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Adoption Video

Madonna’s quest to adopt a second child — a 3-year-old girl — from Malawi has once again put the celebrity in the spotlight and stirred debate about international adoptions. Save the Children (U.K.) has said that the girl Madonna wants to adopt and children like her would be better off in their home countries, and that most children in orphanages have extended family. (A man claiming to be the father of the girl, Chifundo James known as Mercy, has come forward demanding custody.) This view of international adoption is also held by Unicef.

What should the standard be for allowing international adoptions?

• Elizabeth Bartholet, Harvard Law School
• E.J. Graff, Brandeis University
• Marguerite A. Wright, psychologist
• David Smolin, Cumberland Law School
• Diane B. Kunz, Center for Adoption Policy
• Jane Aronson, pediatrician

Ny Times

Raising Katie
Tony Dokoupil
Newsweek Web Exclusive

Several pairs of eyes follow the girl as she pedals around the playground in an affluent suburb of Baltimore. But it isn’t the redheaded fourth grader who seems to have moms and dads of the jungle gym nervous on this recent

Saturday morning. It’s the African-American man-six feet tall, bearded and wearing a gray hooded sweatshirt-watching the girl’s every move.
Approaching from behind, he grabs the back of her bicycle seat as she wobbles to a stop.
“Nice riding,” he says, as the fair-skinned girl turns to him, beaming.
“Thanks, Daddy,” she replies. The onlookers are clearly flummoxed.

As a black father and adopted white daughter, Mark Riding and Katie O’Dea-Smith are a sight at best surprising, and at worst so perplexing that people feel compelled to respond. Like the time at a Pocono Mountains flea market when Riding scolded Katie, attracting so many sharp glares that he and his wife, Terri, 37, and also African-American, thought “we might be

lynched.” And the time when well-intentioned shoppers followed Mark and Katie out of the mall to make sure she wasn’t being kidnapped. Or when would-be heroes come up to Katie in the cereal aisle and ask, “Are you OK?”-even though Terri is standing right there.

Is it racism? The Ridings tend to think so, and it’s hard to blame them.
To
shadow them for a day, as I recently did, is to feel the unease, notice the negative attention and realize that the same note of fear isn’t in the air when they attend to their two biological children, who are 2 and 5 years

old. It’s fashionable to say that the election of Barack Obama has brought the dawn of a post-racial America. In the past few months alone, The Atlantic Monthly has declared “the end of white America,” The Washington

Post has profiled the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People’s struggle for relevance in a changing world, and National Public

Radio has led discussions questioning the necessity of the annual Black History Month. Perhaps not surprising, most white and black Americans no

longer cite racism as a major social problem, according to recent polls.

But the Ridings’ experience runs counter to these popular notions of harmony. And adoption between races is particularly fraught. So-called transracial adoptions have surged since 1994, when the Multiethnic Placement Act reversed decades of outright racial matching by banning discrimination against adoptive families on the basis of race. But the growth has been all one-sided. The number of white families adopting outside their race is growing and is now in the thousands, while cases like Katie’s-of a black

family adopting a nonblack child-remain frozen at near zero.

Decades after the racial integration of offices, buses and water fountains, persistent double standards mean that African-American parents are still

largely viewed with unease as caretakers of any children other than their own-or those they are paid to look after. As Yale historian Matthew Frye

Jacobson has asked: “Why is it that in the United States, a white woman can have black children but a black woman cannot have white children?”

That question hit home for the Ridings in 2003, when Terri’s mother, Phyllis Smith, agreed to take in Katie, then 3, on a temporary basis. A retired social worker, Phyllis had long been giving needy children a home-and Katie was one of the hardest cases. The child of a local prostitute, her toddler tantrums were so disturbing that foster families simply refused to keep her.
Twelve homes later, Katie was still being passed around. Phyllis was in many ways an unlikely savior. The former president of the Baltimore chapter of the National Association of Black Social Workers, she joined her colleagues in condemning the adoption of black children by white families as “cultural genocide”-a position she still holds in theory, if not in practice. She couldn’t say no to the “charming, energetic” girl who ended up on her front doorstep.

Last November, after a grueling adoption process-”[adoption officials] pushed the envelope on every issue,” says Mark-little Irish-Catholic Katie O’Dea, as pale as a communion wafer, became Katie O’Dea-Smith: a formally adopted member of the African-American Riding-Smith family. (Phyllis is her legal guardian, but Mark and Terri were also vetted as legal surrogates for
Phyllis.)

To be sure, it’s an unconventional arrangement. Katie spends weekdays with Phyllis, her legal guardian. But Mark and Terri, who live around the corner, are her de facto parents, too. They help out during the week, and welcome Katie over on weekends and holidays. As for titles: Katie calls Phyllis “Mommy” and Terri “Sister,” since technically it’s true. Mark has always

been “Daddy” or “Mark.”

“Let me just put it out there,” says Mark, a 38-year-old private-school admissions director with an appealing blend of megaphone voice and fearless opinion, especially when it comes to his family. “I’ve never felt more self-consciously black than while holding our little white girl’s hand in public.” He used to write off the negative attention as innocent curiosity.
But after a half-decade of rude comments and revealing faux pas-like the

time his school’s guidance counselor called Katie a “foster child” in her presence-he now fights the ignorance with a question of his own: why didn’t a white family step up to take Katie?

Riding’s challenge hints at a persistent social problem. “No country in the world has made more progress toward combating overt racism than [the United States],” says David Schneider, a Rice University psychologist and the author of “The Psychology of Stereotyping.” “But the most popular stereotype of black people is still that they’re violent. And for a lot of people, not even racist people, the sight of a white child with a black parent just sets off alarm signals.”

Part of the reason for the adoptive imbalance comes down to numbers, and the fact that people tend to want children of their own race.
African-Americans
represent almost one third of the 510,000 children in foster care, so black parents have a relatively high chance of ending up with a same-race child.
(Not so for would-be adoptive white parents who prefer the rarest thing of all in the foster-care system: a healthy white baby.) But the dearth of black families with nonblack children also has painful historical roots.

Economic hardship and centuries of poisonous belief in the so-called civilizing effects of white culture upon other races have familiarized Americans with the concept of white stewardship of other ethnicities, rather than the reverse.

The result is not only discomfort among whites at the thought of nonwhites raising their offspring; African-Americans can also be wary when one of their own is a parent to a child outside their race. Just ask Dallas Cowboys All-Pro linebacker DeMarcus Ware and his wife, Taniqua, who faced a barrage of criticism after adopting a nonblack baby last February. When The New York Times sports page ran a photo of the shirtless new father with what appeared to be a white baby in his arms (and didn’t mention race in the accompanying story), it sent a slow shock wave through the African-American community, pitting supporters who celebrated the couple’s joy after three painful miscarriages against critics who branded the Wares “self-race-hating individuals” for ignoring the disproportionate number of blacks in foster care. The baby, now their daughter, Marley, is in fact Hispanic. “Do you

mean to tell me that the Wares couldn’t have found a little black baby to adopt?” snarled one blogger on the Daily Voice, an online African-American newspaper.

For the relatively few black families that do adopt non-African-American

children, and the adoptive children themselves, the experience can be confusing. “I hadn’t realized how often we talked about white people at home,” says Mark. “I hadn’t realized that dinnertime stories were often told with reference to the race of the players, or that I often used racial stereotypes, as in the news only cares about some missing spring-break girl because she is blonde.’”

Katie, too, has sometimes struggled with her unusual situation, and how outsiders perceive it. When she’s not drawing, swimming or pining after teen heartthrob Zac Efron, she’s often dealing with normal kid teasing with a

nasty edge. “They’ll ignore me or yell at me because I have a black family,”
she says. Most of her friends are black, although her school is primarily white. And Terri has noticed something else: Katie is uncomfortable identifying people by their race.

Is she racially confused? Should her parents be worried? Opinions vary in the larger debate about whether race is a legitimate consideration in adoption. At present, agencies that receive public funding are forbidden

from taking race into account when screening potential parents. They are

also banned from asking parents to reflect on their readiness to deal with race-related issues, or from requiring them to undergo sensitivity training.
But a well-meaning policy intended to ensure colorblindness appears to be backfiring. According to a study published last year by the Evan B.
Donaldson Adoption Institute, transracial parents are often ill equipped to raise children who are themselves unprepared for the world’s racial realities.

Now lawmakers may rejoin the charged race-adoption debate. Later this year the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, an independent federal think tank, is expected to publish a summary of expert testimony on adoption law-much of which will ask Congress to reinstate race as a salient consideration in all cases. The testimony, from the Evan B. Donaldson institute and others, will also suggest initiatives currently banned or poorly executed under existing policies, including racial training for parents and intensifying efforts to recruit more black adoptive families.

Would such measures be a step back for Obama’s post-racial America? It’s

hard to tell. The Ridings, for their part, are taking Katie’s racial training into their own hands. They send her to a mixed-race school, and

mixed-race summer camps, celebrate St. Patrick’s Day with gusto and buy Irish knickknacks, like a “Kiss Me I’m Irish” T shirt and a mug with Katie’s O’Dea family crest emblazoned on it. But they worry it won’t be enough.
“All
else being equal, I think she should be with people who look like her,”
says
Mark. “It’s not fair that she’s got to grow up feeling different when she’s going to feel different anyway. She wears glasses, her voice is a bit squeaky, and on top of that she has to deal with the fact that her mother is 70 and black.”

But even if Katie feels different now, the Riding-Smiths have given her both a stable home and a familiarity with two ethnic worlds that will surely serve her well as she grows up in a country that is increasingly blended.
And it may be that hers will be the first truly post-racial generation.

URL: http://www.newsweek.com/id/194886

January 27, 2009

By SUSAN OKIE
BALTIMORE – One sister is 14; the other is 9. They are a vibrant pair: the
older girl is high-spirited but responsible, a solid student and a devoted
helper at home; her sister loves to read and watch cooking shows, and she
recently scored well above average on citywide standardized tests.

There would be nothing remarkable about these two happy, normal girls if it
were not for their mother’s history. Yvette H., now 38, admits that she used
cocaine (along with heroin and alcohol) while she was pregnant with each
girl. “A drug addict,” she now says ruefully, “isn’t really concerned about
the baby she’s carrying.”

When the use of crack cocaine became a nationwide epidemic in the 1980s and
’90s, there were widespread fears that prenatal exposure to the drug would
produce a generation of severely damaged children. Newspapers carried
headlines like “Cocaine: A Vicious Assault on a Child,” “Crack’s Toll Among
Babies: A Joyless View” and “Studies: Future Bleak for Crack Babies.”

But now researchers are systematically following children who were exposed
to cocaine before birth, and their findings suggest that the encouraging
stories of Ms. H.’s daughters are anything but unusual. So far, these
scientists say, the long-term effects of such exposure on children’s brain
development and behavior appear relatively small.

“Are there differences? Yes,” said Barry M. Lester, a professor of
psychiatry at Brown University who directs the Maternal Lifestyle Study, a
large federally financed study of children exposed to cocaine in the womb.
“Are they reliable and persistent? Yes. Are they big? No.”

Cocaine is undoubtedly bad for the fetus. But experts say its effects are
less severe than those of alcohol and are comparable to those of tobacco -
two legal substances that are used much more often by pregnant women,
despite health warnings.

Surveys by the Department of Health and Human Services in 2006 and 2007
found that 5.2 percent of pregnant women reported using any illicit drug,
compared with 11.6 percent for alcohol and 16.4 percent for tobacco.

“The argument is not that it’s O.K. to use cocaine in pregnancy, any more
than it’s O.K. to smoke cigarettes in pregnancy,” said Dr. Deborah A. Frank,
a pediatrician at Boston University. “Neither drug is good for anybody.”

But cocaine use in pregnancy has been treated as a moral issue rather than a
health problem, Dr. Frank said. Pregnant women who use illegal drugs
commonly lose custody of their children, and during the 1990s many were
prosecuted and jailed.

Cocaine slows fetal growth, and exposed infants tend to be born smaller than
unexposed ones, with smaller heads. But as these children grow, brain and
body size catch up.

At a scientific conference in November, Dr. Lester presented an analysis of
a pool of studies of 14 groups of cocaine-exposed children – 4,419 in all,
ranging in age from 4 to 13. The analysis failed to show a statistically
significant effect on I.Q. or language development. In the largest of the
studies, I.Q. scores of exposed children averaged about 4 points lower at
age 7 than those of unexposed children.

In tests that measure specific brain functions, there is evidence that
cocaine-exposed children are more likely than others to have difficulty with
tasks that require visual attention and “executive function” – the brain’s
ability to set priorities and pay selective attention, enabling the child to
focus on the task at hand.

Cocaine exposure may also increase the frequency of defiant behavior and
poor conduct, according to Dr. Lester’s analysis. There is also some
evidence that boys may be more vulnerable than girls to behavior problems.

But experts say these findings are quite subtle and hard to generalize.
“Just because it is statistically significant doesn’t mean that it is a huge
public health impact,” said Dr. Harolyn M. Belcher, a neurodevelopmental
pediatrician who is director of research at the Kennedy Krieger Institute’s
Family Center in Baltimore.

And Michael Lewis, a professor of pediatrics and psychiatry at the Robert
Wood Johnson Medical School in New Brunswick, N.J., said that in a doctor’s
office or a classroom, “you cannot tell” which children were exposed to
cocaine before birth.

He added that factors like poor parenting, poverty and stresses like
exposure to violence were far more likely to damage a child’s intellectual
and emotional development – and by the same token, growing up in a stable
household, with parents who do not abuse alcohol or drugs, can do much to
ease any harmful effects of prenatal drug exposure.

Possession of crack cocaine, the form of the drug that was widely sold in
inner-city, predominantly black neighborhoods, has long been punished with
tougher sentences than possession of powdered cocaine, although both forms
are identically metabolized by the body and have the same pharmacological
effects.

Dr. Frank, the pediatrician in Boston, says cocaine-exposed children are
often teased or stigmatized if others are aware of their exposure. If they
develop physical symptoms or behavioral problems, doctors or teachers are
sometimes too quick to blame the drug exposure and miss the real cause, like
illness or abuse.

“Society’s expectations of the children,” she said, “and reaction to the
mothers are completely guided not by the toxicity, but by the social
meaning” of the drug.

Research on the health effects of illegal drugs, especially on unborn
children, is politically loaded. Researchers studying children exposed to
cocaine say they struggle to interpret their findings for the public without
exaggerating their significance – or minimizing it, either.

Dr. Lester, the leader of the Maternal Lifestyle Study, noted that the
evidence for behavioral problems strengthened as the children in his study
and others approached adolescence. Researchers in the study are collecting
data on 14-year-olds, he said, adding: “Absolutely, we need to continue to
follow these kids. For the M.L.S., the main thing we’re interested in is
whether or not prenatal cocaine exposure predisposes you to early-onset drug
use in adolescence” or other mental health problems.

Researchers have long theorized that prenatal exposure to a drug may make it
more likely that the child will go on to use it. But so far, such a link has
been scientifically reported only in the case of tobacco exposure.

Teasing out the effects of cocaine exposure is complicated by the fact that
like Yvette H., almost all of the women in the studies who used cocaine
while pregnant were also using other substances.

Moreover, most of the children in the studies are poor, and many have other
risk factors known to affect cognitive development and behavior – inadequate
health care, substandard schools, unstable family situations and exposure to
high levels of lead. Dr. Lester said his group’s study was large enough to
take such factors into account.

Ms. H., who agreed to be interviewed only on the condition that her last
name and her children’s first names not be used, said she entered a drug and
alcohol treatment program about six years ago, after losing custody of her
children.

Another daughter, born after Ms. H. recovered from drug and alcohol abuse,
is thriving now at 3. Her oldest, a 17-year-old boy, is the only one with
developmental problems: he is autistic. But Ms. H. said she did not use
cocaine, alcohol or other substances while pregnant with him.

After 15 months without using drugs or alcohol, Ms. H. regained custody and
moved into Dayspring House, a residential program in Baltimore for women
recovering from drug abuse, and their children.

There she received psychological counseling, parenting classes, job training
and coaching on how to manage her finances. Her youngest attended Head
Start, the older children went to local schools and were assigned household
chores, and the family learned how to talk about their problems.

Now Ms. H. works at a local grocery, has paid off her debts, has her own
house and is actively involved in her children’s schooling and health care.
She said regaining her children’s trust took a long time. “It’s something
you have to constantly keep working on,” she said.

Dr. Belcher, who is president of Dayspring’s board of directors, said such
programs offered evidence-based interventions for the children of drug
abusers that can help minimize the chances of harm from past exposure to
cocaine or other drugs.

“I think we can say this is an at-risk group,” Dr. Belcher said. “But they
have great potential to do well if we can mobilize resources around the
family.”

November 25, 2008

by Jen Graves

After all this time, there are still things we don’t talk about. It’s a century and a half after Emancipation and a year before the election of America’s first black president. This is October 2007.

The door is closed. There is a black woman at the front of the room, near the blackboard. She is facing a black man who is sitting down and talking fast. He keeps talking for a long time, as if he has been waiting a while to say this to someone. The police, but not only the police, treated him like he was a criminal. His parents, who are white, didn’t believe him when he told them this, or if they wanted to believe him, they still just didn’t

know what to say. Why would they? They were adopting a black child, they

thought-not a black teenager, not a black man.

When he finishes, there is quiet in the room, as if everyone is giving him his due. A young Korean woman goes next. She says she has tried to find her birth mother, but the Korean authorities have stopped her. She says she is working to end all adoption from Korea.

There is a young Korean man. He is gay. He is also transgender. He grew up in a white Christian family in a white Christian town. He had to escape.
For
a long time, he didn’t talk about it. He knows he should be grateful, but here, among like-minded peers, he feels like he can really talk about it for the first time.

This workshop is called “Race and Transracial Adoption Workshop with Lisa Marie Rollins.” Rollins is the black woman at the front of the room. She

says that a social worker labeled her Mexican, Filipino, and Caucasian because people didn’t want black kids. But she looked more and more black as she grew older. Her parents still said she wasn’t black. She was.
Finally,
they admitted it too. Then once, as an adult, visiting home, she found a

mammy doll in her mother’s kitchen, in among the other knickknacks.
That’s
the end of the anecdote. She’s still basically speechless about it.

She says it is time to watch a video called “Struggle for Identity.” In the video, people tell their stories, stories like the ones in the room. A black woman who was adopted by white parents boils it down: “Don’t think you can make black friends after you adopt a black child. If you don’t already have black friends, you shouldn’t be adopting a black child.” Then the lights go up. There are several white people in the room who have said they have already adopted black or Asian or Guatemalan children, or that they are right now waiting to leave for Ethiopia to pick up their adopted children.
All of those people-the white people-are crying.

They are crying because they have heard things they did not want to hear.
But there is more to it than that. They are also crying because they do not know how else to respond to the great, big cultural silence that has been broken here.

I t would be easier for white people if race did not exist. Or if everyone could agree that race did not matter, that is. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the word “transracial” first appeared publicly in a
1971
Time magazine article. The article introduced transracial adoption, or adoption across racial boundaries-most often white parents adopting children of color-and reported a strange phenomenon. According to a study in Britain, some white parents “tended to ‘deny their child’s color, or to say he was growing lighter, or that other people thought he was suntanned and did not recognize him as colored. Sometimes the reality was fully accepted [by the parents] only after the very light child had grown noticeably darker after being exposed to bright sunlight on holiday.’”

It’s such an outrageous finding that it sounds like a joke. Stephen Colbert’s dimwitted white-guy alter ego has a joke like this, when he says on The Colbert Report, always in the most ridiculous of situations: “As you know, I don’t see color.” The joke is funny because in so many ways it’s

true. Plenty of white people don’t see color. We refuse to look at it, prefer not to see too much difference, because difference almost always makes us feel bad by comparison.

Transracial adoption is awkward to discuss at first, because although it is designed to chart a radically integrated future, on the surface its structure repeats the segregated past. Just look at the basic structure of a family and apply race to the equation. The most crude way to put it:
Whites
are in charge, children of color are subordinate, and adults of color are out of the picture. And that’s not even talking about class.

And yet there are more of these families now than ever. The exact number of transracial adoptees in this country is unknown, but the practice, which

began in earnest in the 1970s, has been on the rise for at least 10 years.
Twenty-six percent of black children adopted from foster care in 2004-about 4,200 kids-were adopted transracially, almost all by white parents, according to a New York Times analysis of data from the National Data Archive on Child Abuse and Neglect at Cornell University and the Department of Health and Human Services. That figure is up from 14 percent in 1998 and, according to adoption experts, it has continued to climb. The 2000 census, the first to collect information on adoptions, counted just over 16,000 white households with adopted black children. In the last 15 years, Americans have adopted more than 200,000 children from overseas, but that trend is cooling off, partly because international adoptions are so expensive.

In spite of all that, a person has to slog through layers of silence just to meet someone else at the surface for a conversation about the topic.
When
Mark Riding, a black father in Baltimore, burst out last November on an NPR blog with a long narrative he’d clearly been waiting to tell someone-about adopting a white daughter, getting glares on the street, and trying to censor his own family’s talk about “white people” at home-he found himself in a debate with another commenter, who told him repeatedly to “rise above the race issue” and talked about “membership in the human race.” There’s a silencer in every conversation about race.

But anonymous commenters can be great sources of information, because they’ll write what they’d never say. On The Stranger’s blog, I wrote about the woman at the workshop who said you shouldn’t adopt black children if you don’t already have black friends. An adoptive parent named Teresa took serious offense. Biological parents don’t even get screened, she wrote.
“My
husband and I are white, and we adopted a 9-year-old Hispanic boy four years ago. The amount of training and inspection that we went through was incredible…. You don’t know the whole story. You can’t possibly. You aren’t part of those families.”

“P.S.,” she wrote at the end, “It isn’t that hard to get a white person to cry.”

Teresa’s comment was long, and it built to a climax before the P.S. Her
point: If you don’t silence these disgruntled adopted adults, then adoption policy could become race-conscious, and if adoption policy becomes race-conscious but white people still mostly aren’t, then white people could be denied the right to adopt, and if that happens, then children of color are going to go without good, permanent homes.

Don’t talk is the idea-it can’t lead to anything good. All it leads to is shouting, and suing, and then, finally, resilencing.

B arack Obama may as well have been a transracial adoptee.

He grew up with white grandparents, without black role models. His Kenyan father and his Kansas mother were not constant presences. As an upperclassman in high school, he realized what it meant to be black in a

white world and became sick with the particular loneliness of a transracial adoptee. His grades dropped, he smoked pot, he snorted coke, he came close to trying heroin with an acquaintance in a meat locker: In short, he nearly destroyed himself. To his family, he simply fell silent. “I was trying to raise myself to be a black man in America, and beyond the given of my appearance, no one around me seemed to know exactly what that meant.” So

they didn’t talk about it.

In the world of transracial adoption, you don’t have to look very hard to figure out why no one talks about this stuff. Federal adoption laws mandate silence. Social workers aren’t allowed to talk to families about whether

they already have black friends. They aren’t allowed to tell families they might want to get some. Any of that would be seen, according to federal law written in 1996, as a violation of the 1964 Civil Rights Act. The 1996 law prohibits the placement of an adoptee on the basis of race, color, or national origin. Race does not matter, the law says. The American domestic child-welfare system is officially colorblind-or, more to the point, colormute.

There’s one exception: The law doesn’t apply to Native American children. A separate 1978 law governs them and says the opposite: that in-race adoptions are preferred. Both laws were written by people who said they had the best interests of the children in mind. Yet today, as a report released this past May by the Evan B. Donaldson Adoption Institute shows, Native American and black kids-despite being governed by philosophically opposite laws-both on average stay in the child-welfare system longer than children of any other race. Why are these kids still stranded? If one way of helping minority foster children doesn’t work, and the opposite way of helping minority foster children doesn’t work either, why are we still pretending one is right and one is wrong?

A doption has never been simple for adoptees, and increasingly, adoptive

parents are learning that making life easier for their children may make it more complicated for them. Today, many parents acknowledge absent birth parents-always present to the adoptee-as a presence in their families too.
For a transracial adoptee, race is like another missing parent. In fact,

transracial adoptees hunger for heritage at a younger age than their white counterparts, searching for their parents on average five years earlier
(25.8 versus 31.2), and looking not just for parents but also for a racial identity.

We know this because of a study cited in the 2006 anthology Outsiders Within, which is the first book ever to be written entirely by transracial adoptees and to include academic research, scholarly papers, memoirs, and artworks. It’s a landmark book representing a new voice, or an old voice

finally speaking up. Why did it take so long? Gratefulness. Gratefulness is the most powerful silencer in the adoption world. Even if a transracial adoptee breaks the silence to make a criticism about his or her experience, the immediate response always is: Would it have been better if you’d never been adopted? It’s a rhetorical cul-de-sac, a false runaround that continues to stifle conversations about more complicated subjects, like what’s the

difference between a family that’s tolerant and one that’s actively antiracist, or why are there so many children of color adopted in the first place?

That old stifling question is starting to die.

These are the voices that are coming out instead:

“I can’t be alone in thinking that being transracially adopted, we have lost
something: lost our languages, traditions, cultures, and most importantly the subtleties and nuances of those cultures. We have lost something we never had, which we may not have even valued had we had it, and yet we continue to mourn. Am I alone in this grief?”

That’s M. Anderson, writing in Outsiders Within. Here’s Rita Simon, a researcher at American University who has been studying transracial adoption since 1968 (she’s talking on NPR):

“What we find consistently is that the white families cannot raise a black child as if it was its own birth child. They have to make changes in their lives. In other words, love is not enough.”

And this from the Donaldson report this past May:

“Two principles provide a solid framework for meeting the needs of black

children and youth in foster care: that adoption is a service for children, and that acknowledgement of race-related realities-not ‘colorblindness’-must help to shape the development of sound adoption practices.” (Emphasis
mine.)

The Donaldson report, commissioned by the U.S. Civil Rights Commission, calls for a change to federal adoption law.

P am LaBorde, a Seattle pediatrician, is in her kitchen making black-bean burritos for dinner. “My white friends don’t really get it when I say this, but I basically have these kids because of poverty,” she says.

Her willingness to talk openly is surprising; I find myself wanting to silence her for her own protection.

Pam and her husband, Bill, both white, adopted two black children, Theo and Simone, whose mother, Amanda, lives in Texas. Amanda had to give them up

because she’s poor and has been dealing with illness in her immediate family. The semi-open adoptions cost almost $20,000 each. “Some of my white friends think there’s something wrong with the birth mother for giving up her kids. Okay, she could have used contraception, but not everyone I know is perfect in that way either. There’s nothing wrong with her. It’s important that my kids know that. I’ve thought before, what if I’d just given that money to her?”

In international adoptions, the poverty of the parents is usually blamed on corrupt governments or bad political situations, Pam says. “But when it’s domestic, we blame the parents.”

The Transracially Adopted Children’s Bill of Rights, by adoptee Liza Steinberg Triggs, includes this rule: “Every child is entitled to parents who know that if they are white they experience the benefits of racism because the country’s system is organized that way.”

Pam is the sort of person-maybe all self-critical parents (people?) are this way out of necessity-who can’t help but believe in opposing ideas. She and her husband, who studied black history in graduate school, were interested in adopting black children “from a social-justice point of view.” Both because more black children than white children need homes, and because the LaBordes believe in the civil-rights dream of an understanding and connection between different races of people.

A year ago, they moved from the lily-white Proctor neighborhood in Tacoma to the racial mix of Columbia City, and Theo, now in kindergarten, goes to school at John Muir Elementary, where the LaBordes are hoping to meet and befriend black families. (They want not only black peers but black role models for their kids.) Their adoption agency gave them a few tips about

respecting black culture and sent them on their way. “It’s not enough,”
she
says. “Honestly, we could have gone and moved to a white gated community in northern Minnesota, and nobody would have done anything about it.”

Some days, Pam does feel like moving to a white neighborhood, not that she would. Several months ago, on a bus in Columbia City, a young black man asked her whether her kids were adopted. She said yes. He chanted, “That’s fucked up, that’s fucked up.” Then he told her that when her son got older, he’d get up in the middle of the night and kill her, so maybe the man would just kill her now, there on the bus. Another time, a black woman in a car yelled at Pam and the kids when they were walking on the street in Columbia
City: “How does it feel to steal black babies, you white bitch?”

There are times when black parents or grandparents smile at her knowingly, or randomly hug her, or give her unsolicited help, but usually she feels

nervous around black parents. “I feel that I need to do it right,” she says.
“I need to prove that I’m capable of parenting these children.”

She gives herself only middling marks. Neither she nor Bill have close black friends yet. And they aren’t Christians, so they can’t join a black church.
“It’s complicated,” she says. “It’s only going to get harder as they get

older. I think you have to be willing to talk about it constantly, and over and over.”

I ‘m a moderate racist.

My personal data “suggest a moderate automatic preference for European Americans compared to African Americans.” This data came from something called the Implicit Association Test, which is hosted on the website of Harvard University. The test, developed in 1998, is intended to gauge unconscious bias. It measures how long you take to answer questions (by
keyboard) that ask you to associate faces of different races with good (e.g., “joy”) versus bad (e.g., “failure”) words.

This is the test that King County employees of the state’s Children’s Administration department are going to be taking, because Washington has a problem. It’s the same problem pretty much everywhere around the country, and not a new problem either: Too many kids of color are coming into foster care and staying in too long. In King County, the Children’s Administration is writing a plan with five parts, one of which is “staff development, which begins with self-examination,” says director Joel Odimba. “We’re going to train in knowing who we are.” The five-point plan includes-in addition to soul searching-a review of policies, the formation of an advisory committee, and a possible Cultural Competency Center.

Those are pretty quiet, bureaucracy-as-usual ideas compared to the idea that made Seattle famous on this issue. In 1999, Washington’s Department of Social and Health Services launched a pilot project that four years later became the full-blown Office of African-American Children’s Services (OAACS, pronounced “oasis”). It was staffed with people trained to handle the particular issues of black foster kids, and most of the county’s black kids were routed through it-blatantly defying the colorblind mandates of federal adoption law. Quickly, it was the talk of the nation, a test of dealing with race head-on in public policy, as if it matters. And it was invented out of a sense of desperation not uncommon around the country: In 2004, while black children made up 7 percent of the population of King County’s kids, they

accounted for 30 percent of the kids in King County foster care.

It was a stab, an effort, a start. But it got complaints. Its management

turned over often, and it was criticized by the rest of the department.
Last
spring, just as OACCS’s approach was about to be validated by new research-two months later, the Donaldson report would call for an emphasis on race in the child-welfare system-OACCS was killed. The federal Office of Civil Rights declared it in violation, and the state decided to let it go.
The state’s foster-care administration would no longer deal with race in a direct way. Meanwhile, the OAACS building would be renamed the Martin Luther King Jr. office-an apt linguistic elision. Now it operates like all the others, taking cases on the basis of where the kids live. You’d never know that a major experiment on the role of race in families went on there, and whatever it might have been on its way to learning appears to have been lost.

T here are not that many movies about domestic transracial adoption. In one, the 1995 movie Losing Isaiah, Halle Berry stars as a crackhead named Khaila who leaves her baby, Isaiah, in a trash can while she goes to find some crack. He’s discovered, taken to a hospital, and adopted by Jessica Lange’s character, Margaret. When Khaila cleans up and discovers her son is still alive, she wants him back, and a judge orders his return. But it is too late-the toddler is attached to Margaret, and he doesn’t respond to Khaila.
Khaila is forced to admit that Margaret has become her son’s mother. The

last scene shows Margaret and Isaiah reunited over some toys, and Khaila

playing alongside them. A title card flashes: “And a little child shall lead them, Isaiah 11:6.”

A little child shall lead them.

That phrase hits me hard. One of the reasons I was at that October 2007 workshop (at Seattle University), and that I’d been looking into transracial adoption, was to teach racist family members of mine a lesson. I had other reasons too-I’ve been debating whether to become a parent for a while-but this one was the most embarrassing. In my fantasy, I hadn’t considered how exactly I would protect my child. The child was a means to an end, a healing
agent: Want to rid your parents of their overt racism? Give them black grandchildren and defy them not to love them! Need to atone for your own

covert racism? Adopt a black child and let him teach you!

Part of the genuine appeal of transracial adoption, it’s true, is its potential to transform our culture. “I often think about transracial adoption as a grand social experiment,” writes John Raible, one of the first mixed-race children adopted to a white family in the 1960s and something of a spokesperson on the topic.

Even so, children shouldn’t be the day laborers on the job, says Chad Goller-Sojourner. Would you want your children to be the test cases in a

grand social experiment?

“What I’d ask parents is, are you willing to be the uncomfortable one?”
Goller-Sojourner says. This is how he’d question a prospective parent if he were a social worker. “Because somebody’s gonna be uncomfortable, and it

seems the burden is on you. You have to be the uncomfortable one.”

He means that if white parents of black children, for instance, don’t live in black neighborhoods, join black churches, have black friends, and send their children to significantly mixed-race schools, then at least they should cross the thresholds into black barbershops even though it’s awkward, or drive out of their way to shop at grocery stores in black neighborhoods.
Parents should be careful to raise their children to live in this world, not the one they wish existed.

“If you’re buying a house and you have a dog, don’t you spend more time looking for a big old yard for your dog?” he says. “Love is but one of many components of parenting. You’re raising children to live in a world that may not be your world. If you go to the pound, they won’t just give you a dog.
There are rules. They’ll say, ‘That dog’s not good for your house, we’ll get you another dog.’ But when you ask that question about kids, people freak out.”

Goller-Sojourner is a performer. This summer, he put on a one-man show at the Rainier Valley Cultural Center called Sitting in Circles with Rich White
Girls: Memoirs of a Bulimic Black Boy. As a big, gay, dark-skinned black

adoptee of white parents living in white University Place outside Tacoma, he has had to explain himself many times, from many different perspectives, to many different kinds of people. He’s developed multiple metaphors: the dog-adoption analogy, one involving a seven-foot child with five-foot parents (”It’s not that one’s better, it’s just an acknowledgement of likeness or nonlikeness”), and one about lions and a gazelle.

“Let’s say I was a gazelle adopted by lions,” he says. “I pranced around

happy until I got to first grade and all these lions tried to attack me;

it’s like they didn’t get the memo. The other gazelles, they smelled the

lion on me and didn’t trust me, so I stood open.”

He can also tell it literally: “The difference between when I got called

nigger and when other black kids got called nigger is that they went home and got love, and I went home and got love from people who looked just like the people who called me nigger. As a child, you don’t have the ability to bifurcate.”

P hebe Jewell is gay. She and her partner, Dawn, adopted a boy named Isaac.
He has the same mother as Bill and Pam LaBorde’s two children, the poor woman from Texas, Amanda, who for the most part finds it too painful to be in contact with the children she’s let go. Isaac, Theo, and Simone all live in the same neighborhood, and Theo and Isaac go to the same school (Simone is too young). When friends from school come over, they are often confused about why Isaac, Theo, and Simone don’t live together. But then somebody

explains it, and that’s that.

Isaac is 6 1/2, the oldest of the three, and he is not a quiet kid. You can hear him across the aisles at a store. Phebe worries that some people will see him as “dangerous, a thug,” but she knows that if he were quiet, he’d probably get teased as an Oreo. At his school, many of the kids are black.
He comes home talking black, calling her “girl.” It makes her proud, that he’s getting black culture, black cadence. Even though she’s white, she knows it herself, having grown up partly in the South. She jokingly calls him “boy” in return, but she knows she’ll eventually have to stop herself, because of that word’s old association with power and slavery, something

Isaac couldn’t know about now.

Isaac does know about slavery. He learned about it a year ago.
Eventually,
he used it against his mother when she tried to tell him what to do.
“White
people don’t own black people anymore, so you can’t own me,” he told her.

Ingenious, she thought. That’s my son.

O ver at Theo and Simone’s house, they have just finished eating their black-bean burritos, and it’s time to put on swimsuits and get in the car to go for lessons. Lessons are at Medgar Evers Pool, a place named for a man who was intimidated from voting just 62 years ago, who was on his college debate team, who married a woman named Myrlie, who had a Molotov cocktail thrown into the carport at their home, who was nearly run down by a car, who was shot dead in his own driveway-in the back-by a Ku Klux Klan fertilizer salesman who was not convicted of murder until 30 years later.
Everything
good that happened to Medgar Evers was because of Medgar Evers.
Everything
bad that happened to him was because he was black and refused to apologize for it.

Theo and Simone are sitting in the backseat of the car. Pam is explaining how she dresses the children carefully. If they were white children, she

might dress them as “little Goodwill hippies,” but she doesn’t want black or white people thinking of them as poor maltreated urchins, so she dresses

them up. Theo is wearing a white button-up polo shirt and glasses. We are driving past Garfield High School, where on Halloween night, a black teenager was killed in what police think was a gang shooting. Since then, black teenagers have been walking around the Central District and riding

city buses along Martin Luther King Jr. Way in sweatshirts that say “RIP Lil Q” for the kid who died.

Theo doesn’t know any of this. He doesn’t know that he’s going to a pool

named for Medgar Evers. He doesn’t know that there was a shooting here at this same place, another shooting of a black man. He doesn’t know that this is my neighborhood, where I live, where I’m learning about the meaning of race, the moderate racist in the front seat.

He does know about Obama, though. What does he know about Obama? I ask him.
He puts his fingers to his chest and says, “Black.” Then he says, “White

House.” That’s all he says.

November 18, 2008

By DENISE GRADY
Infants conceived with techniques commonly used in fertility clinics are two
to four times more likely to have certain birth defects than are infants
conceived naturally, a new study has found.

The findings applied to single births only, not to twins or other multiples.
The defects included heart problems, cleft lip, cleft palate and
abnormalities in the esophagus or rectum. But those conditions are rare to
begin with, generally occurring no more than once in 700 births, so the
overall risk was still low, even after the fertility treatments. Cleft lip,
for instance, typically occurs in 1 in 950 births in the United States, and
the study found that the risk about doubled, to approximately 1 in 425,
among infants conceived with the fertility treatments.

The procedures that increased the risk were so-called assisted reproductive
techniques, like in vitro fertilization, which require doctors and
technicians to work with eggs and sperm outside the body. The study did not
include women who only took fertility drugs and did not have procedures
performed.

“I think it is important for couples to consider the fact that there may be
a risk for birth defects,” said Jennita Reefhuis, an epidemiologist at the
Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and the first author of the
study, which was published online on Sunday by the journal Human
Reproduction.

But Dr. Reefhuis (pronounced REEF-house) also said that although her study
linked fertility procedures to birth defects, it did not prove the
connection or explain it. If the connection is real, it is not known whether
the procedures increase the risk for birth defects, or whether infertility
itself raises the risk.

Fertility doctors, she said, “may not believe my findings.”

Dr. James A. Grifo, director of the fertility clinic at New York University
Medical Center, said, “The good news is that the risk is low.”

Dr. Grifo said more research was needed to test the findings, because the
study included only 281 women who had fertility procedures. He said that if
the association with birth defects was real, the underlying cause was more
likely related to the patients’ infertility than to the treatments.

“The results are concerning, but with this small a sample of patients, a
bigger study would need to be done,” Dr. Grifo said. “And the fact that they
see it in singletons, not in twins, makes it hard for me to think this is a
direct relationship.”

Twins and other multiple births have a higher risk of birth defects than
single births and whether infertility treatment adds to that risk is
unknown.

Dr. Alan R. Fleischman, vice president and medical director of the March of
Dimes, said: “I think it’s an important study. It’s confirmatory of the
direction we have been concerned about, an increase in some structural birth
defects in babies born with assisted reproductive techniques compared to
those born without such. And yet the numbers are still small, the risks are
low.”

Women considering fertility treatment should be informed that there might be
a risk of birth defects, Dr. Fleischman said, but they need not be “overly
concerned.”

In 2005, about 52,000 infants were born in the United States as a result of
in vitro fertilization and related techniques, according to the disease
centers. The number doubled from 1996 to 2004; currently, about 12 percent
of women ages 15 to 44 in this country seek fertility treatments.

The researchers used information already collected by a large project paid
for by the government, the National Birth Defects Prevention study. Dr.
Reefhuis and her colleagues compared 9,584 women who had children with birth
defects, and 4,792 control women whose children were born without defects.
In the control group, 1.1 percent of the women (51) had undergone fertility
procedures; in those whose children had birth defects, the figure was 2.4
percent (230). The increased risk among those who had the procedures was not
related to their age, income, the number of children they had or to whether
or not their babies were born prematurely.

Dr. Fleischman acknowledged that the number of women who had fertility
procedures was small, but, he said, “These are very well-studied
populations, and they’re just about as good data as we have.”

The study included information from 281 births conceived with fertility
techniques and 14,095 without.

The Vietnamese Department of International Adoptions (DIA) has confirmed that the DIA continued to issue referrals to prospective adoptive parents until September 1, 2008, the date the United States – Vietnam bilateral adoption agreement expired. According to the Vietnamese Ministry of Justice, prospective adoptive parents who received a formal referral by September 1 will be allowed to process their adoption to conclusion. Dossiers that were not referred by September 1 will be closed and returned to the adoption service provider.

According to the DIA, a referral occurs when DIA sends a letter to prospective adoptive parents informing them that both DIA and provincial authorities have agreed to the match of a specific child.
Any case where this letter has been sent to the prospective adoptive parents before September 1 will be considered as having a referral and will be processed to completion.

The DIA has informed the U.S. Embassy in Hanoi that they will supply the U.S. Embassy with a list of all cases that have received a referral. The Embassy expects to receive this list during the third week of September. The Embassy will confirm when this information is available to all U.S. adoption service providers and issue a public announcement providing a general summary about the number of cases still in process. Prospective adoptive parents who have not received a referral letter may wish to verify the status of their case with their adoption service provider.

According to an informal poll of adoption service providers taken in mid August, approximately 600-700 prospective adoptive parents still had an application pending with the DIA and had not yet received referrals. The U.S. Embassy in Hanoi, Vietnam, will process to conclusion all adoptions that meet the Government of Vietnam’s criteria and deadlines.

The United States is strongly committed to processing legitimate intercountry adoptions from Vietnam. We have indicated to the Vietnamese our interest in negotiating a new agreement. An important goal for the United States is that any new agreement must establish enforceable safeguards and a transparent process which ensures that the children and families involved in the adoption process are protected from exploitation. The Government of Vietnam shares this concern. Both countries acknowledge that more needs to be done to address deficiencies in the current system. It is not possible, at this time, to predict when a new bilateral adoption agreement may be negotiated and signed.

U.S. field investigations continue to reveal incidents of serious adoption irregularities, including forged or altered documentation, cash payment to birth mothers (for other than reasonable payments for necessary activities such as administrative, court, legal, translation, and/or medical services related to the adoption), coercion or deceit to induce the birth parent(s) to release children to an orphanage, and children being offered for intercountry adoption without the knowledge or consent of their birth parents. During the month of June 2008, some children were reunited with their families after investigations by the U.S. Embassy in Vietnam revealed that the birth parents had not consented to their adoption. In August, Vietnamese officials confirmed media reports that 24 individuals have been arrested and charged throughout Vietnam for documentation fraud and child trafficking instances related to intercountry adoption.

The U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Service and the Department of State have instituted procedures to verify that children identified for placement meet the requirements of Vietnamese and U.S. law, before the child has been adopted under Vietnamese law. Information about these procedures is available from USCIS or through their website http://www.uscis.gov/portal/site/uscis. The Embassy strongly advises prospective adoptive parents not to travel to Vietnam until they have received notification from the Embassy that their case is ready for final processing and travel is appropriate.

by Miriam Vieni L.C.S.W.

When we adopted our daughter in 1974, the field of international adoptions was on the verge of blossoming into an exciting range of opportunities for homeless children and would-be adoptive parents. Up to that point, there were a very few large agencies (perhaps three or four) involved in facilitating the adoptions of children, mainly from Korea and more recently from Vietnam. The large, more traditional agencies were uncomfortable about international adoptions because less was known about the health and backgrounds of the children, than what was known about the health and backgrounds of children born in the U.S. Some of the agencies and groups that were helping families adopt children from Vietnam during the war, were new and small and they were operated by enthusiastic people who had, themselves, adopted children from Vietnam. When adoptions from Vietnam ceased in April 1975, the people who had been involved in helping children from that country, find families, turned to other countries with populations of homeless children and they instituted programs in those countries. Suddenly, a field that had been limited to a few agencies arranging adoptions from two countries, expanded into large numbers of agencies and parent groups, facilitating the adoptions of children from many countries. Families were able to adopt children from Colombia, Chile, Guatemala, El Salvador, Peru, Ecuador, Bolivia, Honduras, and India. Then, in the late 1980’s, there was a trickle of direct adoptions from China which, expanded and was formalized over the years, until thousands of Chinese babies were being adopted. In the early 1990’s, the field expanded to several countries in Eastern Europe, and Russia, as well as a few African countries. Little by little, the number of direct adoptions decreased while the number of adoptions arranged by agencies, increased. Many of the agencies were small and were operated by adoptive parents. They were flexible and they were committed to the children and families whom they served. The majority of adoptions had good outcomes. A very few had problems. The majority of agencies and facilitators were honest. A minority were not. Larger, more traditional agencies turned to international adoptions because the supply of healthy Caucasian infants in the U.S. had decreased as more single mothers either chose to keep and raise their children or turned to abortion. In order to stay in business, these larger agencies needed to attract adoptive parents and they discovered that in the 1990’s, middle class Caucasian couples were interested in adopting children of a variety of races and cultures from many foreign countries. Middle class African American families also began to turn to international adoptions as it became more and more difficult for them to find healthy African American babies in the U.S.

In 1993, we learned of a plan to impose an international treaty on the field of international adoptions. The ostensible goal of the treaty was to protect the children by regulating the adoptions to minimize black market adoptions and to ensure that adoptions would be carried out in a professional manner so that the welfare of children would be protected. The two people who set out to sell international agencies and adoptive parent groups on the treaty were Peter Fundt from the Department of State Office of the Assistant Legal Advisor for Private International Law, and Bill Pierce (now deceased), the executive director of the National Council on Adoptions (an organization of private adoption agencies). He was also on the board of the National Council on Accreditation (a private organization which accredited private multi-service social service agencies. Bill Pierce was a vocal opponent of non-agency adoptions. In a letter to the member organizations of NCFA, he stated that he hoped the framework for agencies developed in the Hague regulations, would eventually be expanded to all adoptions.

Some of us, attorneys, adoptive parents, social workers, and agency people, believed that the framework of regulations that was being proposed by the State Department, would be harmful to international adoptions as a whole. We believed that it would cause small agencies to go out of business, cause countries to develop bureaucracies that would interfere with efficient adoption processing, and would add requirements and costs that would eliminate many prospective adoptive parents. We believed that the government’s proposed implementing legislation (greatly influenced by Bill Pierce) would not actually protect children but would, rather, promote the primacy of large agencies. It was difficult to communicate with others about our feelings because people were not using email and internet service at that time and because the State Department recruited people to travel throughout the country and to sell the Hague Treaty to adoptive parents and agencies. They promised that Immigration requirements for children entering the U.S. would be made more flexible and they threatened that countries would refuse to send their children to the U.S. if the U.S. didn’t ratify the treaty. However, we were able to initiate debate on the subject and to put pressure on the powers that be to hold public meetings in Washington D.C. on the treaty. We developed our own proposed implementing legislation for the treaty which, we hoped, would satisfy the wish for more regulation while setting up procedures which would allow small and medium sized agencies to continue to function in the international adoption field. The State Department people, however, were uninterested in our suggestions and our visits to senators and congressmen, during which we tried to explain the potential problems with the State Department plans, were ineffective. The meetings proceeded, and promises were made to keep the fees low and to take the needs of all stake holders into account. Committees were formed to provide feedback to the officials who were developing the implementing legislation for the treaty and the regulations connected to them. Many of the people who were initially very concerned about the impact of the treaty, were reassured by all of this that the treaty would not impact negatively on international adoptions.

The Hague Treaty went into effect in the U.S. on April 1, 2008. Following, is what I have observed. Our State Department has made demands on countries that did not initially sign on to the treaty, that they do so. The U.S. State Department has indicated that adoptions from countries that resisted, such as Vietnam, Cambodia, and Guatemala, were flawed and unacceptable and these adoptions by U.S. citizens, have by and large ceased. The adoption processes from countries that haven’t signed on and that have continued, have been negatively affected by new procedures imposed by our government. In many cases, home study agencies and placing agencies are insisting on Hague requirements for non Hague adoptions. These requirements make the adoption process more complicated and expensive. Many agencies are applying the regulations across the board because they feel that this will protect them from criticism from COA.

Adoptions by U.S. citizens from countries that have signed on, have decreased in number and are slower to complete. U.S. Immigration procedures for potential adoptive parents adopting from Hague countries are more difficult and complicated than they are for those adopting from non Hague countries. Home studies for people adopting from Hague countries are more complicated and difficult to conduct. Although the legislation allows exempt providers (non accredited agencies and independent social workers) to perform them, in practice, accredited placement agencies are reluctant to use exempt providers.

The National Council on Accreditation (one of two accrediting bodies and the accrediting body responsible for accreditation of most U.S. agencies), is charging large fees to accredit agencies. It has recruited volunteers to make judgments as to whether or not agencies may be accredited. Some of the volunteers have worked in international adoptions previously and some have not. The regulations are new and difficult for everyone to understand. Therefore, the volunteer accreditors have received brief training on how to implement the accreditation requirements from people who do not completely understand them. So, the accreditation standards are being applied differently to different agencies. Many small and medium sized agencies have been refused accreditation, and some of them have gone out of business altogether. Some of our best small agencies have opted out of accreditation completely because they cannot afford the process and they, therefore can no longer provide international adoption services to families and children. The actual regulations have little or no connection with the quality of services provided to families and children, but on paper, they satisfy the accrediting officials.

So, the fears that we had back in 1993 have been justified. Fewer people are able to adopt. Fewer agencies are arranging international adoptions. The agencies that have survived, tend to be the larger, wealthier agencies. Children are arriving from fewer countries, and they wait longer in institutions before they can be adopted. Most of the children seem to be coming from Russia, Korea, and a few African countries. These are not Hague countries. The wait for children and adoptive parents is longer. In the guise of improving the quality of international adoptions, our government has systematically been doing away with them.

All Rights Reserved by Miriam Vieni L.C.S.W.

Click here to visit NY Times and Hear the Videos

For people who are just discovering their infertility or who are thinking about their options, these audio portraits of women who have dealt with the issue, should be helpful. At minimum, you wil understand that you are not alone in your struggle.

Miriam Vieni, L.C.S.W.
www.nyhomestudy.com
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www.nyhomestudy.net
miriamvieni@optonline.net
(516) 333-4999
Fax (516) 876-8246

June 8, 2008
By LISA W. FODERARO

Eight months into New York City’s bold experiment of moving hundreds of troubled teenagers out of group homes and into foster care, the system is stretched so thin that many involved say they are having trouble making thoughtful matches between foster parents and their charges. Some child-welfare experts are worried they may soon be unable to recruit enough qualified foster parents, while others say the city has moved too slowly in putting support systems in place to help these older children flourish in private homes.

“It’s a good direction, but the problem is that we’re implementing the plan before the infrastructures are all in place,” said Bill Baccaglini, executive director of the New York Foundling, one of the largest of about three dozen private foster care agencies that contract with the city to find and monitor homes. “We run the risk of burning out our foster parents and losing them.”

Stephen McCall, a consultant who runs a support group for foster parents, said he fielded a frantic call in May from a New York City police officer he had helped persuade to foster her 19-year-old godson. She suspected he was smoking marijuana with friends in her home in Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn.
“She said, ‘I don’t know if I can do this,’ ” Mr. McCall said.

A 61-year-old psychotherapist said that a year ago, after raising four children of her own, she welcomed a 17-year-old boy into her home on the Upper West Side with the intention of adopting him. Speaking on the condition of anonymity because she wanted to shield her private life from her clients and protect the boy, she said that the teenager had been physically abused when he was younger, was “emotionally no older than 12 or 13″ and consistently lied to her. He moved out in March.

Even Mary Chancie, an experienced adoptive parent who recruits foster parents on behalf of the nonprofit agency You Gotta Believe, lasted only six months with two teenage boys she took in. One, age 13, had a behavior disorder and went to live with a sister; the other, 19, was “disrespectful to family members in the house,” Ms. Chancie said.

“He was a nice kid and we still have a relationship,” she said. “But he had challenges I wasn’t equipped to deal with at the time.”

Robert H. Gutheil, executive director of Episcopal Social Services, another private foster care agency that contracts with New York City, said his organization usually has 10 to 15 foster families awaiting children, but “typically, in the best case, only one to three of those would be willing to take a teenager.” With the city’s Administration for Children’s Services having promised to move 700 to 1,100 children out of so-called residential care – group homes and larger institutions – and into foster homes by June 2009, that may not be enough.

“It’s the right principle and policy, but principles and policies need to meet kids where they are on every single day,” said James F. Purcell, executive director of the Council of Family and Child Caring Agencies, an umbrella organization that represents foster care agencies. “And we need to pay constant attention to that – that we don’t let a policy direction that says ‘less residential’ become the reality if, in fact, that’s not what the kid needs.”

New York – which has long had a higher proportion of teenagers in institutional settings than other large cities, according to John B.
Mattingly, commissioner of the Administration for Children’s Services – is among several places nationwide prioritizing a push toward private foster homes. National studies show that in general, children in private homes have fewer problems as adults than those in group homes.

As the total number of children in the city’s care has dropped to 17,000 from 19,000 over the past four years, the proportion in institutions has also dipped, to 15 percent from 19 percent, according to figures provided by the children’s services agency. The average age of the foster care population is 10 ½, while those in institutional care average 16. Children in New York State can remain in foster care until age 21.

The city’s most recent initiative to reduce the current institutional population of about 2,500 to as few as 1,500 comes on top of similar efforts. In 2005, the city finished closing its own 250-bed network of group homes. And in 2004, Children’s Village, a private nonprofit agency that contracts with the city and houses 280 children in cottages on a 150-acre campus in Westchester County, decided to redouble its efforts to find homes for teenage residents rather than maintain its longstanding practice of keeping them until they turn 21.

Mr. Mattingly said the key is to place teenagers in private homes immediately on being removed from their families, because otherwise they often languish forgotten in institutions.

“The basic experience we have in the field, and research supports this, is that if you work at it, you can place teens at the very get-go in foster families,” Mr. Mattingly said. “Those foster families sometimes will need additional supports, not always, and the young people will do better and achieve permanency more quickly if placed at the outset with a family.”

But the challenges of placing teenagers only grow more complicated as the numbers dwindle, since those left behind tend to have more physical, behavioral, emotional, psychological or learning problems. Some were badly abused and further traumatized by bouncing from foster home to foster home.

“Good, solid, healthy teens have issues in the best of families,” said Mr.
Gutheil, of Episcopal Social Services. “But these are not run-of-the-mill, ‘I’m in a bad mood today’ adolescents. These are kids who have gone through some pretty rugged times. The notion that an adult is somehow going to take control of their lives is very difficult for them.”

To address these issues, the Administration for Children’s Services has created nearly 1,000 so-called therapeutic foster homes, which come with extra counseling services, as well as crisis-management support and more training for parents. The city has also relaxed its rules regarding kinship placement, allowing a godparent, coach or family friend to take in a child.

And foster care agencies have begun to tailor their recruiting pitches at churches and street fairs to play up the benefits of fostering a teenager, including the freedom from diaper changes and sleep deprivation. Among the most effective tools has been including a panel of teenagers who need homes in the 10-week training of prospective parents: Mr. Mattingly said that while perhaps 7 percent start out willing to take in teenagers, by the end,
25 percent raise their hands.

“One lady called after attending a panel and talked about one young man who she said had an amazing self-deprecating humor,” recalled Jeremy C.
Kohomban, the president and chief executive officer of Children’s Village.
“She ended up taking him.”

Andrew White, director of the Center for New York City Affairs at the New School and editor of Child Welfare Watch, a policy journal, said that some of the planned reductions of children in residential care would be achieved through attrition, as young people age out of the system at 21.

The current challenges were foreshadowed by the experience of Children’s Village, which found this year that over three years, only half of 69 charges age 13 to 20 settled successfully with families. The story of the other half is sprinkled in shorthand across an agency tracking spreadsheet.
Angel, 18: “Severe Psych Issues. AWOL from Hosp & now incarcerated.” David,
19: “Severe Psych issues: not ready.” Claude, 16: “Goal to be changed.”

“It’s not that residential has no place in the continuum, but it can’t be a permanent solution, and in the past it has become that,” Dr. Kohomban said.
“Organizationally, we have to be eternally optimistic that there’s always a family. All of us look at these kids and say, ‘There’s a family for you.’
When kids lose hope, they’re impossible to treat.”

Dr. Kohomban said that as hard as his staff tried, the cottages on his Dobbs Ferry campus, which house 12 to 14 boys each, could not replace the experience of a private home. “We take boys who have been arrested multiple times and get them into employment,” he said. “But the one thing we can’t do in residential care is we can’t create family. The dynamics of family life have to be experienced – the negotiating, the setting of limits, the good, the bad. I can’t create the values of being a brother or a son or responsible boyfriend.”

Richard Hucke, deputy director of foster home services for the Jewish Child Care Association, is one of many in the field who want the city to create more therapeutic foster homes, in which the parents also receive a much higher monthly payment, called a board fee, to help cover the expense of housing a foster child.

(According to the Administration for Children’s Services, the board rate for a child 12 or older is $662.70 a month, compared with $486.30 for a child under 6, and the $901.50 annual clothing allowance for a foster child of 16 is about quadruple that for a 4-year-old. Those with special needs get a board rate of $1,065 to $1,614.60 a month.)

Mr. Hucke said that his agency, another contractor, is hamstrung because the city gives it only enough money for 96 therapeutic homes, though it has trained more parents to run such homes. “I have therapeutic homes that are sitting empty,” he said.

In the meantime, his is one of many agencies that have become more aggressive and creative in recruiting new foster parents since the city’s focus shifted to placing teenagers. It offers a finder’s fee of $500 for each new household that current foster parents recruit, and is planning a cruise around Manhattan on Thursday to woo new foster parents and thank current ones.

On Friday morning, representatives of the Jewish Child Care Association set up a table brimming with brochures outside a mental health forum at Lincoln Medical and Mental Health Center in the Bronx in the hope of reaching out to potential parents with a grounding in some of the children’s challenges.

“Those are professionals, and those are the people we really want to target,” Mr. Hucke said.

Beverly Mills, a case manager for a city-run shelter for homeless families who stopped by, said she lives alone and has plenty of room. She said she would like to do her part to help disadvantaged young people, explaining that “sometimes when they’re not raised correctly, they come out here and do bad things.” But Ms. Mills, who has a 30-year-old son, drew a line at adolescents.

“I would take someone up to 11 or 12 because they’re still impressionable,”
she said. “You can still grab them and guide them so they can go through school and go through college.”

As a success story, Children’s Village points to Juan Molina, 17, who in another time and place would have simply been called an orphan. After a decade of searching, Juan found a family in the form of Henry Greene, a 71-year-old retiree who had already adopted eight boys, most of them teenagers at the time, now successfully launched into the world. They began spending time together last fall, and Juan moved into Mr. Greene’s apartment in the Parkchester section of the Bronx in March. Mr. Greene, Juan’s foster father now, has started the process of adoption.

Juan was 7 when he was taken from his father, who he said was an alcoholic, and his mother, who was sick with cancer. After bouncing around among foster families, he landed in Children’s Village at 11, though he said he ran away and lived with a friend in Brooklyn for a couple of years.

Until Mr. Greene entered his life, Juan had given up hope of being someone’s son. “Ever since my mom passed away, I never thought I’d find a family,” he said. Of Mr. Greene’s decision to adopt him, he added: “It was awesome. He cares about me and talks to me like a father. I feel like I finally got this.”

Copyright 2008 The New York Times Company