Man Asks if It's Wrong to Only Adopt Three of His Four Foster Kids

This is a pretty unique story and I can honestly say I’ve never read or heard one quite like it before.

It comes to us from the “Am I The A**hole?” page on Reddit and a man asked the readers there if he was wrong for a specific reason.

Let’s see what he had to say.

WIBTA for adopting only three of our four foster daughters?

“So my wife and I are raising four foster daughters aged 14 to 16. All of them have been with us from a young age.

Some time ago we had a family discussion about us adoption and after giving it some thought they all said they would like us to adopt them. Of course we were very happy and honoured so we put the process in motion.

Now three of the four girls have either no biological family left or their remaining family agreed to the adoption, but in the case of our youngest daughter the family refused.

They were against her being placed into foster care in the first place yet none of them offered to take them in after her addicted mother abandoned her. They have played a fairly marginal role in her live so far. However when they don’t agree the adoption can’t happen and we have to respect that.

The problem is my youngest daughter has developed abandonment issues after her mother abandoned her at twee years old and her going through three foster families before arriving at us.

She had been in therapy for several years now and although it has gotten a lot better the fears are still present. After she heard she couldn’t be adopted she got very sad and anxious and talked about how if she was the only one not adopted she would be the only one who could still legally be removed from the family.

We have been telling her that after almost a decade of her being with us that chance is very small but she is still afraid about it.

Now, one of the reasons we wanted to at least propose adoption to our daughters – although the main one is of course that we love them to pieces – is that we would make clear to them that we are committed to being their parent their whole lives, not just till they are 18.

But while the other three girls are very happy and looking forward to it the whole affair seems to only have made the abandonment issues of the youngest worse and we feel bad about that. We have been telling her a lot that if her biological family ever change their minds we will adopt her in a heartbeat and that it won’t change how we treat her of her sisters, but she is still very sad.

She isn’t sure she wants to come to the adoption ceremony because ‘I will cry for sure and I don’t want to ruin it for them’. We have offered to ceremonially adopt her at the same ceremony but she refused because ‘it isn’t the same’ (to be fair, it isn’t).

She has never explicitly said she doesn’t want us to go through with the adoption of the other three but we can see she is very said about it and that it is feeding into her issues. On the other hand we don’t want to disappoint our other daughters.

So, would we be the a**holes for adopting only three of our daughters?”

Now let’s see how folks on Reddit responded.

This person said that it might be a good idea to wait until she turns 18 and then have a huge party!

I think that might work!

Photo Credit: Reddit

This reader opined that the young girl is actually being really mature about this situation, given that she’s only 14…and they argued that the biological parents are the only ones being unreasonable here.