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Bringing together scholars from a wide range of disciplines, this fascinating and timely Research Handbook provides diverse perspectives on the law and practice of adoption. It examines how adoption laws differ between countries and cultures, and the ongoing effects of adoption on the child, the birth parent(s), and the adoptive parent(s). This Research Handbook documents the history of adoption legislation and offers comparative perspectives on the implementation of full adoption in England and Wales, in contrast to the use of simple adoption in other European countries. Chapters examine the challenges facing adoption law; from adoption without parental consent and anonymous birth, to transracial and intercountry adoption, as well as discussing the human rights of the child during and after the adoption process. Providing an abundance of global research on all aspects of the topic of adoption, Nigel Lowe and Claire Fenton-Glynn offer a comprehensive guide to the past, present, and future of adoption law. The Research Handbook of Adoption Law will be an indispensable resource for students and researchers of family law and social work, as well as human rights lawyers, legal practitioners in the field of adoption, and social workers worldwide.

Lynn watched her beloved Clare, newly adopted from Haiti, crawl the house in a frantic search for her lost mother. Preschool Clare enchanted with belly laughs and shining smiles. Also, thrashed and wailed in her room as Lynn crouched on her own bed—pillow clutched over her head—her past trauma triggered. A pre-teen trip to Haiti brought sunshine, ruby red hibiscus blooms, and the music of Haitian Creole. Back at home, Clare shattered mirrors into shards on the subway tiles of their bathroom. And just before her thirteenth birthday, as she and Lynn walked hand in hand through their neighborhood, Clare calmly detailed her plan to die.Over the next years, Lynn and her family walked through psychiatric hospitals, along the Appalachian Trail, and in and out of residential placements, marriage, faith, and sanity barely surviving the journey. But then Lynn learned about fetal alcohol spectrum disorder (FASD)—a source of neurodivergence in one in twenty American children—and discovered the FASCETS Neurobehavioral Model, a strengths-based approach to celebrating and accommodating neurodiversity. It was a discovery that transformed them all.At times joyous, at times harrowing, but always full of love, Tinderbox is a mother's story of brokenness, unrelenting resilience, and hope.

A companion to What White Parents Should Know about Transracial Adoption, this practical workbook guides readers to better understand transracial adoption and do the work of anti-racist, trauma-informed parenting.A must-read for white parents who have transracially adopted or prospective parents considering transracial adoption, this follow-up to What White Parents Should Know about Transracial Adoption offers a wealth of activities, templates, and questions for self-reflection. Melissa Guida-Richards, who learned at the age of 19 that she was adopted from Colombia as an infant, addresses the complexities of transracial adoption with insight, compassion, and the wisdom of lived experience. Through thought-provoking questions and activities, Guida-Richards guides you to:Consider the role of infant-mother bonding and understand developmental trauma in adopteesUnderstand the complex history of adoption; recognize illegal and unethical practices, such as trafficking operations and baby factories; and ask the important questions when working with adoption agenciesLook more deeply at implicit bias, white saviorism, and white fragilityLocate and utilize adoption-competent mental health careOffer culturally aligned education, community, and resources to your childAcknowledge the effects of racism and celebrate your child's race and cultureThroughout the workbook, Guida-Richards guides you to break free from toxic positivity, understand and drop defenses, engage in difficult conversations, and learn to listen to your child's experience. Whether you are a potential parent considering a transracial adoption, a parent of an adopted child, or a therapist or advocate working with adoptive families, this practical and engaging workbook will help you “do the work” of furthering anti-racist, child-centered, and trauma-informed parenting.

An adoption expert and transracial adoptee herself examines the unique perspectives and challenges these adoptees have as they navigate multiple cultures“Your parents are so amazing for adopting you! You should be grateful that you were adopted.”Angela Tucker is a Black woman, adopted from foster care by white parents. She has heard this microaggression her entire life, usually from well-intentioned strangers who view her adoptive parents as noble saviors. She is grateful for many aspects of her life, but being transracially adopted involves layers of rejection, loss, and complexity that cannot be summed up so easily.In “You Should Be Grateful,” Tucker centers the experiences of adoptees to share deeply personal stories, well-researched history, and engrossing anecdotes from mentorship sessions with adopted youth. These perspectives challenge the fairy-tale narrative of adoption, giving way to a fuller story that explores the impacts of racism, classism, family, love, and belonging.

Embrace the beauty and challenges of transracial adoption.Being an adoptive parent is hard enough. But when your family is multiracial, things get even trickier. Parenting transracially doesn't come naturally, nor does it just happen with time. Love is essential—yet by itself, love isn't enough. Cross-cultural parenting also takes intentionality, listening, learning, growing, repenting, changing... then starting all over and doing it again. It's hard work! And yet, when an adoptive family honors the ethnic heritages of their children, the whole family—as well as the watching world—gets to see the beauty of a gloriously creative God.In It Takes More Than Love, Brittany Salmon shares her own family's story of transracial adoption and offers a biblically-based guide for others following the same path. Brittany recognizes that we live in divided times and there are extra challenges whenever race is part of the conversation. But with wise insight and hard-won experience, she provides guidance about topics such as:Maintaining a Gospel perspective throughout the journeyCelebrating your child's history and heritageConfronting racismResponding to comments about your familyAvoiding pitfalls in adoptionHelping your kids feel represented in your home and communityNo one is promising transracial adoption will be easy—least of all Brittany! Yet the extra effort is balanced by a beauty that images our eternal destiny. Until the day God makes all things new, the welcoming an inclusive transracial family can help fulfill Jesus's words, “on earth as it is in heaven.”

The White Fragility for transracial adoption--practical tools for nurturing identity, unlearning white saviorism, and fixing the mistakes you don't even know you're making.If you're the white parent of a transracially or internationally adopted child, you may have been told that if you try your best and work your hardest, good intentions and a whole lot of love will be enough to give your child the security, attachment, and nurturing family life they need to thrive.The only problem? It's not true. What White Parents Should Know About Transracial Adoption breaks down the dynamics that frequently fly under the radar of the whitewashed, happily-ever-after adoption stories we hear so often.Written by Melissa Guida-Richards--a transracial, transnational, and late-discovery adoptee--this book unpacks the mistakes you don't even know you're making and gives you the real-life tools to be the best parent you can be, to the child you love more than anything.From original research, personal stories, and interviews with parents and adoptees, you'll learn:What parents wish they'd known before they adopted--and what kids wish their adoptive parents had done differentlyWhat white privilege, white saviorism, and toxic positivity are...and how they show up, even when you don't mean itHow your child might feel and experience the world differently than youAll about microaggressions, labeling, and implicit biasHow to help your child connect with their cultural heritage through language, food, music, and clothingThe 5 stages of grief for adoptive parentsHow to start tough conversations, work with defensiveness, and process guilt

Confronting trauma behind the transnational adoption system—now back in printMany adoptees are required to become people that they were never meant to be. While transracial adoption tends to be considered benevolent, it often exacts a heavy emotional, cultural, and economic toll on those who directly experience it. Outsiders Within is a landmark publication that carefully explores this most intimate aspect of globalization through essays, fiction, poetry, and art. Moving beyond personal narrative, transracially adopted writers from around the world tackle difficult questions about how to survive the racist and ethnocentric worlds they inhabit, what connects the countries relinquishing their children to the countries importing them, why poor families of color have their children removed rather than supported—about who, ultimately, they are. In their inquiry, the contributors unseat conventional understandings of adoption politics, reframing the controversy as a debate that encompasses human rights, peace, and reproductive justice. Contributors: Heidi Lynn Adelsman; Ellen M. Barry; Laura Briggs, U of Massachusetts, Amherst; Catherine Ceniza Choy, U of California, Berkeley; Gregory Paul Choy, U of California, Berkeley; Rachel Quy Collier; J. A. Dare; Kim Diehl; Kimberly R. Fardy; Laura Gannarelli; Shannon Gibney; Mark Hagland; Perlita Harris; Tobias Hübinette, Stockholm U; Jae Ran Kim; Anh Đào Kolbe; Mihee-Nathalie Lemoine; Beth Kyong Lo; Ron M.; Patrick McDermott, Salem State College, Massachusetts; Tracey Moffatt; Ami Inja Nafzger (aka Jin Inja); Kim Park Nelson; John Raible; Dorothy Roberts, Northwestern U; Raquel Evita Saraswati; Kirsten Hoo-Mi Sloth; Soo Na; Shandra Spears; Heidi Kiiwetinepinesiik Stark; Kekek Jason Todd Stark; Sunny Jo; Sandra White Hawk; Indigo Williams Willing; Bryan Thao Worra; Jeni C. Wright.

Adoption and Multiculturalism features the voices of international scholars reflecting transnational and transracial adoption and its relationship to notions of multiculturalism. The essays trouble common understandings about who is being adopted, who is adopting, and where these acts are taking place, challenging in fascinating ways the tidy master narrative of saviorhood and the concept of a monolithic Western receiving nation. Too often the presumption is that the adoptive and receiving country is one that celebrates racial and ethnic diversity, thus making it superior to the conservative and insular places from which adoptees arrive. The volume's contributors subvert the often simplistic ways that multiculturalism is linked to transnational and transracial adoption and reveal how troubling multiculturalism in fact can be. The contributors represent a wide range of disciplines, cultures, and connections in relation to the adoption constellation, bringing perspectives from Europe (including Scandinavia), Canada, the United States, and Australia. The book brings together the various methodologies of literary criticism, history, anthropology, sociology, and cultural theory to demonstrate the multifarious and robust ways that adoption and multiculturalism might be studied and considered. Edited by three transnational and transracial adoptees, Adoption and Multiculturalism: Europe, the Americas, and the Pacific offers bold new scholarship that revises popular notions of transracial and transnational adoption as practice and phenomenon.

L'enfant s'inscrit dans une filiation mais celle-ci n'est jamais une évidence. La filiation nécessite un cadre juridique, des témoignages de reconnaissance… Dans le cas de l'adoption, il s'agit pour l'enfant de se greffer dans sa famille, qu'elle devienne sienne. Différents spécialistes nous transmettent ici leurs réflexions.

An essential resource for transracially adoptive parents and the professionals who serve them, this book offers practical strategies for helping a transracially adopted child through the challenges he or she may face.Anchored in a qualitative study of parents who have adopted children identified as being of a different race, this book draws from real-life experiences to raise and respond to questions that arise before, during, and after transracial adoption. Its goal: to help adoptive parents (and child welfare professionals) understand the underlying racial challenges in a transracial adoption so they can help their children cope.The book addresses questions from the obvious—for example, how to respond to comments from family and community members—to the practical—how a Caucasian mother can learn to help her African American daughter groom her hair. Topics include parental understanding of race while growing up, parental understanding of the challenges within the community, and communicating within the adoptive family. The book also shares advice from practitioners about preparing and supporting families in transracial adoption. A highlight of this book is a chapter written by three adult adoptees who grew up within transracial families. Equipped with the information in this helpful volume, readers will be prepared to parent in ways that empower, rather than impede, their child's social, emotional, and identity development. This book will enable children welfare professionals to better help and support parents involved in these processes.

When parents form families by reaching across social barriers to adopt children, where and how does race enter the adoption process? How do agencies, parents, and the adopted children themselves deal with issues of difference in adoption? This volume engages writers from both sides of the Atlantic to take a close look at these issues.

The Interracial Adoption Option draws on the lives and experiences of a couple adopting children interracially. Through the author'experiences, the book guides prospective parents through the adoption experience, providing answers to complex questions and offering practical advice on interracially adoption.

Bridging the gap between feminist studies of motherhood and queer theory, Mothering Queerly, Queering Motherhood articulates a provocative philosophy of queer kinship that need not be rooted in lesbian or gay sexual identities. Working from an interdisciplinary framework that incorporates feminist philosophy and queer, psychoanalytic, poststructuralist, and postcolonial theories, Shelley M. Park offers a powerful critique of an ideology she terms monomaternalism. Despite widespread cultural insistence that every child should have one—and only one—'real'mother, many contemporary family constellations do not fit this mandate. Park highlights the negative consequences of this ideology and demonstrates how families created through open adoption, same-sex parenting, divorce, and plural marriage can be sites of resistance. Drawing from personal experiences as both an adoptive and a biological mother and juxtaposing these autobiographical reflections with critical readings of cultural texts representing multi-mother families, Park advocates a new understanding of postmodern families as potentially queer coalitional assemblages held together by a mixture of affection and critical reflection premised on difference.

Adoptar es una decisión definitivamente importante para una pareja, un adulto solo o una familia, y especialmente trascendental en la vida de un niño. De su éxito depende el bienestar y la felicidad de todos ellos. El fracaso significaría su sufrimiento constante. Esta cuestión, éxito o fracaso, dependen de la forma como el hijo adoptado pueda reconstruir su identidad después del cambio, en general drástico, que la adopción significa. También, de que pueda integrarse convenientemente en su medio familiar y social, asumiendo la diferencia étnica cuando esta existe. Solo así podrá hacer de su nueva casa y de su nuevo entorno su hogar y su lugar de pertenencia. La tarea más importante de los padres en la adopción es ayudar al hijo a desarrollar estos procesos. Este libro explica el desarrollo y la constante remodelación de la identidad a lo largo de toda la vida, los acontecimientos que la influyen y su papel en la integración familiar y social. Describe especialmente la función de los padres y la ayuda que aportan al hijo adoptado, a través de la relación con él, a base de interés, apoyo y empatía. Presenta también los factores que pueden limitar las posibilidades de integración y las formas de reducirlos. Las autoras son profesionales de la asistencia social, la psicología, la psiquiatría de niños y adolescentes y la pediatría, con muchos años de experiencia en adopción internacional, que trabajan en la Fundación Eulàlia Torras de Beà (FETB).

Making Families Through Adoption provides a comprehensive look at adoption practices both in the United States and in other cultures, and a general understanding of the practices and ideology of kinship and family. The subject of adoption allows a window into discussions of what constitutes family or kin, the role of biological connectedness, oversight of parenting practices by the state, and the role of race, gender, sexuality, and socio-economic class in the building of families. While reviewing practices of and issues surrounding adoption, the authors highlight the ways these practices and discussions allow us greater insight into overall practices of kinship and family.

'Transracial adoption has recently become a hotly contested subject of contemporary and critical concern, with scholars across the disciplines working to unravel its complex implications. In Claiming Others, Mark C. Jerng traces the practice of adoption to the early nineteenth century, revealing its surprising centrality to American literature, law, and social thought.Jerng considers how adoption makes us rethink the parent-child bond as central to issues of race and nationality, showing the ways adoption also speaks to broader questions about our history and identity. He analyzes adoption through a diverse set of texts, including the 1851 Massachusetts statute that established adoption as we understand it today, early adoption manuals, the New York Times blog Relative Choices, and the work of John Tanner, Lydia Maria Child, William Faulkner, Charles Chesnutt, Chang-rae Lee, and David Henry Hwang.Imaginative and social practices of transracial adoption have shaped major controversies, Jerng argues, from Native American removal to slavery to cold war expansionism in the twentieth century and the contemporary global market in children. As Claiming Others makes clear, understanding adoption is crucial not just to understanding the history between races in the United States, but also the meaning of emancipation and the role of family in nationhood.'

Since the early 1990s, transnational adoptions have increased at an astonishing rate, not only in the United States, but worldwide. In Belonging in an Adopted World, Barbara Yngvesson offers a penetrating exploration of the consequences and implications of this unprecedented movement of children, usually from poor nations to the affluent West. Yngvesson illuminates how the politics of adoption policy has profoundly affected the families, nations, and children involved in this new form of social and economic migration. Starting from the transformation of the abandoned child into an adoptable resource for nations that give and receive children in adoption, this volume examines the ramifications of such gifts, especially for families created through adoption and later, the adopted adults themselves. Bolstered by an account of the author's own experience as an adoptive parent, and fully attuned to the contradictions of race that shape our complex forms of family, Belonging in an Adopted World explores the fictions that sustain adoptive kinship, ultimately exposing the vulnerability and contingency behind all human identity.

Since 1989, American families have adopted more than 230,000 children from other countries. Many of these children have lived in crowded conditions, sometimes with poor standards of hygiene, inadequate nutrition, and limited numbers of caregivers. Some suffer from endemic infectious diseases. Upon arrival, practitioners often fail to recognize the unique concerns of this group. This text provides an overview of the specialized medical and developmental issues that affect internationally adopted children, offering guidelines to the physicians caring for these children and their families before, during, and after adoption. The reader will learn how to advise families prior to an international adoption, how to perform an effective initial screening assessment of the newly arrived child, and how to recognize and manage developmental and other more long-term problems as they emerge.

Multiracial families (families in which one member of the family has a different racial heritage than the other member(s) of the family) comprise a rapidly growing U.S. population. Counseling Multiracial Families addresses this population that has been neglected in the counseling literature. In the first chapter, readers are given a comprehensive history of racial mixing in the United States special needs and issues of multiracial families as well as special strengths of multiracial families are addressed. Challenges of interracially married couples are explored as are the social and cultural issues related to parenting and child rearing of multiracial children in today′s society. The results of biracial identity development research are translated into counseling practice with the children, adolescents, and adults in multiracial families.