Ann Kimble Loux's book, The Limits of Hope, is the story of her adoption of two girls, ages three and four, after she and her husband had had three biological children. It will no doubt be read by many people in many different ways. Some will come away with a sense of outrage at a system that would place children with a traumatic history with a family and fail to convey to them any of that history. Some will be outraged at the lack of preparation the family had prior to taking on the challenge of raising two such damaged children. Some will be shocked at the apparent inability of an upper middle-class family, with highly educated parents, to get access to appropriate information and services they needed for their children. Yet others will be heartened to read of a family that stuck with their difficult children, when so many such adoptions are disrupted (i.e., the adoption fails and the child is back in "the system").

At the time when Ms. Loux adopted her daughters, it was common thought that even children with traumatic histories would be fine as long as they were given some stability and love. It was also common practice not to disclose to the adopting family any confidential information about the children's prior life. This has changed. We now know that early childhood trauma is not something that will just heal itself (for most children), and prior to the adoption of older children, comprehensive information about their backgrounds and histories is given to the adoptive family. However, much of what Ms. Loux has to say about her experience is still relevant. More and more, older and older children are being placed with families for adoption. It can be a lifeline for those children - but the families need to understand what they are undertaking. Ms. Loux seems to believe that these children probably cannot be raised in families, because she views her children's adoption as, essentially, a failure. While her assessment of her family's experience is no doubt accurate, I would take issue with generalizing it to the entire population of hurt children who are finding loving, permanent families.

There is practically no discussion in the book about how Ms. Loux dealt with the schools - no individual education plan meetings mentioned, no special education. There is little mention of therapeutic services for the children or the family as a whole. These are serious omissions, either in the book or in the provision of care to the girls. Clearly, children with as many problems as these children had needed therapeutic intervention and special education services. If the omission is in the book, it is a shame, because information on dealing with these service providers is invaluable for parents with special needs children (and virtually all older adopted children have special needs). If the omission is in the care, it is disturbing: Ms. Loux and her husband were both educators, and her brother is a psychiatrist. It was difficult to understand, while reading the book, why Ms. Loux was not getting more, and earlier, help from her brother, and why the family was not receiving more services.

The tone of the book was relentlessly despairing. I could not help but wonder whether there was no joy in the family's life. Was the negativity the result of the difficulties, did it contribute to it, or was it part of a spiral over which no one was able to gain control? I also had no sense of how the presence of the adopted children affected the biological children, or the parents as a couple, and those are things that would have been of great interest to readers. As a parent of one child adopted "through the system" and two biological children, I wanted to read about the ways the adopted and biological children affected each other - both good and bad. Another issue which would have been important to address is that of the dual career family. Both Ms. Loux and her husband had full time careers. It is possible that a dual career family cannot meet the needs of children who are suffering the effects of early childhood trauma. It may be that someone needs to be more available: both to the children on a day-to-day basis, and to the schools, the therapists, and when necessary, hospitals and partial hospitalization programs.

For families who are considering adopting an older child, or who have already done so, this book is important in that it points out, with brutal clarity, the difficulties that they may face. What is missing is the positive aspects of such adoption: despite the extraordinary difficulty of raising such children, there are the moments of joy, of accomplishment, of triumph. While Ms. Loux at times bemoans her inability to have adjusted her hopes and expectations to the reality of who her children were, she does not seem, even now, to have come to peace with the fact that their dreams are not the same as her dreams for them. All parents have to come to terms with that; even more so adoptive parents of older children. Prospective adoptive families need to hear: "Your life will change in ways you cannot imagine. You must think carefully about your biological children and how this will affect them. But if you hang in there with your child, and can be proud of his/her victories, however small, because they are his/hers, if you can focus on your child and his/her needs and wants, you may save a life, and enrich your own." Ms. Loux has made it clear, however, that if people think that they can adopt children whose early lives have been traumatic and incorporate them into a "normal" upper middle-class home with little upheaval, they are setting up everyone - the parents, the families, and the children - for a terrible fall.

This book is very disturbing. It is certainly disturbing in the way it was intended to be, as it details the problems experienced by a fatally idealistic family and their two adopted daughters who came from a background of abuse and neglect. One must, of course, condemn the fact that the family was kept in ignorance of the girls' problems. This is explained as a product of the time, in which everyone involved in adoption is described as believing that a loving family is all that is needed to heal even the most severely abused. Now such secrecy would be criminal; 30 years ago it is still an indication of inexcusable ignorance on the part of all the adults involved in the process. The truly disturbing aspect of the book for me, however, is the attitude of its author, the girls' adoptive mother. Although she claims her daughters and the rest of the family were abused by the system, she seems not to see the significance of her own failures. She admits much that must be painful to admit; for example, she sees in retrospect that the two newcomers were always seen as separate in important ways from her already-formed family of two parents and three children. Does she understand how truly awful that must have been for the girls, how lonely it must have been always on the outside, how terrifying to encounter expectations they couldn't possibly live up to? The insensitivity of the mother to her daughters' problems is mind-boggling, never mind that it happened 30 years ago. With all allowances for the difficulties she encountered trying to parent these troubled children--and I would not try to minimize that--she still falls short in understanding that they are the true victims. Instead one has a sense that too much of her rage is on her own behalf: rage that *she* didn't get the support she needed, rage that the girls turned out to be much for difficult for *her* than she expected. It is quite painful to read her monotonous detailing of the girls' delinquent and self-destructive behavior, not only for the obvious reasons, but especially because of the eager tone in which she recounts the outrages and how difficult it was for her to deal with them. She has yet to reach the point where she understands that, whatever her sufferings, those of the girls have been worse, because the destruction is of them, because they entered the family with various handicaps and with no resources to deal with these, and because they were the children and she was the adult. I guess I cannot contradict her claim to love them deeply, but I would like to see her gain a better understanding of their pain and see how her own must take a back seat to theirs. Of course she has been cheated of a normal mother-daughter relationship with them, but life has cheated them of much, much more.

As a parent whose experiences are similar to Loux's I was grateful beyond words that someone has had the courage to publish a story like the ones I hear in whispers about "my friend, my sister, my cousin" who has experienced a troubled adoption. I mean the stories where there isn't an upbeat ending about the power of faith, or hope or unconditional love. Why do I hear so many of these stories and see so few in print? It's time that people who have spent countless days and nights and dollars in a fruitless quest to reach a troubled child be heard and believed and not blamed. Thank you Ann Kimble Loux.