It's a safe bet that any American who was working on an adoption in Russia in 2005 knows the name Peggy Hilt. On July 1, 2005, she beat a two-year-old girl that she and her husband had adopted from Russia so severely that the child died the next day. Peggy Hilt was sentenced to 19 years for second-degree murder.

Her story, and that of Nina, the child she murdered, is back in the news now because of a profile in the Dec. 17 issue of Newsweek magazine, "When Adoption Goes Wrong".

Hilt isn't looking for sympathy, and unlike Robert and Brenda Matthey, she seems to have huge remorse for what happened to her adopted Russian child. "There is no punishment severe enough for what I did," Hilt told the magazine. She cooperated with the story--which is balanced and sobering--to alert other adoptive parents to the signs that they need help.

Part of me understands the void that Hilt fell into. In 2004, when I started my second adoption, there weren't a whole lot of resources for parents adopting older children. The one book that everybody steered me to, Trish Maskew's "Our Own", was painfully long on generalizations and, to my thinking, short on specific help. Blogging was in its infancy. There was no "Parenting Children With Special Needs" blog, or the "Older Child Adoption" blog, or the hundreds of others out on the Web now. There was, sad to say, little training from adoption agencies or social service groups about parenting an institutionalized child. There were no online training programs to meet the mandate of the Hague Convention on Intercountry Adoption.

Yes, I know that there is so much we don't know about parenting when we become parents--bio or adoptive--that it could fill a book. And that there are not enough hours in the day to read all those books on parenting that are written. But Newsweek's story on Peggy Hilt should be handed out by adoption agencies to prospective adoptive parents. Not to scare them off adopting from Russia or anyplace else, but to prepare them for the challenges they might face and, most importantly convey to them the message that there will be times as a parent when they need to seek help.

Peggy Hilt knows that Nina might be alive today is she had done just that.

Image credit: Kevin Rosseel at Morguefile.com.

Adoption.com Forum thread on the Newsweek article.