By Jeneen Interlandi

Despite sensational headlines about Haitian orphans, children adopted from
developing nations can thrive in the United States. I know, from personal
experience.

Earthquakes in Haiti and Chile have left thousands of children orphaned and
revived debates over the value of international adoption. In the weeks since
a group of American missionaries were arrested on charges of
child-trafficking, Haiti’s orphans have continued to trickle across her
borders. More than 300 Haitian children have been adopted by families in
France, and the State Department estimates that nearly 2,000 will have been
placed with U.S. families by month’s end. Thanks to enhanced scrutiny by
both Haitian and U.S. officials in the wake of the missionary debacle, it
appears that the vast majority of those adoptions will be of legitimate
orphans and not child-trafficking victims.

That won’t silence critics, who argue that taking orphaned children from
their birth countries and raising them elsewhere robs those nations of their
most valuable resource and leaves the adoptees with a hopelessly fractured
ethnic identity, only to satisfy the capricious whims of wealthy Westerners.
(The contentious term cultural genocide is sometimes employed.) Opponents of
international adoption routinely point to the abundance of orphans here in
the U.S. where they claim it is both easier and cheaper to adopt. From
there, they typically question the motives of “eager white Americans” who
would endeavor “to adopt children that look nothing like them,”-as if every
would-be parent who sought to adopt overseas were somehow trying to be
Angelina Jolie. There are some persistent myths behind that argument that
need dispelling. But first, a quick story:

My own parents suffered through a string of miscarriages and failed attempts
to adopt in the U.S. before fetching my older sister, twin brother, and I
from a dilapidated orphanage in Medellín, Colombia. It was the late 1970s,
and we were infants-two of us premature and very sick. They nursed us back
to health, brought us to a working-class suburb of New Jersey and promptly
went about the business of raising us. Among the many things they took pains
to instill (like work ethic, faith in God, and a healthy appreciation for
good lasagna), a sense of Colombian-ness was not included. Nor was it to be
acquired elsewhere: together my siblings and I made up about half the town’s
Colombian population.

But if we lacked a clear blueprint for our ethnic identities, we still had
plenty of other parameters from which to forge our sense of selves: we were
blue-collar kids from Jersey. We grew up amongst the mostly Irish- and
Italian-American children of nurses, plumbers, and store clerks. Like them,
we indulged in all the rituals of our particular American upbringing. And
like most internationally adopted children, we turned out just fine.

To be sure, there are some significant and seemingly unclosable gaps in our
cultural identities. I remember eagerly befriending two Colombian kids that
moved to our town in junior high, only to find out that we had nothing
special in common. “I’m Colombian too,” I exclaimed to one of them, a girl
the same age as me. She smiled and started speaking in Spanish. I furrowed
my brow to show that I didn’t understand. “Where are you from?” she asked in
English. “Medellín,” I said. “No,” she said, laughing. “You definitely
aren’t.”

In later years my twin brother (who is darker than my sister and I) would
occasionally be subject to racial profiling. And, as we belatedly
discovered, all three of us would have to go through the complicated and
lengthy process of naturalization before we could obtain driver’s licenses
(or register to vote or apply for financial aid for college). We were
immigrants and minorities-but only sometimes. The same was true of our
Italian experience. I know more about Palermo and my father’s upbringing in
1950s Bensonhurst than I ever will about Medellín, but I feel as dishonest
calling myself Italian or Italian-American as I do calling myself Colombian.
That’s OK by me. My loss of ethnic heritage has been more than compensated
for in the multitude of opportunities afforded by my adoption. Besides, I
kind of like being a cultural chameleon (Colombian by birth, Sicilian by
adoption, and American by upbringing). It makes me unique.

I won’t pretend my experience is the same as it would be if I were black or
Asian, or even a darker shade of Hispanic, and I’m not trying to say that
race doesn’t matter at all. But race and ethnicity shouldn’t be the foremost
concerns of adoptive parents, foreign governments, or society at large. The
primary consideration should be the welfare of the children in question.
Where will they have the best chance at happy, fulfilling lives? How best
can the global community ensure their health and safety?

Within the U.S., the federal government has long since determined that while
race and ethnicity merit consideration, they should not be the deciding
factors in any adoption. That’s because numerous studies show that
transracial and transcultural adoptees don’t face any higher risks of
psychological problems or identity issues than domestic, same-ethnicity
adoptees. As uncomfortable as it makes some people to acknowledge, white
parents are capable of raising emotionally healthy black, Asian, and
Hispanic children. And that’s no less true when the child comes from another
country.

Those who argue that prospective parents should “just adopt in the U.S.”
don’t understand the motivations of most adoptive parents. If would-be
adopters were acting out of some profound sense of charity, then reasonable
people could debate the merits of alleviating greater suffering abroad vs.
considerably less suffering closer to home. (In Colombia in 1977, children
who weren’t adopted by the age of 9 or 10 were turned out onto the street:
girls mostly became prostitutes, boys joined the guerrilla armies or found
work in the coca fields. By contrast, American orphans of the same
generation were guaranteed food, shelter, and some form of education until
they turned 18.)

But the fact is, most adoptive parents are like mine: they are unable to
conceive but desperately want to experience parenthood-in all its
permutations. That means they want babies. In the U.S., 60 percent of
eligible orphans are more than 5 years old. Several critics have argued that
the supply of Third-World infants is not a natural occurrence but a response
to the demand of adoption markets in the West. This is only partly true:
yes, Western demand motivates child-traffickers. But even after child
trafficking is taken out of the equation, there are still many more infants
to adopt abroad than there are in the U.S. (6.6 million compared with less
than 60,000, based on an analysis of data from Unicef and the United States
Department of Health and Human Services). International adoption is
expensive (up to $40,000 in many cases) and takes a long time (one to three
years on average)-long enough to consider all of the challenges and
complexities that raising a child of different cultural or ethnic heritage
will entail. It’s not a process one enters into lightly.

In fact, most parents choose international adoption only after being
repeatedly stymied by U.S. adoption protocols-from birth parents that change
their minds at the last minute, to stringent and sometimes arbitrary
requirements on the part of domestic adoption agencies. Speaking of which,
it is patently false that the high-profile choices of a few celebrities have
triggered an international adoption boom. In fact, in the U.S. especially,
international adoption rates have plummeted-from about 25,000 in 2004 to
less than 13,000 in 2009. Today, they are at an all time low, thanks to the
greater availability of contraception, a global crackdown on
child-trafficking, and better economic conditions in places like Russia and
China, the birthplace of many internationally adopted orphans.

These days, internationally adoptive parents often go to great lengths to
preserve their adoptive children’s sense of cultural heritage-a big change
since I was adopted from Colombia. According to one Harvard survey, 15
percent of transracially adoptive parents move to more ethnically diverse
neighborhoods after adopting, to enhance their child’s exposure to other
people of the same ethnicity. Many parents take corresponding language and
cooking lessons and many more immerse themselves in the diaspora communities
of their children’s birth countries. Some also participate, with their
children, in “homeland tours” offered by international adoption agencies.

At the same time, adult adoptees from Korea, China, and elsewhere have
formed national organizations to facilitate homeland visits and lobby for
dual citizenship, among other things. There is no reason to think that
Haitian orphans won’t do the same. To be sure, they will face barriers to
forging coherent racial and ethnic identities-almost all internationally and
interracially adopted children do. But those barriers won’t be
insurmountable and they won’t necessarily be devastating. In the end, what
matters most is not where a child is from, but whether or not that child is
well loved and well cared for by a responsible family-regardless of race or
nationality.

Originally appeared at http://www.newsweek.com/id/234343

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.

By MIREYA NAVARRO, March 31, 2008

Jenifer Bratter once wore a T-shirt in college that read “100 percent black woman.” Her African-American friends would not have it.

“I remember getting a lot of flak because of the fact I wasn’t 100 percent black,” said Ms. Bratter, 34, recalling her years at Penn State.

“I was very hurt by that,” said Ms. Bratter, whose mother is black and whose father is white. “I remember feeling like, Isn’t this what everybody expects me to think?”

Being accepted. Proving loyalty. Navigating the tight space between racial divides. Americans of mixed race say these are issues they have long confronted, and when Senator Barack Obama recently delivered a speech about race in Philadelphia, it rang with a special significance in their ears.
They saw parallels between the path trod by Mr. Obama and their own.

They recalled the friends, as in Ms. Bratter’s case, who thought they were not black enough. Or the people who challenged them to label themselves by innocently asking, “What are you?” Or the relatives of different races who can sometimes be insensitive to one another.

“I think Barack Obama is going to bring these deeply American stories to the forefront,” said Esther John, 56, an administrator at Northwest Indian College in Washington, who identifies herself as African-American, American Indian and white.

“Maybe we’ll get a little bit further in the dialogue on race,” Ms. John said. “The guilt factor may be lowered a little bit because Obama made it right to be white and still love your black relatives, and to be black and still love your white relatives: to love despite another person’s racial appearance.”

Americans of mixed race say that questions about whether Mr. Obama, with a white mother from Kansas and a black father from Kenya, is “too black” or “not black enough,” as the candidate himself brought up in his speech on March 18, show the extent to which the nation is still fixated on old categories.

“There’s this notion that there’s an authentic race and you must fit it,”
said Ms. Bratter, an assistant professor of sociology at Rice University in Houston who researches interracial families. “We’re confronted with the lack of fit.”

The old categories are weakening, however, as immigration and the advancing age of marriage in the United States fuel a steady rise in the number of interracial marriages. The 2000 Census counted 3.1 million interracial couples, or about 6 percent of married couples. For the first time, the Census that year allowed respondents to identify themselves as being two or more races, a category that now includes 7.3 million Americans, or about 3 percent of the population.

Many people still stick to a one-race label, even if they are of mixed descent, researchers say, sometimes because of strong identification with one racial group, and occasionally because of a conscious effort not to dilute the numbers of the group they most identify with.

In interviews, people of mixed race said their decision about how to identify themselves was deeply personal, not political; it is influenced by how and where they were reared, how others perceive them, what they look like and how they themselves come to embrace their identity.

James McBride, 50, who described growing up in a Brooklyn housing project with his white mother in a memoir, “The Color of Water,” said that, like Mr.
Obama, he identified himself primarily as a black man of mixed race. As a child whose father was black, he said: “I really wanted to be like all the other black kids. It was the larger group around me.” And through life, because of his brown skin, society has imposed its own label. “If cops see me, they see a black man sitting in a car,” he said.

But being proud to call himself African-American, Mr. McBride said, does not negate his connection to his “Jewish part,” his mother’s heritage. Asked which part of him was dominant, he said, “It’s like grabbing Jell-O.”

“But what difference does it make?” he added. “When you’re mixed, you see how absurd this business of race is.”

Mr. McBride and other mixed-race Americans said they took pride that Mr.
Obama was presenting his biracial identity as an asset for the presidency.
Even if he calls himself black, and has made a central element of his campaign biography the quest to claim that identity after his father left him, Mr. Obama is seen as giving equal weight in his story to his white mother and grandparents.

“He’s really having to play the field and know his audience really well,”
said Phillip Handy, 21, a junior at Rutgers University in New Brunswick, N.J., whose mother is white and father is black. “In the end, when I hear his message, I don’t think he’s bailing out on any of us.”

While many mixed-race people say they see their heritage as a plus, they also say they often face pressure from others who want to pigeonhole them.
Mr. McBride said his books invariably were shelved in the African-American sections of bookstores. “Why can’t I be a white author?” he said. “I’m half white.”

Shafia Zaloom, 36, a teacher in San Francisco who is Asian and white, said she was often asked if her two children, who look like her white husband, were adopted. “Sometimes, when I’m at the playground, people think I’m the nanny,” she said.

Ms. Zaloom, who gets her looks from her Chinese mother, said she had been on the receiving end of insensitive racial remarks and gestures about Asians.
But she fully identifies as mixed race.

“It’s really unfair to expect people to choose,” she said. “It’s like asking to be loyal to one parent or the other.”

Although still small, the mixed-race population is increasingly visible among the young. The 2000 Census found that 41 percent of the mixed-race population was under 18. Multiracial advocacy groups like the Mavin Foundation in Seattle say that mixed race people now find themselves better reflected in books, in college courses, in school brochures and in teacher’s training in public schools than they did in the past. Carmen Van Kerckhove, a diversity consultant who runs a blog on race and popular culture, racialicious.com, said she doubted that the uproar that greeted Tiger Woods when he described himself as “Cablinasian” (for heritage that includes Caucasian, black, American Indian and Asian) in 1997 would be as strong today.

“When you’re multiracial, you can be several things at the same time,” said Ms. Van Kerckhove, 30, who is white and Asian and has endorsed Mr. Obama on her blog for moving the race debate away from “who’s black and who’s white, or who’s a victim and who’s an oppressor.”

Unfortunately, Ms. Van Kerckhove added, suspicions persist about the motivation of people who identify themselves as mixed race. Many people, she said, wonder, “Are multiracial people trying to be multiracial as a way to escape racism?”

The mixed-race terrain is full of such bumps and tricky balances. But at least, many multiracial Americans say, they are no longer seen as oddities.
Ms. Zaloom expects that her 6-year-old daughter and 4-year-old son will experience a different journey to self-identity than she did. At times while growing up, Ms. Zaloom recalled, she struggled with questions about whether she was white enough or attractive. She rebelled against Chinese language lessons, her mother’s Chinese food and eating with chopsticks.

But when her daughter was born, she named her Mei Lan, like her maternal grandmother, to honor her Chinese roots. Then she named her son Kyle in deference to her paternal Irish side. Her wish for her children, she said, is that they realize that the benefits of a mixed identity outweigh any challenges.

“Ultimately,” she said, the goal is “to not have to check a box.”

by
Miriam Vieni, L.C.S.W.

Now that the U.S. is implementing the Hague Treaty on International Adoptions, adoptive parents are being required to take courses to prepare them for the adoption experience. For many, this seems like one more burden added to an arduous adoption process. Having been through the experience of international adoption myself, I understand why people may be feeling negative and resistant about having to take the courses. However, having been involved in conducting adoption home studies since 1974, I see how taking the courses may help potential adoptive parents better understand the issues they may encounter when their newly adopted child joins the family.

Competent social workers have always included the discussion of adoption issues in the home study process, even before such discussion was first required by our Immigration Service back in 1994. We’ve always talked about medical issues, emotional and adjustment issues, and trans-cultural and trans-racial issues. But these discussions haven’t always had the kind of impact for which we’ve hoped. This is probably partly because families are feeling so anxious during the home study process. When people are worried about gathering all the necessary documents for their home studies and their dossiers, and feeling threatened by the evaluative nature of the home study, it’s hard to concentrate and its educational content. So the fact that the educational courses help people focus on issues important in international adoption, in a process that feels more neutral and is separated from direct interaction with the social worker conducting the home study, helps people begin to absorb important information.

Most people adopting internationally, are adopting children who have been living in orphanages. The courses help families understand the impact of institutionalization on children. What does it mean, for example, to live in an institution in which individual attention barely exists, nutrition is limited, stimulation may be non existent, and independence and curiosity are discouraged? How is a child’s ability to make healthy and enduring connections to other people affected by a changing array of care givers? What is the impact on intellectual development of the absence of toys and a minimum of verbal communication? How can one differentiate between behavior caused by neurological damage and that caused by lack of stimulation? What are the affects on family relationships and interaction of the introduction of a new child to the family? How does age impact on the newly adopted child’s behavior, personality, and adjustment? What kinds of help will be needed as the adopted child enters the school system?

All of the questions noted above are concerns for new adoptive parents, and the many courses available to them, help with answers and provide techniques for handling problems. There are a variety of on-line courses as well as those provided by agencies and organizations to help you deal with the complexities of international adoption. So embrace the numerous opportunities for learning that will help you with the wonderful new challenges that await you.

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

by Andrea Troy

Race in America is forefront in the news. With Barack Obama, a man who is black and white and running for president, it is here with renewed vigor. His candidacy would be even more surprising if we weren’t a country so full of contradictions.

Interracial unions and the biracial offspring they produce have a long, tortured history, from master/slave “relationships” to laws banning miscegenation (the “mixing” of races.) Marriage between blacks and whites was once illegal and statutes remained on the books in some southern states until the very recent past, keeping the stigma alive and well.

It has never been easy or simple to be biracial or part of an interracial family. It complicates life. It raises the potential for emotional dissonance, stress and discomfort. As Obama said, he suffered from unintended racially insensitive remarks his own (white) grandmother who adores him made. But I am sure he’s also heard discriminatory remarks from blacks and people of every race and hue, as we all have.

No “group” is free from stereotypical thinking and prejudice. Not his. Not mine. Not yours. That is important to remember if you are considering transracial adoption.

The term ‘transracial adoption’ used to refer mostly to white parents adopting black children or biracial children, who are also considered black, but over time has become more inclusive.

Controversy arose in the 1970’s and 1980’s in the aftermath of the heady, liberated, ‘let’s love one another 60’s’, when it became apparent we are not all considered equal “under the skin” in cultural currency. Black children who had been adopted by progressive white parents and raised in race neutral environments felt alienated. Society was not race blind, and hearing their parents say it was didn’t make it so. Many of the children were growing up discontented, disconnected, and resentful.

The Association of Black Social Workers decided it was racial genocide to strip black children of their racial heritage—their birthright—by placing them with white families who were not equipped to raise them. They also felt not enough outreach was done to find black families for them. Their assessment and accusation of genocide may have been extreme and politically skewed, but their concerns were valid.

Over time, our ideas about adoption have changed and expanded.

We have come to recognize the needs and rights of birthmothers. We have come to recognize the needs and rights of children and the special needs of children of color. And we have come to recognize that an adult’s view and experience of family are not the same as those of the child’s.

Identity is tidier if you are in the majority within society and/or your own family, and when you can recognize yourself in those around you.

If you are the zygote of the same race egg and sperm you don’t have to choose what to call yourself. If you grew up in a same race household and weren’t adopted or “different” in any way, you don’t know what it’s like to be a minority in your own home.

You need to be aware that as a parent you will never fully understand your child’s experience.

Of course this race stuff is nonsensical because we are all ape descendants. But historical social structure and stricture forces identity based on observable physical characteristics and genealogical lineage. In other words, on how we look.

No one can deny we live in an appearance-oriented, race conscious, inconsistent, and incongruous world.

And here’s the perfect proof: despite this country’s record of slavery and segregation and an intact hierarchical social system that highly values and still favors whites, the son of an African father and white American mother has a chance to win the highest office in the land. What’s more, his good looks and tall stature and light skin are part of the picture.

When interracial families are formed not through intermarriage but via adoption, the dynamic is different. The choice is purely intentional. Transracial adoption has expanded to other countries and includes Asian, Hispanic, Latino, and indigenous children the world over.

Each adoption route carries a unique parental commitment and responsibility. All require effort and sensitivity and knowledge.

We in the adoption field have come to realize families need to consider carefully and prepare well when they adopt a child of a race not their own. They need to incorporate, honor, integrate, and accommodate their child’s racial heritage and birth culture. They need to understand their status will change forever once they become an interracial family. And they need to be willing to relinquish their sense of white middle class entitlement they take for granted.

The concept of race is emotionally laden; socially, psychologically and economically complex; and a great influence in the adoption process. For example, a family may want a child from China but not from Brazil. Another may favor a Guatemalan child over an Ethiopian one. Yet another may shy away from any but a Russian.

Adoption is not the time to be politically correct.

You are allowed to exercise your personal preferences. If you parent the child you desire things will be better for all involved. But you need to understand that adopting a Korean, Vietnamese, or any child who is not Caucasian also makes your family interracial.

And if you are willing and honest enough to admit how your choice is a reflection of broader social values, you will better understand the world that awaits your child.

Living in a diverse neighborhood, availability of resources, having neighbors, friends, and associates who share your child’s race and heritage, are some important factors to take into account.

Think long and hard and examine your feelings. Learn as much you can. And be aware that your child might not always appreciate the choice you made.

Transracial adoption is multifaceted and knotty but can also expand, fulfill, enrich, and bring pleasure to your life. Before you travel across racial lines, make sure it is what you want. Make sure you embrace it for sound reasons. Above all, make sure you feel good and comfortable and secure about your decision.

And then, enjoy the journey!

Copyright 2008 by Andrea Troy. For information, contact relatedarticles.com

* * *

John Stossel is an award-winning news correspondent and author of Myths, Lies, and Downright Stupidity: Get Out the Shovel–Why Everything You Know is Wrong.

By ELIZABETH OLSON

WASHINGTON — Eyes like black pearls, the softest skin and little tufts of hair made it totally easy to fall in love at first sight. And that is what Julie Carroll — and Jewel McRoberts and Tommi-Lynn Sawyer — did when they saw the three tiny girls at a Vietnamese orphanage. They adopted the babies after months of waiting and then had to leave them behind because they could not obtain entry visas to bring them back to the United States.

That was almost four months ago, and the families last week began a public campaign to press the State Department to let them bring Madelyn Grace, Eden and Anabelle to the United States. Enlisting the help of the senators from California, where two of the families live, the adoptive parents argue that they have been unfairly caught in diplomatic wrangling between the American and Vietnamese governments over concerns about corruption in the adoption process that led to the suspension of Vietnamese adoptions from 2003 to 2005.

“What has happened to us is completely unconscionable,” said Mrs. Carroll, who, along with her husband, Steve, and her three other children, traveled from their Camarillo, Calif., home to campaign for a 10-month-old sister, now in foster care in Vietnam.

“We don’t have a problem with them investigating the adoption,” she said, “but we have proved there is not a shred of corruption involved in it.”

The State Department, which issued a warning on adoptions in Vietnam last month, maintains that the lack of controls on “baby finders” and unregulated payments — the average adoption cost is about $25,000 per family — are fostering baby buying. Six years ago, similar accusations led Vietnam to tighten controls on foreign adoption. At the end of 2005, Vietnam and the United States signed an adoption agreement, and nearly 1,100 Vietnamese children have been adopted by Americans since.

However, in advance of talks on renewal of the accord, which expires Sept. 1, families note that there has been a sudden increase in the federal government’s investigations of adoptions in Vietnam, preventing some babies from returning home with their adoptive parents.

Twenty-one entry visas for children have been rejected in the last two years, according to the State Department. More than half the denials have come since last October, prompting complaints that the department is singling out individual cases to embarrass the Vietnamese government into changing its adoption process.

“Everything we know now says the State Department is, frankly, using these babies as a tool in a battle that has nothing to do with these families or the children themselves,” Senator Barbara Boxer, Democrat of California, told the three families who met in her office last week.

The State Department says it is making sure babies are legitimately available for adoption.

“It would be unforgivable for us to look at a case and think something is wrong, then to let it go,” said Michele T. Bond, the State Department’s deputy assistant secretary for overseas services. Ms. Bond said Vietnam had never posted a schedule of adoption fees, as required in the bilateral agreement, and said documentation on how some babies came to be orphaned “is unreliable.”

The State Department warning said that embassy personnel had seen “an increase in the number of irregularities appearing in orphan petitions and visa applications,” and “significant increases in the number of abandoned children” in two provinces, including Thai Nguyen, where the three contested babies were adopted.

The Vietnamese Embassy in Washington did not return a call for comment.

Adoption agencies say they are not steering people away from Vietnamese adoptions, but some, like Children’s Home Society and Family Services of St. Paul, are not accepting new applications for Vietnam so they can handle their existing clients.

“We are encouraging people to list a second country they prefer,” said Kristine Huson, the agency’s spokeswoman, “because we don’t know what delays there might be if the agreement isn’t renewed in Vietnam.”

Under a program begun by the State Department in November, adoption agencies are telling clients to acquire their babies’ visa clearance before they arrange travel to Vietnam and complete the adoption formalities. The Orphans First program, the department said, alerts parents to problems earlier in the process. In the past, parents who legally adopted a child in Vietnam but then could not obtain an entry visa to the United States were faced with either staying indefinitely in Vietnam to resolve the problem or leaving the child there.

That is what the McRoberts family, of Seaside, Calif., faced. They adopted two little girls last September, under the previous system in which immigrant visas were the last step. Jordan, now 8 months old, received her entry visa to the United States, but Eden, also 8 months, was denied her visa on the grounds that there were discrepancies in her file.

“We were told that this denial is never reversed, and to take Eden back to the orphanage,” Mrs. McRoberts said. “It was absolutely devastating to leave her,” she said. “But I had to get Jordan back home. And I have two boys, and I hadn’t seen them in four weeks.”

She and her husband, Claude, a naval officer, paid to leave Eden in foster care instead and paid Vietnamese investigators to ascertain that she had been truly abandoned at a hospital — which, including travel, housing and other costs, could add as much as $20,000 to their costs.

The Carrolls had adopted two baby girls from the same orphanage. They were able to travel with Lillian Rose, 8 months, but Madelyn Grace, 10 months, had to be left behind in foster care.

“We’re missing out on four months of her life, all those milestones in her development,” the Carrolls told Ms. Boxer as their sons, Jeremy, 6, and Grayson, 5, played outside her office.

The McRobertses and Carrolls hired a Vietnamese law firm to investigate, as did Ms. Sawyer, a single mother from Millville, N.J. And in each case, they said, investigators found the children were legally eligible for adoption. Last month, the federal immigration agency, which is part of the Department of Homeland Security, approved Madelyn Grace for a visa, but the couple said that the State Department had yet to act on that and that they had received no explanation why — so they asked Ms. Boxer and Senator Dianne Feinstein, Democrat of California, to help.

Ms. Boxer said she planned to lobby the State Department to approve the visas. Her aide, Sean Moore, said he had noticed the spike in visa denials since October. Thirteen of the 21 denials occurred after Oct. 1, he said. All but seven of those have been resolved.

Among those seven families are Tom and Wendy Mills of Los Angeles, who are finding their lives upended in their effort to keep their baby. Mr. Mills, a character actor and freelance writer, stayed in Hanoi to care for Julie, 8 months old, after her visa was denied, while his wife travels back and forth keeping her accounting practice alive.

It has been “an emotional strain and a financial struggle,” Mr. Mills wrote by e-mail. “I came to Vietnam expecting to stay here for two, maybe three weeks, and now it’s been five months.”

The State Department does not comment on individual cases, but Ms. Bond said the current agreement with Vietnam needed to be reshaped to curb exploitation with, among other things, a more transparent fee structure, and to meet international standards set out in the Hague Convention, an adoptions pact. On April 1, the United States’ membership in the pact begins. Vietnam has not signed the Hague agreement.

“The goal of international adoption is to find a home for each orphaned child,” Ms. Bond said, “not to ‘produce’ a child for a family. It’s not a market.”

copyright NYTIMES, originally appeared at http://www.nytimes.com/2008/02/11/us/11adopt.html?_r=1&ref=todayspaper&oref=slogin

December 21, 2007

Orphanages Stunt Mental Growth, a Study Finds

By BENEDICT CAREY

Psychologists have long believed that growing up in an institution like an orphanage stunts children’s mental development but have never had direct evidence to back it up.

Now they do, from an extraordinary years-long experiment in Romania that compared the effects of foster care with those of institutional child-rearing.

The study, being published on Friday in the journal Science, found that toddlers placed in foster families developed significantly higher I.Q.’s by age 4, on average, than peers who spent those years in an orphanage.

The difference was large — eight points — and the study found that the earlier children joined a foster family, the better they did. Children who moved from institutional care to families after age 2 made few gains on average, though the experience varied from child to child. Both groups, however, had significantly lower I.Q.’s than a comparison group of children raised by their biological families.

Some developmental psychologists had sharply criticized the study and its sponsor, the MacArthur Foundation, for researching a question whose answer seemed obvious. But previous attempts to compare institutional and foster care suffered from serious flaws, mainly because no one knew whether children who landed in orphanages were different in unknown ways from those in foster care. Experts said the new study should put to rest any doubts about the harmful effects of institutionalization — and might help speed up adoptions from countries that still allow them.

“Most of us take it as almost intuitive that being in a family is better for humans than being in an orphanage,” said Seth Pollak, a psychologist at the University of Wisconsin, who was not involved in the research. “But other governments don’t like to be told how to handle policy issues based on intuition.

“What makes this study important,” he went on, “is that it gives objective data to say that if you’re going to allow international adoptions, then it’s a good idea to speed things up and get kids into families quickly.”

In recent years many countries, including Romania, have banned or sharply restricted American families from adopting local children. In other countries, adoption procedures can drag on for many months. In 2006, the latest year for which numbers are available, Americans adopted 20,679 children from abroad, more than half of them from China, Guatemala and Russia.

The authors of the new paper, led by Dr. Charles H. Zeanah Jr. of Tulane and Charles A. Nelson III of Harvard and Children’s Hospital in Boston, approached Romanian officials in the late 1990s about conducting the study. The country had been working to improve conditions at its orphanages, which became infamous in the early 1990s as Dickensian warehouses for abandoned children.

After gaining clearance from the government, the researchers began to track 136 children who had been abandoned at birth. They administered developmental tests to the children, and then randomly assigned them to continue at one of Bucharest’s six large orphanages, or join an adoptive family. The foster families were carefully screened and provided “very high-quality care,” Dr. Nelson said.

On I.Q. tests taken at 54 months, the foster children scored an average of 81, compared to 73 among the children who continued in an institution. The children who moved into foster care at the youngest ages tended to show the most improvement, the researchers found.

The comparison group of youngsters who grew up in their biological families had an average I.Q. of 109 at the same age, found the researchers, who announced their preliminary findings as soon in Romania as they were known.

“Institutions and environments vary enormously across the world and within countries,” Dr. Nelson said, “but I think these findings generalize to many situations, from kids in institutions to those in abusive households and even bad foster care arrangements.”

In setting up the study, the researchers directly addressed the ethical issue of assigning children to institutional care, which was suspected to be harmful. “If a government is to consider alternatives to institutional care for abandoned children, it must know how the alternative compares to the standard care it provides. In Romania, this meant comparing the standard of care to anew and alternative form of care,” they wrote.

Any number of factors common to institutions could work to delay or blunt intellectual development, experts say: the regimentation, the indifference to individual differences in children’s habits and needs; and most of all, the limited access to caregivers, who in some institutions can be responsible for more than 20 children at a time.

“The evidence seems to say,” said Dr. Pollak, of Wisconsin, “that for humans, we need a lot of responsive care giving, an adult who recognizes our distinct cry, knows when we’re hungry or in pain, and gives us the opportunity to crawl around and handle different things, safely, when we’re ready.”

By
Sumeia Williams

My dad had been serving his tour of duty in Vietnam when he’d decided to adopt. He and my mother had already had two boys and wanted a girl. In 1970, toward the last six months of his tour, he’d come across me in an orphanage and taken me home.

At least, that’s what I’d been told as a child.

In the early days of my childhood, I believed myself to be a true orphan with no living genetic parents. The thought that I’d had another mother and father before my adoption didn’t even occur to me until second or third grade. With the exception of my dad, no one spoke of my adoption at length. Perhaps it was my family’s way of telling me that it didn’t matter. They loved me regardless of my unfortunate circumstances.

Further still, my past was too closely linked to a war that had cost thousands of American and Vietnamese lives. For my dad, this was yet another reason not to talk too much about our shared past in Vietnam. War created the circumstances of my adoption, chaos an excuse for hiding the truth and time covered the trail. It boiled down to, “Life happens. Here’s a shovel. Now dig.” It still baffles me that some adoptees must exert so much effort just for the hope of gaining access to a history that rightfully belongs to them. The obvious question is, “Why?”

Perhaps the fact that I wore the face of “the other side” doubled the importance of locking away certain memories forever. Maybe he feared conflicting feelings that might arise in my own growing consciousness as I learned about the conflict between my birth country and my adopted one.

“Many of us from that era still have memories we choose not to speak of or think about,” he once wrote in a letter to me, “It is just a self-protective mechanism of our human nature to preserve our dignity and perhaps our very own sanity.”

Unfortunately, in his attempts to bury parts of his past, he also secreted away vital keys to mine — and with it my personal history and identity. Not content to leave the story open ended, he invented a scenario that might offer us both some closure.
My parents had divorced shortly after my adoption. My mother had been my primary caregiver for most of my childhood. During the early part of my adolescence, I went to live with my dad. Shortly after my arrival, he decided it was time to tell me “the truth” of my adoption.

I was 14 when he called me into the room: “Honey, come here. I have something to tell you.”

He then began to tell the story of how he’d fallen in love with my Vietnamese mother while he was serving in Vietnam. How I’d been the result of that love and how he’d brought me back under the guise of adoption. My dad was married to my adoptive mother at the time, so the need for the ruse was obvious, wasn’t it? As for my mother, he told me, she’d been killed by a group of Viet Cong after which he’d taken me to Hoi Duc Anh orphanage in order to begin the adoption process.

My feelings at that sudden disclosure almost 14 years ago escape me — but I do know it wasn’t like what you see in the movies. There were no tearful, joyous declarations of, “Daddy!” No feelings of resolution. No closure.

I can’t remember how I felt — only my reaction endures in my memory. I smiled, tried to comfort him with a hug and left the room. We didn’t really speak of it again aside from his occasional remarks of how I walked or looked like my mother. How could I convey my feelings of betrayal at having been lied to? I didn’t have the tools to process how learning I was Amerasian threw my identity into chaos. Deeper still, how could I explain that with his sudden confession, he’d just killed all hopes of ever finding my mother? As an orphan, there had remained a small glint of hope. Now that was gone.

In silence, I spent the next several years trying to come to terms with what he’d told me. My mechanism of choice was denial. I went on with my life trying to not to think of it too much. It worked better on some days than others but his words and their affects on me were always there. They manifested themselves in every aspect of my life, directed my choices in ways I’m still trying to understand.

I finished high school, got married and had children of my own just like everyone else, but I could never rid myself of the sense that my insides had been ripped from beneath my skin. And then there were the unanswered questions. What was my mother’s name? Why did he have no photos of her? What about other family members still in Vietnam?

By the time I reached my mid-thirties, I couldn’t stand it. I had to know. After over a decade of silence, I began to ask those questions out loud. And once again, my dad’s response threw me into chaos.

The words of Bryan Thao Worra, a Laotian adoptee and poet, reverberate through my mind as I make yet another necessary edit to my story: “For transcultural adoptees, our lives are written in pencil. Everything you think you know about yourself can change in an instant.”

And for me it did. It seems that I am not my dad’s genetic daughter after all. He didn’t say it directly, but it was obvious: “You were already in the orphanage when I got there.” Even this small detail took months of prodding and questioning. Once it was out, he offered up a tangible clue to my past. It was a 37-year-old address in Saigon that he said belonged to my foster mother, Ta Kim Cuc.

So here is my dad’s most recent version of my beginnings. I have no way of knowing if it is true: Cuc somehow learned of my dad’s wishes and took him straight to my crib in the orphanage. After that, I was taken to her house where I stayed for the next six months. She accompanied us to the airport before we left Vietnam and gave my father her address. “Give this to Le Thi,” she instructed, “so that I can find out what became of her.”

Does or did this woman really exist? If so, how long did she wait hoping for the letter that never came? Is it possible that she’s waiting, still holding perhaps the only clue to the identity of my mother? Why did my dad never write to her? Why did he wait until I’d nearly driven myself crazy with the longing to know my history before he’d given me her address?

“I was waiting until you understood more about life. I had my reasons,” was the only explanation he offered.

All I heard was, “I am not accountable.”

I couldn’t disagree more. Adoption isn’t just about destiny, circumstance and self-congratulation for “saving” a child. It’s also about the consequences of conscious decisions made for adoptees supposedly “in our best interest.” Regardless of whether it’s for better or worse, adoption is the power to change a life and as the saying goes, “With great power, comes great responsibility.” My history had been hidden and altered, affecting my life in ways I’m only beginning to understand. Furthermore, my father’s actions may have possibly prevented me from ever finding out the truth.

What I think my dad failed to realize is that regardless of his own feelings, the truth of my adoption was rightfully mine to know. He was simply holding it in trust and was responsible for giving me unfiltered access to it.

Unlike in decades past, the act of hiding an adoptee’s heritage is not beyond question or criticism. We should be past the days when adoptees are forced to shoulder the burden of maintaining the illusion that none of it matters. In my own situation, though, the instinct to comfort and reassure is too ingrained. Despite my feeling of outrage and betrayal, I cannot break my conditioning.

“It’s alright, Dad,” I said. I was glad we were talking over the phone, that he couldn’t see the look on my face. “I understand.”

I didn’t understand. But what good would it have done to say so? I’m 37 years old with four kids of my own. How much more was I suppose to understand “about life” before he deemed me ready to hear the truth? The fact is he withheld and even altered vital pieces of my puzzle years after my initial inquiries. Knowing that forces me to question the nature of his other “reasons.”

Without further explanation, I am again left to speculate but to what end? My dad and I both know it wouldn’t do anything good for me to push the matter. Even if I tried to hold him accountable for withholding information that was rightfully mine, we both know he would throw up the old reliable defense.
“Everything I did was in your best interest.” How do you argue with that?

It’s not that I doubt my dad’s sincerity. I have little doubt that he believed his decisions were based in large part on what he thought was best for me. Unfortunately, we disagree. Sympathy or even empathy does not equal acceptance or approval. In fact, over the years, I have become highly critical of his actions. By way of omission, deception and half-truth, he altered my personal history and my identity. His actions not only affected me, but all those around me, including my children and even the life of an obscure, almost forgotten woman by the name of Ta Kim Cuc — that is, if she exists. If I bring thoughts of my Vietnamese mother into the picture, the pain and anger become unbearable.

My dad would probably argue that he simply told my story as a continuation of his. True, my story is part of his own, but in telling it through his own perceptions and not including mine, he took away my ownership and for that I need to hold him accountable.

I have tried to write a letter Cuc …

“To whom it may concern…”

But how do you write a letter to a person who may no longer be alive and send it to an address that may no longer exist? To whom it may concern? My father’s choices concerned us all. My whole family has had to live with the consequences, yet I am the one left with the job of rectifying his wrongs. It is the thought foremost in my mind as I scramble to find the one woman who could unravel decades of secrecy. I can’t even begin to think of how I might react if it’s discovered she’s already passed from this life, taking it all with her.

Of course, I will always love my dad as any dutiful daughter does, but I will always feel betrayed. Any feelings of ingratitude, disloyalty and guilt about my anger takes a back seat to a sense of urgency as I run full steam backwards into the past.

By
Jeff Gammage

At about 10 a.m. on June 19, 2003, in the western Chinese city of Wuwei, a man named Ma Guoxing was walking across town, intent on a pending business appointment.

But as he neared the Wei’an Health Center, he noticed a crowd of people at the front gate, and he interrupted his journey to go and see what had so captivated their interest.

On the ground was a newborn baby, a girl, crying loudly.

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