Guilt-free institutionalization

I mention this video below

It must be wonderful to banish any trace of hesitation or guilt about drastic steps you've taken with your children. I would have thought it was impossible, to be honest. But apparently I erred.

There are parents who relinquish their children to strangers. For the rest of their lives. They do this despite those children's inability to ever relay their experiences in those strangers' care. 

It doesn't get much more drastic than that.

But some of those parents go even a step further. They replace the hesitation or guilt that you'd expect, with pride. They convince themselves that doing so was in their child's best interests. They literally boast of evicting their vulnerable children, even babies.  

They are either ignorant of, or dismissive of professional warnings about the evils of institutionalization. 

I once had a friend whose youngest child was about the same age as my daughter Haya and similarly disabled. When her daughter was five years old, she evicted her. I recall her relating to me that the caregivers at her daughter's residence maintained that the child cried whenever her mother's  left after a visit. 

My friend's reaction? "They're wrong. I don't believe she is crying for me."

Another mother I view as delusional has cooperated with ADI in producing a YouTube clip plugging ADI institutions and parroting the lines used in their fundraisers. 

She extols the decision she made to hand her toddler over to the care of ADI employees. It has benefitted her son's body and his heart, she insists. It will give him the love and the confidence to try harder, to conquer the next steps. 

To be fair, Israeli society and professionals brainwash parents like us to believe that abandoning our profoundly disabled children is in their best interests . In a sense, like her son, that mother is a victim too. 

So, I won't provide a link to her YouTube promo of institutionalization. (That's a screen shot from it above.)

But for the curious among you, it was posted on ADI's Facebook page on Thursday, April 1, 2021.