I think that a huge reason parents raising adopted kids and step-kids find it easy to send the kids away is that they don't have that biological tie that parents who gave birth to their own child have. I'm not talking about all adopted parents, there are someone wonderful ones who take kids in and give them love and a home. But, for those who adopted a child for the wrong reasons, or decided it was too much to handle when the child developed a mind and a will of their own, it might be easier for them to make the decision to send the child away.
Of course there are plenty of biological parents sending their children away - it's harding to swallow that for some reason. I can reason away the adopted parent thing and the step-parent thing, but biological parents - well, that makes me even sicker. All of it is sickening, it just makes you wonder how they can sleep at night knowing they have shipped their child away to a place most often they haven't even visited, with strangers. Makes you kind of wonder how they could do that, huh.
And for those who are adopted as an infant, you'd think these parents would develope a strong bond with the child, not the desire to send the child away.
Something I would like to say to all of you who have been sent to programs, adopted or not. Perhaps you weren't the perfect teenager, but who the hell was? Perhaps you had some "issues", but who doesn't? I think the people with the most serious problems are the parents who send their kids away. If they would only stop to think about how their child got to where they are, maybe, if they would really take a look, they could track it back to their lack of proper parenting, their busy lives, and so on.
Kids are not something that should be easily disposable. I know it's a disposable world we live in, but come on! Not kids, please!!
For you who feel you were sent away to change who you are, the very core of you, because the program was all about that, please understand that you don't need to change the core of you. That is what makes you YOU. The programs are wrong, the parents sending kids to the programs are wrong, wrong for thinking they have a right to change a person, to change their personality. I can see that sometimes in life we have behavior that might need some changing, but no one has the right to ask you to change who you are.
Stay true to yourselves, don't give up, and fight for what is right and for what you believe in.