When Foster Teens Find a Home

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But then SaBreena got pregnant. "It was very shocking," says Tina. "All the values we tried to instill, for a brief moment in time went out the window." Their disappointment was so intense that they wouldn't even drive her to doctor's appointments. "We stepped back as parents," admits Stuart. When the baby girl died just a few days after she was born, SaBreena felt even more alienated from her adoptive parents and ran away again.

It was only when SaBreena left home a few months later to attend Iowa State University, where she is now a senior, that she was able to restore her relationship with Stuart and, for the first time, establish a true bond with Tina. "I missed her more. I used to call her all the time and say, 'Mom, I love you,'" SaBreena recalls. She drew even closer to her parents after she married and became a mother. "I get another shot at SaBreena through her daughter," says Tina. "I can establish a relationship with her on another tone."

RESPECTING THE OUTSIDER

UNLIKE SABREENA, DAN KNAPP NEVER RAN away or openly clashed with his adoptive mother. "He never gave me a problem. He just made me proud," says Jackie Knapp, 53, a single mom who is the education director at a Christian center in Elmira, N.Y. Placed in foster care at age 9 after his father died and his mother was unable to care for him on her own, Dan moved in with Jackie and her parents the next year. Now 24, he still remembers the meeting he attended in which his birth mother told the social worker that she was relinquishing her parental rights: "I was devastated," he says. "I was hearing my mother say she doesn't want me."

Such feelings of abandonment by the birth family are common among older adopted kids and can make it hard for them to trust any adult. "That your mom, the person who is supposed to be there for you no matter what in life, is the first person who actually wasn't there for you--that can be very painful," says Barry Chaffkin, a co-founder of the New York City-- based adoption-services agency Changing the World One Child at a Time.

Now a college graduate and program coordinator at a teen center in Watkins Glen, N.Y., Dan says that in some ways he has always felt like an outsider. When his last name was changed to Knapp, after Jackie legally adopted him when he was 14, "I expected everything to magically change, and it never did," he says. "I still felt like I was a foster kid." He recalls how upset he felt when Jackie's mother occasionally introduced him as her adopted grandson and how his cousins always seemed to get more presents than he did when the extended family exchanged gifts at Christmastime. Moreover, he says, he and Jackie "never really connected on an emotional level."

After Dan got his driver's license in high school, he started spending less time at home. He also stopped talking at meals or skipped them altogether. "I kind of just closed off," he says. Jackie noticed the change in him but opted for a tolerant approach. "I just took it that he's a teenager," she says. "I just kind of gave him his space."