NYHOMESTUDY BLOG

Adoptive parents invest more time and financial resources in their children
compared with biological parents, according to the results of a national
study that challenges the more conventional view — emphasized in legal and
scholarly debates — that children are better off with their biological
parents.
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by Anti-Racist Parent Columnist Jae Ran Kim, originally published at jae-ran Harlow’s Monkey

It’s a precarious position for anyone who tries to be an agent of change within any institution. It can be difficult to balance the needs between individual people and systems that were created to help and instead have become so bureaucratic that it is a wonder anyone is helped at all.

When I was in graduate school for social work, we were often told that social reform and social justice were as important to the profession as the ability to empathize and help. Truthfully, however, the field of social work is quite polarized.

I would say the majority of the people in the field (and most of them are women) came into the program because they wanted to “help people” (I could go into a whole separate post about how women are valued in our society and why that created an over-representation of women in the “helping professions” because that deserves an investigation as well. But I’ll leave that for another day).
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THE FOLLOWING SUGGESTIONS are offered by members of the MAPS Teen Adoptees Group in Portland. New group members are welcome. For more information, contact the group’s advisor, Katie Campbell, at kcampbe7@maine.rr.com or call the Portland office of MAPS Adoption & Humanitarian Aid at 207-772-3678. The group welcomes questions from parents and other kids and can add them to its e-mail Q & A list.

1. Don’t over obsess about it. Stop worrying! We are OK.
2. Don’t make a big deal about adoption issues in public. If someone says something insensitive, be supportive, but do it mostly in private.
3. Adopted kids go through more and grow up a little faster than other kids. We know about teenage pregnancy and poverty and their implications more than other kids.
4. Get as much information as possible about your children’s histories and share it with them. Don’t keep information from us even if it is hard for you to bring it up. It is our information.
5. Teach kids how to stick up for themselves. People will say mean things, show your kids how they should handle it.
6. Our birth culture is very important to us. We feel protective of our culture. It is super important to really know the culture of our biological families, because that is our history.
7. One of our favorite adoption books is “A Mother for Choco.” We still love it!
8. We are not “just Americans” like our parents and others in our communities.
9. Be honest! Don’t hide information, be really open.
10. Prepare to talk about birth parents. We worry about hurting your feelings so we don’t bring it up.
11. No one needs to feel sorry for us. We are happy!
12. Regarding teasing: validate, validate, validate! Don’t say “I’m sure he didn’t mean it.” Don’t try to fix it. Say, “That stinks!”
13. We feel a little sadness on our birthdays. Some of us don’t know the real day and we don’t know the story of our birth. Our birthday represents the day someone left us. Adoption Day is the day someone came to get me.
14. Finally, you often ask us how we feel about being adopted. We want you to think about how YOU feel about us being adopted.

LEARN MORE ONLINE: Support groups for adoptive and foster parents: www.affm.net/content/supportgroups.htm

by Betty Reid Mandell

NEW POLITICS Number 42, vol. XI, number 2, Winter, 2007

http://www.wpunj.edu/newpol/issue42/Mandell42.htm

A COUNTRY’S ECONOMIC SYSTEM and its cultural practices shape its adoption
practices. For example, in Western societies adoption practices are very
different from those in the preliterate subsistence economies of Eastern
Oceania. In Western societies, the patriarchal nuclear family is the norm;
illegitimacy and sexual permissiveness have until recently been stigmatized;
property is owned privately and the accumulation of property is highly
valued; most people are engaged in wage labor; children are regarded as
private property; adoption is atypical and, until relatively recently in
some countries, tied very closely to inheritance laws. Some countries, such
as France, Greece, Spain, and most Latin American countries, still do not
allow adoption when it would interfere with the inheritance rights of
biological heirs. The rigidly patriarchal countries of ancient Rome, Ancient
Greece, India, Japan, and pre-revolutionary China, allowed adoption only for
the securing of heirs for a propertied childless family. In those countries
illegitimacy was strongly stigmatized and women were devalued — so much so
in pre- revolutionary China and in ancient Rome that female infanticide was
practiced. After the Russian Revolution the Bolsheviks — perceiving the
relationship between adoption and inheritance — not only abolished
inheritance, but also abolished adoption in 1918. They legalized it again in
1926, apparently because of the need for homes for the many homeless
children after the civil war. The Islamic religion prohibits adoption, as
does the Jewish religious code. 1 No national adoption law was proposed in
Israel until 1958. 2
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Thousands of villagers have rioted in south-western China over the
country’s controversial family planning restrictions, reports say.

The villagers, in Guangxi province, reportedly attacked government
offices after officials imposed heavy fines on families who had too
many children.

The rioting allegedly took place on Friday and Saturday.

Beijing allows urban dwellers to have one child, while villagers can
have two if the first child is a girl.
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May 13, 2007

By ELIZABETH FITZSIMONS

I SAW the scar the first time I changed Natalie’s diaper, just an hour after the orphanage director handed her to me in a hotel banquet room in Nanchang,a provincial capital in southeastern China.

Despite the high heat and humidity, her caretakers had dressed her in two layers, and when I peeled back her sweaty clothes I found the worst diaper rash I’d ever seen, and a two-inch scar at the base of her spine cutting through the red bumps and peeling skin.

The next day, when the Chinese government would complete the adoption, also was Natalie’s first birthday. We had a party for her that night, attended by families we’d met and representatives of the adoption agency, and Natalie licked cake frosting from my finger. But we worried about a rattle in her chest, and there was the scar, so afterward my husband, Matt, asked our adoption agency to send the doctor.
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Washington Post

By Jason Szep
Reuters
Saturday, March 31, 2007

BOSTON (Reuters) - A single woman in the United States can raise a child adopted from China just as well as a married couple, a study showed on Saturday, countering claims by Beijing that single parenting is bad for Chinese children.

Dr. Tony Xing Tan, a psychologist at the University of South Florida, compared 144 Chinese girls aged 1-1/2 to 11 years old adopted by 126 single-mother families, with 509 Chinese girls adopted by 415 families with two parents.
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Modern Love

By ELIZABETH FITZSIMONS

I SAW the scar the first time I changed Natalie’s diaper, just an hour after the orphanage director handed her to me in a hotel banquet room in Nanchang, a provincial capital in southeastern China.

Despite the high heat and humidity, her caretakers had dressed her in two layers, and when I peeled back her sweaty clothes I found the worst diaper rash I’d ever seen, and a two-inch scar at the base of her spine cutting through the red bumps and peeling skin.
Continue Reading »