I just re-read what I posted a minute ago, and I noticed that I said "Yehva was born into a family of introverts." I didn't catch that when I was writing it; technically, of course, Yehva was not born into our family. She was adopted into it. But I like my little slip of the tongue, and I don't think I'll change it.
It reminds me that I have been wanting to say more about the book Blue Ribbon Babies and Labors of Love, which I blogged about back in June, when I was only partway through it. Having finished it, I have a lot more to say about it, and it's been rattling around in my brain in a very annoying way, so I'm going to try to get it out before I shower and load the kids into the van for homeschool park day. It may not be very well-organized; more of a brain-dump.
I have a lot of respect for Christine Ward Gailey, the sociologist who did the research and wrote this book. I so appreciate her willingness to think about, in particular, social class and how it affects the experiences of adoptive parents and their children. In her study, there were differences in how adopters from different social classes talked about their adopted children and their role in the family, and this is what my slip of the tongue about Yehva reminded me of. In her interviews, it was only among the working-class adopters that people said things about their adopted children like, "He reminds me so much of my Uncle Louie." On the other hand, it was only among the middle-class and wealthy parents that people said things like, "We love him like he was our own." One international adopter described going to Guatemala for an infant in these terms (I have a note but not a direct quote, so I'm paraphrasing): "We went to Guatemala because we'd heard they had very healthy Caucasian infants there, and we wanted to get as close to the real thing as possible" (p. 107).
"As close to the real thing as possible." "Love him like he was our own." Hmmm.
Adopters also varied by social class in how they responded to troubled children. Gailey says that children adopted into working-class homes are more at risk of being hit, but children adopted into middle-class homes and wealthy homes are more at risk of emotional abandonment within the home when they don't meet their parents' expectations. For instance, wealthier families whose kids have behavioral problems are more likely to isolate the children from extended family. "I just leave her home with the nanny; it's easier for everybody." But working-class parents say things like, "I always take him to family get-togethers. He is part of the family. We stay as long as we can; sometimes it's two minutes, sometimes it's all afternoon." Wealthier families also tend to build a buffer of professionals between themselves and their troubled kids: therapists, special schools, nannies. Working-class families look to extended family and friendship networks for support and help (interestingly, single women who adopt, even if they have middle-class professions and backgrounds, often adopt working-class style strategies for support, relying on extended family, surrogate family in the form of neighbors, and alliances with other single parents).
I have often heard people speak with extreme vitriol about international adopters and the agencies that serve them, and I haven't really gotten why. I know that there are ethical problems and risks associated with international adoption, but I think that's true of domestic adoption as well, and I have always seen international adopters as embedded in the same complicated mix of love, risk, and privilege that we live in. I know many international adopters, and they are compassionate people who do not shy away from the ethical complexities of their choice, or from the responsibility they bear to their children, so I just couldn't understand where the anger toward international adopters was coming from.
And then I met the people Gailey interviewed for her book. And I get it. Oh, oh, oh, do I get it.
In her sample, international adopters were significantly more wealthy than other adoptive parents. International adoption costs more, in general, than other forms of adoption, and what adopters get for their money includes less-invasive home studies and fewer education requirements. International adopters generally pay about twice as much for their home studies as domestic adopters, but are subjected to less scrutiny.
At one point, Gailey called an international adoption agency to see if she could set up some interviews with staff for her study. The person she spoke to on the phone mistook her for a potential adoptive parent, and Gailey decided to run with that. She was told that her home study would cost about $5000 (for comparison, ours cost $1500; $1500-2500 is pretty typical, as I understand it) and would take a few months to complete. Gailey said she was in a hurry because she had already identified a child in a Peruvian orphanage that she was interested in; she was told that for $10,000, she could have her home study in two weeks.
Gailey decided to throw up as many red flags as she could. She told the representative that two weeks would be great, but she was very busy at work and often not getting home until late in the evening. The agency rep said that was no problem; they could do her interviews over the phone. "What about this class we're supposed to take? I don't see how I have time for that," Gailey said. The rep replied that they could send her the reading materials and then someone would go over them with her by phone.
In other words, this agency essentially said that for $10,000, Gailey could have a completed home study in 14 days, without ever having a home visit or meaningfully fulfilling an educational requirement.
Of course, this is neither typical or ethical. But it was only an extreme example of a trend Gailey found in her study, that the wealthiest people in her study, who chose international adoption most often, were able to use their financial resources to avoid the rigorous process other adopters go through.
Another thing the international parents were able to avoid was knowing much about the nations they were adopting from, and the political, social, economic, and racial conditions there. Some of them avoided this deliberately. International adoption agencies sometimes actively advertise, "We have caucasian babies!" Seeing an ad like this in the program at a conference, Gailey asked a woman she was talking to, who was in the process of international adoption, whether she knew that in other parts of the world, "caucasian" doesn't necessarily mean what it does in the US; in other words, a baby might be "caucasian" but be olive-skinned, with dark hair and eyes. This woman actually held out her hand to stop Gailey talking, said, "I don't want to hear about this," and walked away.
Many of the international adopters in Gailey's study had little or no information about their children's biological families. In the absence of information, they were free to construct their own stories, and they did. The stories they constructed were often Tales of the Deserving Poor. "I didn't want to deal with some crack whore's damaged goods," they might say when explaining why they didn't adopt domestically, and then go on to say something like--remember, this is in a complete absence of actual information--that they thought their child's birthmother was a pregnant teenager who had no family support, or a woman who had all the kids she wanted and could handle. In other words, your birthmother is immoral and bad, but mine is a decent woman in a hard situation making a responsible decision.
So interesting.
Gailey found that international agencies did little to educate potential adopters about the risks associated with adopting children who have been institutionalized, (most children adopted internationally have spent time in orphanages) and the adopters themselves generally did not seek this information. As a result, adopters were surprised, disappointed, and ill-equipped when their children displayed attachment or behavioral problems, or learning disabilities. And here is where social class again comes in in a very interesting way: working-class parents whose children (usually adopted from foster care) exhibited problems tended to attribute the problems to the traumatic experiences their children had had. "Who can blame him, with what he's been through?" they'd say, and focus on process rather than outcomes: "But when I think about how far he's come..." International adopters tended to give genetic explanations that absolved themselves of responsibility: "I used to think nurture mattered most, but now I see that some kids really are just bad seeds." (That's not a direct quote, except the "bad seed" part, which more than one international adopter used.)
Working class parents also tended to take a very long view in dealing with their troubled children. One parent said, "There are some wounds that take more than one generation to heal." Another said that when things were hard for her with her child, she would remind herself "that I'm doing this for the grandchildren." In other words, they accepted that their damaged child might not be healed, but they hoped they were taking a step that would make things better for the next generation.
Wealthy parents, on the other hand, tended to draw back from their children when it became clear that their children would not meet their aspirations. Reproduction of social class was an issue, and children were sometimes written off when it became clear that they weren't "college material." These parents often felt they had been duped into believing they would get a healthy, normal child, and thought that someone other than them should be accountable when that didn't happen. One father said, "There oughta be a lemon law for these kids. You ought to be able to send them back."
In Gailey's study (which she is careful to point out was done with a snowball sample, not a random one, so may not be generalizable), international agencies and adopters colluded to shield adoptive parents from the realities of conditions in children's home countries and the real risks associated with international adoption, with lamentable outcomes for the children involved.
(There are exceptions: Gailey's study included a small cohort of international adopters she called "academics." These are people who adopt from a country in which they have been doing work of some kind over extended periods of time; usually they adopt in response to observed conditions. For instance, one parent in this cohort adopted her daughter after seeing young girls selling their bodies on the streets in exchange for food. These adopters usually speak the local language, and continue to spend extended periods of time in their child's home country. Some of these children spend as much as 3-4 months per year in their country of origin, and it was only among this cohort that some children continued to have relationships with extended biological family.)
I could say so much more, about the word "orphan," what adopters think it means and what it really means (it's often a legal fiction, allowing adopters to believe they're adopting a child whose parents are dead, when in fact it may simply mean that their legal relationship has been severed); about wealthy adopters who meet their child's need for cultural knowledge by hiring domestic help from the child's country of origin; about so many other things--I have pages of notes.
But this stuff about international adoption and social class has really stayed with me. The international adopters I know are (thinking a minute) all Quakers, and almost all lesbians. In my experience, both Quakers and lesbians would be unlikely to ignore social and political realities. I would like to think that my sample is typical and Gailey's is exceptional, because the international adopters in her study really did not come off well at all (and by "really did not come off at all," I mean that they provoked rage in me). But I fear the opposite is true.
I have to get the kids fed and ready to go the park; I have to shower and load up swimsuits, towels, and snacks; I have to look up directions to the park and get my laundry out of the dryer if I want to wear a clean shirt. And I have to do all of this in the next 32 minutes, ideally. So I'll leave this here. I have tremendous respect for Gailey and her willingness to look at issues of social class, which I do not think most researchers have done.
7 comments:
thanks, Su, your writing is lovely and you tackle subjects I could easily ignore. Thanks for expanding my worldview.
One issue I've heard international adoption opponents raise is that the severing of the relationship between the birth parent(s) and child may not have been consensual, that the child may have been taken by force or sold. Another issue is that -- as you've found in your process of domestic transracial adoption, too -- folks feel that even if a child's own parents are not equipped to raise them, that the child ought to be raised in their own community, and that it undermines the wholeness of a community to take children out of it and give them to someone else. It sounds like you've done a bunch of reading on the experiences of the adopters -- have you found some of the resources from the perspective of adoptees? I haven't myself done too much inquiry into this topic but I know there are a fair number of folks speaking out about it.
Oliver Danni, I have only recently begun reading blogs by adult adoptees, and some books as well. I like John Raible's blog at http://johnraible.wordpress.com/
Browsing around in his blogroll is how I've come to read some others. As an adoptive parent, those blogs aren't easy to read--the folks who are angry or politicized enough to be blogging or writing about their experiences as transracial adoptees have some things to say that are hard to hear.
Rita Simon and Rhonda Rooda have a trilogy of books that are interviews with adoptive parents, transracial adoptees, and the white siblings of transracial adoptees (they and John Raible are the only people I've seen doing work on the experiences of white siblings): http://tinyurl.com/3xvrtam (tinyurl goes to Amazon link for the three books). I haven't read these books deeply but they seemed very good to me.
Su, I'm curious -- did the author make any distinctions by ethnicity of parent and child within the class distinctions? It strikes me that families who adopt out of foster care are more likely to have a child of a similar ethnic background (not just race) as their own. These children come from their own community or one nearby. International adopters have children who, even when they are of the same skin color, usually come from a different ethnic background. You wouldn't think this would matter if the children are adopted as babies, but I wonder... There is some research to suggest that we have a harder time getting over subtle feelings of tribalism than we would like, even those of us who *want* to be totally open-minded and accepting of everyone. (We can do it, but it takes time, relationships and awareness.) The language the international adopters use makes me think of this phenomenon. They *do* love their children (well, I'm sure most of them do), but they remain aware of their differences in spite of themselves and the hot water of a difficult child makes the tea bag of tribalism release it's flavor.
I just wonder if this is as class-based as it seems on the surface, since international adoption is not widely available to working class people. If a significant number of working class families had adoptees from other countries, I wonder if you would see similar seepings of xenophobia?
Gotta run myself. I'm off to see my new nephew who was born yesterday!
Stephanie, that's a really good question--most of the working-class families did adopt from foster care, and I don't remember Gailey being specific all the time about whether the adoptions were transracial or not. It makes sense that what you're talking about could be a confounding factor.
Congratulations on the new nephew!
Another thought about adopting from foster care that came to me. As unpleasant as it is to contemplate, foster care kind of serves as a "lemon law". Presumably most people who adopt out of foster care had gardianship of the child for some time before the adoption. If the child seemed more challenging than the family could handle, (or for any other reason, really), the family would simply not pursue adoption for that child. So it makes sense that adoptive parents from the foster care system might be less likely to feel disappointed in the child they adopted. Just another thought that came to me last night.
Stephanie
Stephanie, I think you're right about some foster care adoptions, where the children are in the home for some period of time before they're released for adoption. But some foster care adoptions are people taking kids into their home with the intent to adopt (adopting "waiting" children), and that can be finalized pretty quickly. I don't know what proportion of foster-care adoptions fall into those two categories.
And I think, from what I've heard parents say at the ForeverParents forum, that even people who know a child they're adopting has problems of one kind or another often think that these are temporary, that with good, stable care and love, there will be significant improvement in 3 or 6 months, or a year. So there is often a process they describe of figuring out, and adapting to the reality, that they're never going to have the relationship with their kids that they imagined, when that recovery doesn't happen like they expected it to. So there's definitely a process there, even for forewarned parents, where they can choose to accept or reject the reality of the child they have.
I think, too, there are limits to forewarning. We knew a lot of birthmothers change their minds (I think our agency said about 40%?) but we were still stunned and devastated when it happened to us. And I remember one thread at foreverparents where people who had really challenging older-child adoptions--people who'd had to call the police on their children, or who had placed them eventually in residential facilities--talking with dark humor about how they did know this could happen, they'd heard all the stories, the agencies had told them all about. They just didn't think it could happen to them.
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