Download or read book Building Transnational Families Adoptive Parents Perceptions of the International Adoption Experience written by Bethany Willis Hepp and published by . This book was released on 2007 with total page 126 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The practice of international adoption is a relatively new and still expanding method of family formation. Globally, it involves more than one hundred countries and the movement of hundreds of thousands of children across international boundaries. In the United States alone the number of children adopted internationally now exceeds more than 20,000 annually. This study explores how newly adopting parents perceive the international adoption process. Data for this study was collected through the use of face-to-face interviews with parents who had adopted internationally. It provides detailed information about the confluence of factors that parents experience as they negotiate the adoption process. Included in parent perceptions of the international adoption process is how they conceptualize well-being and what is important for raising a child adopted internationally. This study also explores the life course factors that influence those perceptions of their experience.

Download or read book Transnational Adoption written by Sara K. Dorow and published by NYU Press. This book was released on 2006-04-01 with total page 343 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Each year, thousands of Chinese children, primarily abandoned infant girls, are adopted by Americans. Yet we know very little about the local and transnational processes that characterize this new migration. Transnational Adoption is a unique ethnographic study of China/U.S. adoption, the largest contemporary intercountry adoption program. Sara K. Dorow begins by situating the popularity of the China/U.S. adoption process within a broader history of immigration and adoption. She then follows the path of the adoption process: the institutions and bureaucracies in both China and the United States that prepare children and parents for each other; the stories and practices that legitimate them coming together as transnational families; the strains placed upon our common notions of what motherhood means; and ways in which parents then construct the cultural and racial identities of adopted children. Based on rich ethnographic evidence, including interviews with and observation of people on both sides of the Pacific—from orphanages, government officials, and adoption agencies to advocacy groups and adoptive families themselves—this is a fascinating look at the latest chapter in Chinese-American migration.

Download or read book Transnational Adoption written by Toby Alice Volkman and published by Social Text. This book was released on 2003 with total page 136 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The experiences in this volume consider how trans-national adoption creates and transforms cultures, in the light of the vast increase in their number.

Download or read book Adoption and Multiculturalism written by Jenny H Wills and published by University of Michigan Press. This book was released on 2020-09-04 with total page 287 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.

Download or read book Saving International Adoption written by Mark Montgomery and published by Vanderbilt University Press. This book was released on 2018-01-30 with total page 289 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Choice Outstanding Academic Title of 2018 International adoption is in a state of virtual collapse, rates having fallen by more than half since 2004 and continuing to fall. Yet around the world millions of orphaned and vulnerable children need permanent homes, and thousands of American and European families are eager to take them in. Many government officials, international bureaucrats, and social commentators claim these adoptions are not "in the best interests" of the child. They claim that adoption deprives children of their "birth culture," threatens their racial identities, and even encourages widespread child trafficking. Celebrity adopters are publicly excoriated for stealing children from their birth families. This book argues that opposition to adoption ostensibly based on the well-being of the child is often a smokescreen for protecting national pride. Concerns about the harm done by transracial adoption are largely inconsistent with empirical evidence. As for trafficking, opponents of international adoption want to shut it down because it is too much like a market for children. But this book offers a radical challenge to this view—that is, what if instead of trying to suppress market forces in international adoption, we embraced them so they could be properly regulated? What if the international system functioned more like open adoption in the United States, where birth and adoptive parents can meet and privately negotiate the exchange of parental rights? This arrangement, the authors argue, could eliminate the abuses that currently haunt international adoption. The authors challenge the prevailing wisdom with their economic analyses and provocative analogies from other policy realms. Based on their own family's experience with the adoption process, they also write frankly about how that process feels for parents and children.

Download or read book Belonging in an Adopted World written by Barbara Yngvesson and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2010-06-15 with total page 261 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.

Download or read book Race in Transnational and Transracial Adoption written by Vilna Bashi Treitler and published by Springer. This book was released on 2014-07-22 with total page 492 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.

Download or read book Inside Transracial Adoption written by Gail Steinberg and published by Jessica Kingsley Publishers. This book was released on 2013-05-28 with total page 306 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Is transracial adoption a positive choice for kids? How can children gain their new families without losing their birth heritage? How can parents best support their children after placement? Inside Transracial Adoption is an authoritative guide to navigating the challenges and issues that parents face in the USA when they adopt a child of a different race and/or from a different culture. Filled with real-life examples and strategies for success, this book explores in depth the realities of raising a child transracially, whether in a multicultural or a predominantly white community. Readers will learn how to help children adopted transracially or transnationally build a strong sense of identity, so that they will feel at home both in their new family and in their racial group or culture of origin. This second edition incorporates the latest research on positive racial identity and multicultural families, and reflects recent developments and trends in adoption. Drawing on research, decades of experience as adoption professionals, and their own personal experience of adopting transracially, Beth Hall and Gail Steinberg offer insights for all transracial adoptive parents - from prospective first-time adopters to experienced veterans - and those who support them.

Download or read book Are Those Kids Yours written by Cheri Register and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2010-06-15 with total page 396 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The question “Are those kids yours?” has a familiar ring to parents who have adopted children from South Korea, India, Colombia, the Philippines, and other countries. As natural and normal as it feels to them to be together, such families are often asked to explain their obvious difference. In rich personal stories drawn from her own experience as the mother of two Korean-born daughters and from interviews with other parents and with adopted children from six to thirty, Cheri Register both affirms the normality of internationally adoptive families and highlights the special challenges they do indeed face. The book addresses many central questions about international adoption: why children are in need of adoption outside the country of their birth, why parents choose to adopt from other countries, and how parents and children of very different origins become a “real” family. International adoption is a controversial matter in countries from which children are coming to the United States, but adoptive families have had little voice as yet in the debate. With honest, thoughtful analysis honed by personal experience, Register addresses the ethical issues inevitably raised by adoption across lines of culture, race, and social class: Are parents in the wealthier nations entitled to raise children left homeless in other parts of the world by poverty or social stigma? Is placement in another country an appropriate solution for children whose parents cannot raise them? Insightful, comprehensive, and eloquent, Are Those Kids Yours? is a unique resource for parents raising internationally adopted children and for those who are contemplating intercountry adoption as well as for the children as they grow up, their extended families and friends, and adoption and mental health professionals.

Download or read book Cultures of Transnational Adoption written by Toby Alice Volkman and published by Duke University Press. This book was released on 2005-06-10 with total page 244 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: During the 1990s, the number of children adopted from poorer countries to the more affluent West grew exponentially. Close to 140,000 transnational adoptions occurred in the United States alone. While in an earlier era, adoption across borders was assumed to be straightforward—a child traveled to a new country and stayed there—by the late twentieth century, adoptees were expected to acquaint themselves with the countries of their birth and explore their multiple identities. Listservs, Web sites, and organizations creating international communities of adoptive parents and adoptees proliferated. With contributors including several adoptive parents, this unique collection looks at how transnational adoption creates and transforms cultures. The cultural experiences considered in this volume raise important questions about race and nation; about kinship, biology, and belonging; and about the politics of the sending and receiving nations. Several essayists explore the images and narratives related to transnational adoption. Others examine the recent preoccupation with “roots” and “birth cultures.” They describe a trip during which a group of Chilean adoptees and their Swedish parents traveled “home” to Chile, the “culture camps” attended by thousands of young-adult Korean adoptees whom South Korea is now eager to reclaim as “overseas Koreans,” and adopted children from China and their North American parents grappling with the question of what “Chinese” or “Chinese American” identity might mean. Essays on Korean birth mothers, Chinese parents who adopt children within China, and the circulation of children in Brazilian families reveal the complexities surrounding adoption within the so-called sending countries. Together, the contributors trace the new geographies of kinship and belonging created by transnational adoption. Contributors. Lisa Cartwright, Claudia Fonseca, Elizabeth Alice Honig, Kay Johnson, Laurel Kendall, Eleana Kim, Toby Alice Volkman, Barbara Yngvesson

Download or read book Welcome Home written by Lita Linzer Schwartz and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2013-10-08 with total page 261 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Examine the pros and cons of nontraditional adoption! Welcome Home! An International and Nontraditional Adoption Reader is an essential guide to the process, pros, and cons of adopting children from outside the United States, with special needs, and/or from a different racial/cultural background. The book documents every aspect of the adoption procedure—from working with “facilitators,” adoption agencies, and attorneys to mixed reactions over a child’s possible loss of heritage as the result of a transracial or multicultural adoption. Parents and adoptees offer unique, firsthand perspectives on the cautions and benefits of nontraditional adoption. Americans adopted more than 20,000 children from other countries in 2001, a number that reflects humanitarian motives, the desire to adopt a child from a specific country, and/or frustration with the domestic adoption system. Including a foreword by United States Representative Ted Strickland, Welcome Home! is a practical resource for anyone thinking of establishing a family or adding to their own. The book provides insight into the adoption process, open adoption, biracial adoption, adopting a special needs child, cultural attitudes, and how to handle an adopted child’s questions in later years. It also addresses specific adoption issues, including: how to verify an agency’s credentials; how an agency negotiates with the birth mother; state and country laws and practices; tax benefits; and expenses, including legal and medical costs; and includes research findings on the Northeast-Northwest Collaborative Adoption Projects (N2CAP) Welcome Home! tells the stories of: Naomi and Fred, an intermarried couple (she’s Jewish, he’s not) who adopted a Greek baby in 1962 “Tina” and “Lee,” a lesbian couple, who adopted a baby from China Marianne, a professor of child and adolescent psychiatry at the University of Lund in Sweden, who adopted babies from Iran and Thailand—several years after her divorce Pamela, a divorced mother of four biological children who has adopted babies from Viet Nam and China All of her biological children Mildred—Pamela’s mother and the children’s grandmother Karen, adoptive mother and national chairperson for Families for Russian and Ukrainian adoption (FRUA) William, adoptive father of miracle sisters from Romania and many more! Welcome Home! is an invaluable source of unusual insight for psychologists, psychiatrists, marriage and family therapists, adoption agencies, counselors, social workers, attorneys, physicians, academics, and, of course, anyone considering adoption.

Download or read book Broken Links Enduring Ties written by Linda Seligmann and published by Stanford University Press. This book was released on 2013-10-02 with total page 345 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Family-making in America is in a state of flux—the ways people compose their families is changing, including those who choose to adopt. Broken Links, Enduring Ties is a groundbreaking comparative investigation of transnational and interracial adoptions in America. Linda Seligmann uncovers the impact of these adoptions over the last twenty years on the ideologies and cultural assumptions that Americans hold about families and how they are constituted. Seligmann explores whether or not new kinds of families and communities are emerging as a result of these adoptions, providing a compelling narrative on how adoptive families thrive and struggle to create lasting ties. Seligmann observed and interviewed numerous adoptive parents and children, non-adoptive families, religious figures, teachers and administrators, and adoption brokers. The book uncovers that adoption—once wholly stigmatized—is now often embraced either as a romanticized mission of rescue or, conversely, as simply one among multiple ways to make a family.

Download or read book The Intercountry Adoption Debate written by Robert L. Ballard and published by Cambridge Scholars Publishing. This book was released on 2015-06-18 with total page 750 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Meaningful discussion about intercountry adoption (the adoption of a child from one country by a family from another country) necessitates an understanding of a complex range of issues. These issues intersect at multiple levels and processes, span geographic and political boundaries, and emerge from radically different cultural beliefs and systems. The result is a myriad of benefits and costs that are both global and deeply personal in scope. This edited volume introduces this complexity an ...

Download or read book Mismatched written by Sarah Dunbrook Macdonald and published by . This book was released on 2016 with total page 140 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The United States has historically been the top receiving country for children adopted from abroad. Since 2004, though, massive changes in sending countries have led to a significant reduction in the supply of adoptable children, and a corresponding decline in transnational adoptions. Not only are there fewer children legally available for transnational adoption, but the types of children available today are markedly different from those that were adopted during the international adoption boom of the 1990s. This shift has created a mismatch between the desires of adoptive parents and the types of children that are most readily available for international adoption. Managing this mismatch becomes particularly challenging without a pricing mechanism—one of the central legitimating factors of adoption is that parents do not pay a price to adopt a child, but instead pay a fee tied to professional services. This dissertation asks: when there is no pricing mechanism to restore the balance between supply and demand, how do organizations and individuals manage parental desire and the shortage of certain types of children? How do the children available for adoption come to be emotionally valuable to the parents who eventually adopt them? To answer these questions, I draw on government reports, in-depth interviews with adoption agency professionals and adoptive parents, participant observation in an adoption agency, and textual analysis of agency promotional materials. I show that perceptions of permanency, racial boundaries, and certainty of placement affect parents’ decisions to pursue transnational adoption over other types of adoption. I then trace the origins of the mismatch between supply and desire to massive changes in policy that constrain the supply of children and the eligibility of certain types of parents. I argue that when confronted with this mismatch, adoption agencies, and the parents they serve, engage in a process of (re)evaluation that recasts previously less desirable types of children as sentimentally valuable. In a transnational adoption economy characterized by shortage, parents must make compromises about the children they are willing to bring into their families, and the shape of these compromises reveals a hierarchy of socially constructed desire. By considering the work of adoption agencies and the experiences of adoptive parents, I show how classificatory schemes, boundary making, morality and emotions operate within this economy. Through the emotional connections that they forge with parents, agency staff carefully frame parental preferences for different types of children, while helping parents feel that their decisions are supported and legitimate.

Download or read book Disrupting Kinship written by Kimberly D. McKee and published by University of Illinois Press. This book was released on 2019-03-02 with total page 346 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Since the Korean War began, Western families have adopted more than 200,000 Korean children. Two-thirds of these adoptees found homes in the United States. The majority joined white families and in the process forged a new kind of transnational and transracial kinship. Kimberly D. McKee examines the growth of the neocolonial, multi-million-dollar global industry that shaped these families—a system she identifies as the transnational adoption industrial complex. As she shows, an alliance of the South Korean welfare state, orphanages, adoption agencies, and American immigration laws powered transnational adoption between the two countries. Adoption became a tool to supplement an inadequate social safety net for South Korea's unwed mothers and low-income families. At the same time, it commodified children, building a market that allowed Americans to create families at the expense of loving, biological ties between Koreans. McKee also looks at how Christian Americanism, South Korean welfare policy, and other facets of adoption interact with and disrupt American perceptions of nation, citizenship, belonging, family, and ethnic identity.

Download or read book International Adoption written by Laura Briggs and published by NYU Press. This book was released on 2009-07-01 with total page 322 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the past two decades, transnational adoption has exploded in scope and significance, growing up along increasingly globalized economic relations and the development and improvement of reproductive technologies. A complex and understudied system, transnational adoption opens a window onto the relations between nations, the inequalities of the rich and the poor, and the history of race and racialization, Transnational adoption has been marked by the geographies of unequal power, as children move from poorer countries and families to wealthier ones, yet little work has been done to synthesize its complex and sometimes contradictory effects. Rather than focusing only on the United States, as much previous work on the topic does, International Adoption considers the perspectives of a number of sending countries as well as other receiving countries, particularly in Europe. The book also reminds us that the U.S. also sends children into international adoptions—particularly children of color. The book thus complicates the standard scholarly treatment of the subject, which tends to focus on the tensions between those who argue that transnational adoption is an outgrowth of American wealth, power, and military might (as well as a rejection of adoption from domestic foster care) and those who maintain that it is about a desire to help children in need.

Download or read book Exploring Swedish International Adoption Desire written by Richey Wyver and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2023-12-24 with total page 167 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book is a critical study of international adoption in Sweden, based on analysis of adoption-related texts, images and videos. The author argues that representations of adoption, and specifically of the bodies of international, transracial adoptees, are used to create and sustain myths of Swedish exceptionalism, concealing the nation’s colonial, racist and eugenic histories. The book challenges the virtuous perception of international adoption, and exposes and critiques the underlying racism and violence of both the adoption industry and the shaping of Sweden as a ‘good’ nation. It will appeal to students and scholars of adoption and migration, as well as those engaged in anti-racism research.