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All children present unique challenges, yes, but when you adopt you have to become acquainted all those challenges at once, while if you raise a baby you get the challenges progressively.
On the other hand, I would be very glad to adopt a child that someone else potty trained already.
When you raise a child from a baby their problems are your fault, which makes their problems especially bad.
Adopting at least someone else did this to them … so … unethical life pro tip right here (except adopting is rad)
In my experience over six years of fostering and adoption, I've yet to meet a kid anywhere near as stressful to care for as the "training" material presents them. Maybe I got lucky, but the four kids I've looked after have been some of the sweetest, most cheerful, and most charming little folks you could ask for. If anything, the struggle was getting them out of their shells and behaving like a normal rambunctious kid.
On the flip side, Texas CPS was a fucking nightmare. We got grilled for taking one girl to have her hair trimmed. We spent three weeks filling out paperwork and doing status checks because we took another little guy with a fever to the Urgent Care. Every single placement involved us submitting whole volumes of medical records to multiple different agencies within a week of taking in the new child. Some of these demands didn't even make sense - we were supposed to bring a newborn to the dentist, despite multiple dentists telling us there's literally no point until they start teething. Our attorney ad lidem was perpetually late for scheduled meetings and insufferably rude at every interaction. Our guardian ad lidem was an absolute sweetheart in a volunteer position who got chewed out by her own "bosses" several times for failing to find anything wrong with us to report up the chain. Court hearings every six months were time-consuming and pedantic, with state officials repeatedly fouling up their own paperwork and forcing rescheduling. Multiple agents left or were fired within the span of a six month placement. Nobody knew when kids were going to be assigned to us or moved to a relative's house, or whether the house was properly inspected and the family accredited, or whether we were foster parents or adoptive parents.
Ultimately, we did a private adoption just to avoid the shit show.
The best description I've seen for child protective services in America is "needing a ground-up overhaul to meet the standard of 'dysfunctional"
It's a shame how the bureaucracy largely only serves to make lives even harder for these kids.
I mean, the truly bitter thing is that I know people who have worked in these organizations and they're all genuinely good and generous people.
But I also know who is being appointed to run the agencies and they're fucking monsters.
People who want an adorable bayybee, but don't want to parent a kid and help them become a happy, healthy, fulfilled adult infuriate me.
I know a few a people who love the idea of being a parent but don’t want to parent. They don’t know how, they don’t want to learn how, and the only thing they know is saying a thing and expecting it to be done. My sister with her dog, even, is like that. She’ll yell his name from a chair as if he gives a shit and when he doesn’t stop she’ll just give up unless I tell her to actually go deal with the problem. The dog has the ability, I’ve gotten him to behave just fine even on our first 2min walk, but she has no idea what she’s doing.
People want the title without doing any of the work so they buy the merchandise instead.