly Father, I just thank you for each mom or dad that is listening to this podcast right now. God, you see them right where they are and you know whatever challenges they are facing with their son or their daughter. God, and I don't know what that challenge is and Sherry doesn't know, but, but you see them and you see their pain and you see just the brokenness that they're carrying.
And so God, I just pray for a breath of encouragement today that something may be said today on this podcast was an encouragement word, or that if they read or listen to this book, that they would hear a story that would really encourage them on their journey. But God, I just pray that above all, they see that you are walking with them through this storm.
Amen. And that you're going to walk them through it. God, and we pray for whatever son or daughter is struggling right now. And perhaps just in a really dark place, God, we just pray for freedom for that son or daughter and that hearts would be softened, that minds would be healed, Lord, souls would be healed, and that there would just be an acceptance of their mother's love and acceptance of their father's love.
Yeah, God, we know that you are the author of adoption and their adoption was not a mistake or that they are in this for a reason. And so I just pray that you would guide them in this moment that they are in and just fill them with hope that is found in you. And we pray this in the mighty name of Jesus.
Amen.
Thank you so much, Karen.
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