Va. Parents Trying to Unadopt Troubled Boy

And then there is another reason, one that woke up late one recent morning and, yawning, shuffled downstairs in fluffy white slippers with bells on the toes and nestled onto Briggs's ample lap: a little girl of 5, the child of a former foster daughter and Briggs's legal ward.

"I can't take him back," Briggs said, stroking the hair of the child she chose to keep.

Wrongful Adoption

If it is true what Briggs says, that she really didn't know the full extent of the boy's difficult young life, it would not be the first time.

The first "wrongful adoption" lawsuit was won in Ohio in 1986. Parents were told the 16-month-old they adopted was a healthy infant born to a teenage mother. When the child later developed a fatal disease and exhibited mental disorders, the parents discovered he was born to two middle-age mental patients.

Since then, states have enacted a patchwork of laws and written disclosure policies. Some states, such as Texas and Ohio, give adoptive parents access to a child's entire case file. In Maryland, social workers are required to prepare a written background summary and ask adoptive parents to sign it. Virginia's disclosure policy has no written requirement.

"I have seen so many adoptive parents come back and feel so angry and cheated that we didn't tell them about a child. And we did tell them," said Judith Schagrin, a Maryland social worker. "It's just that at the time, they were so hopeful and looking through a lens of love that they couldn't hear what we were saying."

But sometimes, because of the high turnover of case workers, information gets lost, assumptions get made, mistakes happen -- especially if the child is older. Especially if they've bounced around foster care for years. And especially, Schagrin said, if their sad and broken histories might scare away potential foster or adoptive families.

That pressure has intensified since 1997 because of a federal law that rewards states as much as $6,000 for every foster child adopted.

"I have seen caseworkers. They think, 'Oh, the family won't adopt the child if they know everything," Schagrin said.

Most adoptions take, especially for infants. But for children over 12, as many of 25 percent of the adoptions don't. They simply dissolve.

Separate Paths

Briggs has seen her adopted son four times since he left her home in 2003 -- three brief visits to his out-of-town institution before she decided to give him up and once in court this summer. The child, by turns angry and despondent, had smashed his hand through glass.

"He feels unloved," a counselor noted in his file. "That he doesn't belong in the world."

Caseworkers came to Fairfax juvenile court to ask a judge to send the boy to a secure facility in another state. Though she had no say in the matter, Briggs came to see him.

After the hearing, she asked him for a hug. "Well, I'm grown up now," she remembers him saying before he gave in.

"Do you miss me?" she remembers asking.

"Yes," he said.

Then she returned home, to her grandchildren, her small ward and the new foster daughter who sleeps in the boy's old room.