Harlow's Monkey

Thoughts about the MN Supreme Court ruling in contested adoption case

I was honored (and more than a little overwhelmed) to be interviewed on MPR News to discuss the implications of the MN Supreme Court case ruling in favor of foster parents over paternal grandparents in a contested adoption case. 

You can listen to the interview below:

 

 

In preparing for this interview, I read over the court's decision, as well as the dissents ( Download MN Supreme Court Opinion - Dunning case). I wanted to share some of my thoughts about this case, the court's ruling/dissents, and expand more on the implications of this case. 

I am not a legal expert or scholar so this is my perspective from a child welfare scholar standpoint. Back in early January, I was contacted by Olivia LaVecchia from the City Pages. Olivia was writing a story about this case and was looking for my thoughts as a child welfare scholar. Although none of my quotes were included in the article (the executive director of my Center, Traci LaLiberte, was included) Olivia did let me know later that I was helpful in providing broader contextual information for her as she wrote the story.

As I shared with Olivia, and mentioned briefly in the MPR interview, I saw this case as a story about what happens when systemic issues and communication and collaboration between systems fail. There have been comments on news sites, blogs and facebook discussions that largely are sympathetic to the foster parents, in sum pointing to the attachment and bonding that has been formed by both the children to the foster parents and vice versa. And there is no doubt that that has happened; there is no doubt in my mind that these parents have been wonderful, stellar and committed caregivers to these children; nor is there any doubt in my mind that to disrupt this placement would be very traumatic and emotionally heartbreaking to the children and the parents both.

The problem to me is that had earlier issues regarding kinship identification, kinship placement, and interstate collaboration and communication been practiced as required and with the best interests of the children in mind, then we wouldn't be having this discussion at all because these kids could have been placed with the relatives as their first placement, and the bonding and attachment would have been with the grandparents.

I had several pages of notes prepared for the interview and had such a short time to discuss with Mr. Picardi, but here is some expansion of some of the systemic issues that I believe were at play in this case: 

1. The interstate compact on the placement of children (ICPC) is an agreement that is in place in all states to provide assistance and oversight in placing children in foster and adoptive placements across state lines. But the ICPC is problematic to actually practice in real life and often fails children and families. Each state does adoption differently; how each state practically processes ICPC requests differ as well. 

2. One of the things that complicated this particular case is that a federal law that regulates how long children can be in placement before moving ahead with the "permanency plan" (that is, terminating parental rights and moving toward adoption or legal guardianship if reunification with family is determined to be not in the child's best interest) called the Adoption and Safe Families Act (ASFA). Since these two girls in this case were placed as newborns, the minute they are placed with the foster family, that timeline clock starts ticking, and for children under 8, that means six months before the permanency review hearing is supposed to take place determining their plan for permanency.

Think about how this disadvantages relatives who come forward to adopt. In this case, because of the delays from the grandparent's state, the paperwork for the ICPC wasn't done in time to comply with the law. So the grandparents were screwed in part because of the fact that their state did not complete the ICPC process in a timely way, and because Minnesota did not have the resources or the ability to make the other state finish the paperwork.

3. We now practice something called "concurrent permanency planning" in child welfare which means that instead of planning for a child to be reunified with his or her parents and then, if that does not happen, we start planning for permanency (adoption or legal guardianship) in a sequential way, we are now by law required to do both at the same time. So the track is to place the child in the first foster placement with someone whose job is dual - to help support the child's reunification with the parents and also commit to adopting the child (or assuming legal guardianship) in case there is a termination of parental rights.

This is a terribly difficult job to do. To work to care, nurture and support a child, while helping support the child through the reunification process, and then to also adopt is asking a lot of families. As a result there is an unintended consequence to setting up the system this way. Many families sign up to do concurrent permanency planning (also known as legal risk placements) as their first choice for adoption because they often get babies and younger children (as in this case - both girls were placed as infants from the hospital).

Many social workers I've worked with have talked at length about how difficult it is to have foster parents who are concurrent permanency placement homes really do a good job helping in the reunification process  - and can you blame them? It would be difficult. For those doing this type of placement, in Minnesota the chance of the child becoming available for you to adopt is about 20%. That means most families will see 4 out of 5 of the children they care for reunite or go to relatives. For famililies who hope to adopt by becoming a concurrent permanency placement, it means lots of loss and lots of unknowns.

BUT - that is what they signed up for. And so while it's hard, and while I empathize and have compassion for the difficulty, it is SO FRUSTRATING to work with foster parents who half-heartedly or half-assed support reunification because they're really hoping for a TPR so they can adopt. It feels like you're being lied to, as the social worker, and it feels like they're manipulating the system. Sometimes it even feels like they're sabotaging the reunification - and if there is a relative interested then watch out for fireworks because foster parents often feel claim to those children because they've put in the sweat and tears.

Again, I feel a lot of compassion for concurrent permanency foster parents. They have a TOUGH job. And they are underappreciated. But they do have a job, and that is to support reunification.

4. The relatives should, when at all possible, be the concurrent permanency placement option. When families live in different states, or even in different counties, this can be mishandled. This is politics at play, between states and counties. When done well, relatives that are the concurrent permanency option end up being able to keep children in the larger family systems, as well as provide the stability and safety children need, without multiple placements and transitions. So when states and counties do not do a diligent search for relative placements or don't engage with relatives from the beginning, then families lose out on the opportunity to become the concurrent permanency placement.

Now, readers will chime in and say things like, the families were not appropriate, we couldn't find anyone who could pass the background check etc., the apple doesn't fall far from the tree, the family wouldn't work with us, etc., etc. 

Yes, these issues always come up. And for most of them, the easy way out is to just go ahead and rule them out because why not? A worker only has so much time and here we have eager concurrent permanency foster parents jumping at the chance to take in the kids. So you can fill in the rest of the story. Engaging relatives becomes more of a check-list and a rule out, rather than using social work skills and really working with the relatives because you believe its the right thing. Instead of advocating on behalf of relatives who are scared of the system (particularly if they're families of color and they have historical reason to be suspicious of government agencies who separate families), helping them get good legal representation, working to help them push past red tape and other bureaucratic barriers what ends up happening? Social workers do all the above for the FOSTER PARENTS not the relatives. 

5. Contested adoption cases like these are rare, but when they occur they seem to have the following elements - foster parents, often who are white and middle or upper class, who feel entitled to keep the children, and have the means to hire the best and most prestigious/premiere adoption attorney and often with the support of a local or state legislator - and biological or relatives, often of color, working class, who do not have the knowledge of the system enough to know what kind of attorney would best represent them, and without support of local politicians. 

6. Then in many cases, there are racial issues too. They are not additional, or separate, but intersectionally entwined with everything else. 

7. In this case, the foster family said at one time that they would help make sure the children had a relationship with their relatives. Yet out of frustration with the court case, they expressed that now they no longer would do that. I hope that this is just momentary frustration but it shows how little this is about the children and how much it's about grown up adults acting like children. Also, I was personally disturbed that the child who is named after the grandmother is not called by that name by the foster family. One more clue that the foster parents don't value the relational connection to the biological family.

So, that is a very long post that doesn't even begin to cover this case! And keep in mind that there are details I don't know and/or can't begin to cover them all, but I want to end with this. 

Nobody wins, really, in this situation. The girls have lost their opportunity to be raised with their biological family and even if the foster parents do the right thing and change their mind about having a relationship with the grandparents, the girls will not know their grandmother in the way they could have. While the foster family and their attorney hired experts to say that the attachment would be traumatic to these girls (and I believe that yes, it would be very difficult), I feel they patently overplayed the reality that these girls have the capacity to attach to the grandparents. The kids who struggle with attachment are the ones who never had the opportunity to attach in early life. These girls, by the very fact that they are strongly attached, definitely would be able to attach to other caregivers. The people in this case who are having more difficulty with the attachment are the foster parents.

In addition we often, regularly, move children who have been in placements even longer, because it's the right thing to do. I sometimes use this analogy. Let's say a child has been kidnapped by a stranger who treats them like their own and years later is found. That child may have grown up attached and bonded to the kidnapper but once found, they will still have to be taken away and returned to the custodial parent(s). We have to because it's the ethical thing to do, the right thing to do, even if we know that it means causing trauma by separating the child from the only parent they know. Now, don't get angry and leave comments that I'm calling the foster parents or the relatives kidnappers because I'm not - but this just shows how easily we can justify certain elements such as attachment to caregivers in ways that benefit us when it is about us and not about the child. Rather than thinking about it in the larger context of what's best for the children.

For their part, the relatives also believed it was their entitlement to have the girls, and as a result they and the foster parents created an atomosphere that really poisoned what could have been a lifelong supportive system of care for these girls. 

There is a common saying among many of us who work in child welfare - a child can never have too many people love them. If only the adults in this case believed this as well. 

Upcoming event with Families with Children from Asia - Midwest

April 7, 2013 - Coffee and Conversation with Families with Children from Asia - Midwest

2:00-3:30 pm. at Java Train - St. Paul

Join me on Sunday, April 7th with Families With Children from Asia Midwest and Land of Gazillion Adoptees Coffee and Conversation series. I'll be discussing the landscape of post-adoption needs and services for families. To register, click here.

Discussing a contested adoption ruling on MPR

Tomorrow morning I am scheduled to be a guest on Minnesota Public Radio to discuss the Supreme Court's ruling in a contested adoption case. The conflict, which was profiled by reporter Olivia LaVecchia for the City Pages in January, centers around the adoption of two little girls. The lower court had ruled in favor of the foster parents that had cared for both of the girls since their births and the grandmother in Missouri who had been trying to adopt them for nearly the same amount of time. 

The show is scheduled to air at about 11 am. I'll post a de-brief after the show.

Adoption is both/and, not either/or

A long time ago I wrote a post titled "Adoptee vs. Adoptee" outlining some of the challenges that critical adoptees receive from others - including adoptees - particularly those who think adoption should not be criticized or in any way challenged and adoptees who participate in the unproductive "pro-adoption/anti-adoption" dichotomy. 

Lately I've been involved in a similar situation but from the flip side, this time involving an adoptee who publicly shamed me for working with adoption organizations (and their leadership) the adoptee does not support. 

A few days ago I participated in some facebook conversations that brought me back to some of my earlier Harlow's Monkey posts and I had some nostalgic moments re-reading some of my archived articles. Life has sure changed for me since those early days in 2006 when I started the blog. As I re-read through, I thought it was interesting how my thoughts and beliefs about adoption (as well as my tone) have evolved over time. Back then the political stakes were low and I could just be a (mostly) anonymous, outspoken adoptee working with other adoptees and foster youth. Now I'm more public and work more in the arena of research, training and educating those who will work in the area of child welfare, permanency and adoption.

Perhaps the one thing that has remained constant, however, is the struggle to keep balanced on the tightrope. I am still navigating and negotiating and explaining myself to adoptees who are angry that I critique the adoption industrial complex and those who are angry that I seem to be supporting it. The only difference is that in some ways it feels there is more at stake and definitely more politics to navigate now than there was five years ago, but the level of mistrust and suspicion among adoptees is still ever present.

And that makes me wonder how much of this is just human nature, and how much of it is about the structures - politically, institutionally, etc. - that just keep us feuding with each other instead of focusing on working together to dismantle the oppressive institutions.

It is much easier to take all or nothing sides on an issue, but I won't participate in arguments that force me to choose from an either/or situation. Because for me it's never either/or, it's almost always both/and. 

Adoption is not either a family building issue or a big business, it's both/and. Adoption is not the solution or the problem, it's both/and. We can't be focused only on the child or the family, we must be mindful of both. And a child's best interests are not unilaterally separate from the family's and vice versa - the child's best interests can also include the family or community's best interests. Adoption should not be only thought of through the lens of children or through the lens of parents. Both matter.

Trying to reform adoption isn't the same as just moving a few parts around and calling it good to go, and neither is it eliminating the practice all together. There will always be children whose parents are unable, for whatever reason, to care for them. There will be some children who will fall through the cracks in their extended family and kin community. There will always be some parents who don't want to parent the children they have and will find way to not have to parent them. The problem is that adoption is still too often posed as an either/or solution - adoptive family vs. biological family - instead of both/and. Open adoptions are starting to change this paradigm, but we have a long ways to go. I'm not willing to call for a total end to adoption until all the reasons children are placed for adoption have been resolved.   

I've been thinking a lot about the either/or and both/and paradigm shift thing in terms of my profession a lot over the past several years. Social workers in particular grapple with the meaning of the work they do, because it often is positioned as either "helping individuals" or "advocating for social justice" and these two values are seen as dichotomous. I call this the starfish and the dragon dichotomy. We need to be doing both, of course. We can't just save the starfish and ignore the reason for why all the starfish are washing up on shore, neither can we just head off to slay the dragon and let people drown in the river. 

Adoption reform can happen through grass-roots organizing and it can happen through working within institutions to be an agent of changes and in my own opinion, change and reform happens most successfully when both occur at the same time.  

 

Six words: The adoption version

Several folks on my facebook feed this past week linked to The Race Card Project that was created by journalist Michele Norris. For The Race Card Project, people are encouraged to describe their experience of race using only six words. The submissions are powerful and heartbreaking and uplifting. I read through several pages of them and found myself at times nodding my head in affirmation and sometimes surprised (in both good and bad ways) by what was submitted.

Norris' The Race Card Project is not the first "Six Word" idea. I've participated in a local one for my city and neighborhood, and the first one I heard about was the Smith Six-Word memoirs.

It made me think that maybe it would be interesting to have an adoption version of the Six Word Project.

So here it goes - what would be your six word description of adoption from your experience? Please put them in the comments.

 

I'll start it off with what I submitted for The Race Card Project because it sums it up my thoughts about adoption and race simlilarly.

 

I AM NOT YOUR CHARITY PROJECT.

 

Ok, your turn.

Seeking participants for my doctoral dissertation study

Are you an adoptive parent of an internationally adopted child with a disability?

Since the finalization of your child’s adoption, has the child been placed out of the home - either temporarily or permanently -  in a group home, residential treatment center, foster care or another adoptive family?

If so, I am interested in speaking with you. I am looking to interview adoptive parents of internationally adopted children with disabilities for my doctoral dissertation research.

Who: Minnesota adoptive parents whose internationally adopted child:

• Is currently between 6 and 21 years of age
• Has a disability diagnosed at least 6-months ago (or more) by a medical professional, mental health professional, or school professional for an Individualized Education Plan (IEP) including (but not limited to):
  • Intellectual/Developmental disability including Austism Spectrum Disorders
  • FASD
  • Mental health disability
  • Learning disability
  • Physical or medical disability including sensory (vision/hearing) impairment
• Is currently, or has in the past, been placed in any of the following for any length of time other than for respite care of a 72-hour hold:
  • Shelter
  • Foster care
  • Residential treatment center
  • Group home
  • Hospital treatment center
  • With another caregiver (in legal or informal transfer of custody)
  • With another adoptive family after a dissolution of the adoption

What is involved: I am asking adoptive parents for about 60 to 90 minutes of their time to interview them about their experiences. Participation is voluntary and your information will be protected and confidential. Your participation in this study will never be disclosed.

Why: Adopting a child with disabilities can be both challenging and rewarding. Parents who have adopted children from outside the United States with mental health and intellectual/developmental disabilities sometimes struggle to find appropriate pre- adoption education and/or post-adoption support to help them manage the challenges of parenting a child with a disability. The purpose of this study is to inform adoption practices and improve adoption supports for families that adopted children with disabilities.

How: To participate in this study, or to find out more information about this study, please contact JaeRan Kim at jaerankim@gmail.com  (personal research email), blev0001@umn.edu (university email) or 612-626-3831.

You can also download my recruitment flyer. 

This study has been approved by the University of Minnesota Institutional Review Board #1301P26761

Repost: Choosing ethnicity, negotiating race

Another repost from my other blog that was written during my hiatus.

Originally written March 25, 2011.

When you are part of a small and specific population, you tend to be hyper-aware of representations of "your group." So when I heard about Mia Tuan and Jiannbin Lee Shiao's book, Choosing Ethnicity, Negotiating Race: Korean Adoptees in America, I immediately put out a query to my Korean American friends to see if anyone had heard of the authors or this book.

Since 2006, I have been keeping track of the "call for participants" for research on Korean adoptees that I've come across through different venues (most often list-serves and organization newsletters). Since I've started counting, there have been 23 calls specifically involving Korean adoptees and another five for transracial adoptees (ETA: that have put out widespread calls for participants- there have been several others I have been aware of that did not advertise or use the internet to find their sample).

Of those, 11 studies specifically involved looking at racial identity; 9 studies sought to understand the Korean adoptee "experience" and 4 were what I call "well-being" or "adjustment" studies. While I get that racial identity is a huge part of understanding the transracial/international/Korean-adoptee experience, I'm waiting for research that stops pathologizing us and am hopeful that more research like Eleana Kim's work will come out that centers the adoptee as the agent of change and action, not merely a passive subject of study.

There are many aspects of the Korean adoptee experience that are not being studied or researched. I swing between feeling that "my community" is saturated with research while at the same time acknowledging that there is so much more to be learned and understood. 

Tuan and Shiao seek to understand how and in what ways Korean Americans identify themselves and how their identity/identities "are chosen, discarded, or revised over time (p.12). So here are my thoughts about this book and how I, as the "subject" (not literally, I was not a participant in this study, but I am part of the population being studied) view the discussion.

I'm always pleased when I read articles/studies that focus on the adult adopted person's experience (although once again, our voices are mediated through outsiders so some aspects of their analysis will be limited). Because so much of adoption as a practice is focused on the adoption of a child, people tend to think of adoption as an event. But as others have stated, adoption isn't a single-time event (that would be the finalization of an adoption) - adoption is something that affects adopted persons, birth parents and adoptive parents throughout all of their lives. Traditional studies look at outcomes for children, often fairly soon after placement although there have been some notable exceptions, and rarely has there been the opportunity for longitudinal studies which could follow a cohort of adoptees for a long period of time - especially adulthood.

I bring this up because we're so focused on making sure the immediate benefits of adoption are studied that we haven't thoughtfully delved as much into how an adopted person makes sense of their adoption experiences in their 30s, 40s, 50s, 60s and beyond. Other than Brodzinsky and his colleagues, not much research has been conducted on the whole life experiences of adopted persons. An experienced adoptive mom (I call adoptive parents whose children are now adults "experienced") I know shared with me that she often tells newbie adoptive parents that the majority of their lifelong relationship with their child will be as adults and that pre- or new adoptive parents are often taken aback at this statement.

One of the aspects of the study I was disappointed in was the sample. The authors describe that due to their proximity to the Holt adoption agency, they chose to solicit their sample from families that had adopted through Holt (the authors do acknowledge the limitations of their sample and recruitment, which I appreciated).

In addition to the ease of securing participants for the interviews, having access to Holt enabled the researchers to have case files. I was bothered by this for a few reasons. First, it was never clear to me why the researchers needed the case files and how information they gleaned from the files added to their research.

Second, without understanding why and in what ways information from the case file was considered important for the study adds another layer of concern from the point of view from an adopted person who is unable legally to have access to my adoption files. It is disconcerting to know that someone else, through permission of my adoption agency, can have access to that information without my consent.

[ETA 4/19/11: I received an email from Dr. Shaio, informing me that he and Dr. Tuan did not look at case files. In the book (p. 15) they wrote that Holt "provided access to its placement records" and I incorrectly interpreted that to mean case files. I am happy to stand corrected and to know that case files were not accessed for their study.]

As a researcher myself, this is something that I have struggled with. I have participated in research in which I have access to case files that the subject of the files are not allowed to see for themselves. I hope other researchers understand just how privileged they are to have access to such personal information that as the client, I/we can never have. I'm not saying this is necessarily wrong in principle - but I am saying it is an ethical issue that researchers MUST think about. It's not the same thing as having one's medical records or case files used for research because when I go to the doctor I sign a form that gives consent for my records to be used in research. As an adopted person (or as a fostered alum would be) I am not given permission to withdraw my consent. I don't even get asked. Researchers go through the agency or the adoptive parent, not the adopted person.

The other thing I was sensitive to was that the researchers chose to contact the adult adoptees through their families. They sent out letters to adoptive parents, asking them to forward them on to the adoptee. This could only work if the adoptive parent and their adopted child were in contact and/or on speaking terms; and because not all adoptees ARE in contact with their adoptive parents (including some I know of personally who were adopted from Holt) this has the potential to skew the sample because it is dependent on the adoptive parent. Perhaps sending a call for participants through other means in addition to the adoptive parents that still have ties with Holt would have generated a sample that provided a more diverse voice. And once again, it is looking at the adoptee through the lens of the family (adoptive parents), even though the authors were quite clear it was the adult adoptees' voices they were seeking to understand. From my view, it appeared as though the authors chose not to engage with, or were unaware of, adult adoptee organizations who might have been able to help in soliciting participants.

Despite these concerns, overall I was pleased with much of the book. I especially appreciated that the authors problematized the adoptive parents' "colorblind" mentality about adopting a child of color - if that color were "yellow" and not "black." I really liked that the authors expanded David Kirk's theory of "shared fate" to analyze how adoptiveparents accept/reject racial difference in addition to adoption.

While the stories and words of the adopted Koreans that participated in this study rang familiar in terms of their descriptions of childhood experiences, their more recent discussions pertaining to race, culture, and constructing identity did not fully match the spectrum of adoptees. There was very little discussion of the networking (social and otherwise) of Korean adoptees around the world, which was interesting to me in light of the fact that Holt was the first to do adoptee camps and also have been big in organizing yearly "Motherland" tours. There was one mention of the Gatherings (1999, but not the 2004, 2007 ones), no mention of adoptee list-serves and blogs which have been around since the 1990s, and very little mention of books written by Korean adoptees (including memoirs, anthologies and scholarly work).

In the end I gave this book 3 1/2 stars out of 5. I think that the audience for this book is actually adoptive parents. There would be much for adoptive parents to learn, especially if they are not familiar with the concept of "shared fate" and I think the adoptee voices do, to a large part, mirror much of what I have heard from adult adoptees over the past 12 years I have been involved with the Korean adoptee community.

 

Interview at Rileys in Uganda blog

I did an interview with Keren Riley from the Riley's in Uganda blog. You can see the interview in full (and since I have so much to say it's pretty long) at Keren's blog.

Riley's in Uganda blog

For those of you who may be interested in family reunification and orphan care and thinking about/problem solving child welfare issues in the African context, you should check out the facebook page the Rileys created, Alternative Care in Uganda.

Thank you Keren!

Where Russia goes, will others follow?

 

From the New York Post

International adoption has been in the news a lot lately. In the days prior to the Christmas holidays, newsfeeds were abuzz with the reports that Russia was going to enact legislation effectively closing down adoptions to the U.S. as a retaliation for the U.S.'s recent legislation approving sanctions to Russia for human rights violation.

This past week, China also made news, but interestingly this story about baby buying and corruption for international adoption was posted in the international version of the NYT and not the U.S. version. 

From the New York Times

People are naturally outraged, and the usual pundits have weighed in. Many are saying Russia is putting politics over children, saying children are being punished by not being able to be adopted.

Except that let's remember Russia isn't banning international adoption outright, it's banning adoption to the United States. 

Just under 1000 children were adopted by American families last year, a little less than a third or so of the total number (3,400) of Russian children placed for international adoption from the country. 

Whether the bill was passed as a retaliatory political statement or not, it is striking to me that they chose to enact such politics through what they thought was something that would get people's attention: international adoption. I also believe that had the U.S. not had so many problems already regarding adoptions from Russia, this may not have been the road Russia would have taken.

When you consider the return of Artyom by the Tennessee adoptive parent Torry Hansen, or the abuse of Masha Allen by her adoptive father, or the Ranch for Kids, the residential placement that specializes in treating Russian adoptees, or the deaths of Russian adoptees due to the abuse or neglect of their U.S. adoptive parents, is it really any wonder that Russia would make this move?

A total of 19 Russian adopted children (3% of the estimated 60,000 children adopted from Russia) have reportedly died (see this account or this one). And for those of you who say only 3%, the percentage of children in the general population who died in the U.S. due to abuse and neglect is around 0.2% (2010 figures). I find this particularly egregious since supposedly adoption is to be the safety intervention for a child who has already experienced abuse, neglect and abandonment.  [ETA 9:49 pm: Thanks to readers who pointed out the percentages should be 0.03% (not 3%) and 0.002% (not 0.2%) above.]

Clearly the move is political, however I think that this was a natural and expected reaction from Russia. Without all the problems involving Russian adoptees over the past two decades, and without the U.S. being more concerned about the entitlement of American parents to adopt children at their demand than other children's human rights (for example, the U.S. still has not ratified the U.N. Convention on the Rights of the Child) then I don't think Russia would have taken this move. Clearly the problems involving Russian adopted children over the past two decades alone was not incentive enough to create this ban and recently the U.S. and Russia had worked on a bilateral agreement concerning protections of children adopted to the U.S.

So Russia made a political move. As if the U.S. doesn't do that as well, all the time. And perhaps maybe 1000 children in Russia won't get adopted by American families. That doesn't mean they won't get adopted. They could still go to other countries, or be adopted domestically in Russia since the country has also been working hard on improving their domestic adoption practices. Several years ago I spoke with a delegation of Russian child welfare professionals, judges, and orphanage directors. They spoke about their biggest challenge in domestic adoption - getting people to consider adopting sibling groups, older children and those with disabilities.....hm. Sounds familiar, like all those American families who won't adopt our children in foster care with siblings, who are older, and who have disabilities.

I predict that Russia won't be the only country that will ban or impose even more strict criteria for adoption in the near future. And the U.S., being resourceful, is already working on other countries to open adoption programs. When it comes to international adoption I see it as a re-work of this old metaphor - when one door closes, we break open windows. 

Where is the outrage and concern for children's safety and well-being in other parts of the world? Or do we only care for them if they're considered "adoptable" and available to Americans?

 

More:

NYT: Putin signs bill that bars international adoption, upending families

CNN: Families in 'limbo" after Russian adoption ban

Guardian: Russia's ban on adoption isn't about children's rights

Repost: Inside the mind and heart of an internationally adopted child

This is another re-post from my other blog that was written while on hiatus from this blog. People sometimes have asked me about adoption-themed books for children and young readers. Honestly I think most are terrible. I agree with my friend and scholar of children's literature, Sarah Park Dahlen, that most of these children's books on adoption were written more to satisfy and soothe adoptive parents than adoptees themselves. That said, this was my review of the book, Betti on the Highwire, which is one of the few I can recommend. For more of my book suggestions, please see my recommended reading page here. 

 Originally posted May 11, 2011.

This afternoon, a children's novel I ordered online arrived in my mailbox and a few short hours later I had devoured the book. Betti on the High Wire is the story of a young girl, Babo, living in an unnamed country devastated by war. Babo finds herself unexpectedly adopted by Americans (or "melons" as Babo refers to them because of their round, pink faces) and soon she is living in an unnamed town in the U.S. with a new name, new sister, new parents - and she vows to never "adapt" or forget where she came from.

Author Lisa Railsback was inspired to write the story from her work volunteering in a refugee camp. As a Korean adoptee, I am often skeptical about how international adoption is portrayed in novels, particularly the feelings and thoughts of the internationally adopted child themselves. Often I find children's books about international adoption to be largely about making adoptive parents feel better as much as they may be outwardly intended to reassure the internationally adopted child. Babo/Betti is a complex child and I found Railsback's conception of what Babo/Betti thinks and feels about her experience being adopted by Americans, and having to leave everything she has known and loved in her country - especially her chosen family there - to be the most realistic and complex portrayal that I have read.

Adoption books for children being what they are - that is typically all nicely resolved in the end, this book doesn't exactly challenge the dominant narrative about adoption. The unnamed country is, after all, portrayed in pretty stark terms, providing exactly the American-style justification for taking Babo away. Babo and the other children of course must be dirty, mostly illiterate, scavenging for food, etc., yet remain likable (i.e. not prone towards Reactive Attachment Disorder). And while Railsback does critique the consumerist, materialist and consumptive patterns of Americans to some extent, as well as portray how mean white American children can be towards children who are different, it is unlikely that a real internationally adopted child of this age would adapt as quickly as Betti does in the book. While the choice to make Babo able to speak some English helps the reader, it is pretty unrealistic in my opinion and serves more as a device to move the character through the story plot more quickly than it is realistic for most older, internationally adopted children (such as the little girl adopted in the movie Wo Ai  Ni Mommy, who would have been close to Babo's age in the story).

Even so, I recommend this book for its most nuanced portrayal of an internationally adopted child's inner thoughts and feelings that I've read so far. If I were an adoption agency, I would require all prospective adoptive parents to read this book before any child adopted internationally was placed in their home.