The Routledge Handbook of Adoption

Gretchen Miller Wrobel, Emily Helder, Elisha Marr

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9780429777806
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Developmental Psychology
• Index: Psychology

Adoption is practiced globally yielding a multidimensional area of study that cannot be characterized by a single movement or discipline. This handbook provides a central source of contemporary scholarship from a variety of disciplines with an international perspective and uses a multifaceted and interdisciplinary approach to ground adoption practices and activities in scientific research. Perspectives of birth/first parents, adoptive parents, and adopted persons are brought forth through a range of disciplinary and theoretical lenses.

Beginning with background and context of adoption, including sociocultural and political contexts, the handbook then addresses the diversity of adoptive families in terms of family forms, attitudes about adoption, and characteristics of adopted children. Next, research examining the lived experience of adoption for birth parents, adoptive parents, and adopted individuals is presented. A variety of outcomes for internationally and domestically adopted children and adoptive families is then discussed and the handbook concludes by addressing the development, training, and implementation of adoption competent clinical practice.

With cutting-edge research from top international scholars in a diversity of fields, The Routledge Handbook of Adoption should be considered essential reading for students, researchers, and practitioners across the fields of social work, sociology, psychology, medicine, family science, education, and demography.

Interviews with chapter authors can be accessed as podcasts (https://anchor.fm/emily-helder) or as videos (https://bit.ly/2FIoi0a).

PART I

Adoption in context

1

Historical and Contemporary Contexts of Us Adoption

An overview

Elisha Marr, Emily Helder, and Gretchen Miller Wrobel

Complex family forms, such as those created through adoption, are becoming increasingly commonplace in the US. Our contemporary familiarity with adoptive families, whether through personal connections or through media portrayals, makes it difficult to believe that adoption is a relatively new practice in the US. In fact, prior to the 1900s, few families formally adopted unrelated children (Davis, 2011; Perry, 2017). The current US adoption system was created and shaped by a variety of factors including immigration, race, war, poverty, affluence, disease, and medical developments as well as changing cultural perspectives about the value of children and norms for women and families. To provide some foundational context for this handbook, we first provide a brief history of adoption in the US and then describe some of the major adoption-related topics and controversies.

Prior to the 1900s

Some of the earliest instances of adoption involved White settlers adopting Native American children. Though ostensibly based – at least initially – on an agreement between White missionaries and Indigenous groups, Native Americans often interpreted the practice as an ongoing, reciprocal establishment of kinship and peaceable relations between the two groups; whereas the White settlers treated it as formal severance of relationships between the child and their tribe. Once the Native Americans learned that the agreement was nonreciprocal and irrevocable, they stopped willingly participating in the practice (Leacock, 1980). Yet the willingness of Native Americans became irrelevant since this period was followed by massacres of Indigenous people allowing Whites to take possession of their now-orphaned children (Ward Gailey, 2010). This practice continued through the early 20th century, during which White Americans not only “adopted” Native American orphans, but also forcibly removed children from their parents in order to “civilize,” “Christianize,” and “Americanize” them in boarding schools (Briggs, 2012; Davis, 2011; Perry, 2017).

The 19th-century influx of European immigrants to eastern coastal cities resulted in the practice of White immigrant children being adopted by rural White families. Travel to the US, poverty, and disease resulted in growing numbers of orphans living on the streets. These were not only children whose families had died, but also those whose parents were too poor to provide them with basic necessities. Although some improperly supervised or homeless children became vagrants engaging in criminal activities to survive, others were taken in by families where they would work for room and board (Carp, 2005; Davis, 2011; DellaCava, Kolko Phillips, and Engel, 2004; Perry, 2017). Around the mid-19th century, there were about 30,000 parentless Irish children in New York City alone (Perry, 2017). Urban and church-related organizations, such as the Children’s Aid Society of New York, would put many of these children on “orphan trains” to the western US to become formally adopted into families or to work as farm hands (Perry, 2017; Solinger, 2004). It has been estimated that from about 1850 to 1930 around 200,000–250,000 of these children were placed into homes; however, only 90,000 were formally adopted (Davis, 2011; Perry, 2017).

1900–1960s

The formal private adoption of infants began around the turn of the 20th century and took shape throughout the Depression Era. The formality arose from efforts to standardize and professionalize child placements. The US Children’s Bureau, which was established in 1912, and the Child Welfare League of America, which was established in 1921, began to create and institute adoption standards for both public and private agencies. By the 1930s, all 48 states instituted statutes governing adoption; the federal government followed suit (Carp, 2005; DellaCava, Kolko Phillips, and Engel, 2004). The infant adoptions resulted from the maternity home movement, which offered unwed pregnant women a place to live until their child was born. The main message conveyed to birth mothers was that their infant would be promptly adopted by married couples, providing good homes, who would raise the child to be a good citizen (Davis, 2011). Until this point in time, safe, effective infant formulas and bottles were not easily accessible or affordable, making it almost logistically impossible for an infant to be adopted by another couple without a wet nurse. Once infants could be fed by someone other than a lactating mother it created the opportunity for childless couples to adopt, and conversely the opportunity for unwed mothers to place their child for adoption (Hanan, 1997).

These systems, policies, and practices continued into the post-World War II (WWII) era baby boom. Married women who were able to biologically reproduce were able to create the idealized nuclear family, yet infertile married women conspicuously lacked the children needed to make their couple into what they considered a real family (Carp, 2005; Sandelowski, 1990). Conversely, pregnant unmarried women often did not have access to jobs paying a living wage and feared the social stigma of raising an illegitimate child (Solinger, 2004). Thus, they were pressured by society to marry, or to quietly and surreptitiously surrender their child for adoption. The aforementioned maternity homes made it possible for infertile White middle class couples to gain access to healthy, White infants available for adoption, while protecting the birth mother and her family from shame and stigma (Davis, 2011; Patton, 2000; Solinger, 2004). Although private adoption seemed like a good solution to the issues of both White married women who were infertile and White unmarried women who were pregnant, some birth mothers reported a sense of choicelessness and being coerced into surrendering their infants (Fisher, 2003; Solinger, 2001).

Adoption was not an option for all women in the US. Throughout US history and into this post-WWII era, African American women were effectively excluded from these early forms of formal adoption. They did not have access to many of the postwar programs, supports, and resources White women were using to create idyllic American families, and most worked in formal or informal wage labor (Davis, 2011; Solinger, 2004). Similar to White couples, unmarried African American couples who learned of their pregnancy were expected to marry to avoid the stigma of raising an illegitimate child (Gutman, 1976). Yet, African American women who did not marry did not also have the choice of a private, confidential, and formal means for placing their child with a vetted middle or upper class unrelated couple of their same race. Consequently, their unwed pregnancies were handled informally by their familial and kinship communities, a practice that had always been utilized by African American families (Gutman, 1976; Higdon, 2008; Solinger, 2004). During slavery, Black women had very little control over the residence and raising of their child, yet could count on the related and unrelated people in their network to support and provide for both of them to the extent it was possible (Abdullah, 1996; Davis, 2011; Gutman, 1976; Higdon, 2008). These informal adoptions could simply involve the network assisting the woman in raising her child, or another woman or couple might raise it as they would one of their own biological children. Regardless of the arrangement, it was more likely to be verbal, informal, and without any organizational oversight or approval (Abdullah, 1996; Higdon, 2008). Asian, Hispanic, and Latino families in the US similarly relied on informal arrangements among extended family for the care of single-parent and orphaned children (Higdon, 2008). Yet their mid-20th-century immigration to the US (History.com, 2018) coincided with the establishment of a more structured adoption system with legal oversight and enforcement, resulting in the informal aspect of adoption being a much smaller portion of their US history than it was for African Americans (Higdon, 2008). In summary, although the 1930s through the 1960s are commonly viewed as the beginning of adoption in the US, it should be recognized that the adoption of unrelated children has been a practice, for better or worse, since the arrival of Europeans (Davis, 2011; Higdon, 2008).

During the post-WWII period, White couples in the US were also able to adopt children from other countries. Part of the de-Nazification program involved placing orphans from Germany and other European countries with both US military and civilian families (Ward Gailey, 2010). Unlike the adoptions of the previous century where the primary goal of adoptive families was to provide a home for the child, often in exchange for work, White couples seeking to adopt internationally desired a child that they would intimately raise as they would their own biological child. Adoption agencies sought to match children with parents with similar eye and hair color in an attempt to minimize differences in appearance (Davis, 2011; Ward Gailey, 2010). This was the beginning of international adoption; however, many would describe these as same-race adoptions due to the matching of adoptive parents’ and adoptees’ phenotypes.

The conclusion of the Korean War in 1953 began the first international adoptions to the US where adoption agencies did not practice racial matching. Very few adoptions of children of one race by parents of a different race had occurred prior to this time (DellaCava, Kolko Phillips, and Engel, 2004; Perry, 2017). Yet the pressure of White families in the US to cross racial-ethnic lines to adopt from Korea was spurred by the notable number of war orphans. Many of these children had been fathered by US soldiers, but excluded from the mother’s Korean family (Perry, 2017). Additionally, civilian evangelical Christians, Harry and Bertha Holt, were moved to adopt these mixed-race children after watching a documentary about an orphanage in Korea. Despite having six biological children, the Holts adopted eight Korean orphans and eventually established Holt International Services to facilitate adoptions from Korea to the US. The Holts are credited with beginning what we now know as the practice of private international adoption (DellaCava, Kolko Phillips, and Engel, 2004; Perry, 2017).

Public foster care also coalesced during this period of the 1930s through the 1960s. As children began to be valued for sentimental and emotional reasons, as opposed to their economic value as workers, adoption practices began to prioritize the best interests of the child (Davis, 2011). Additionally, as the federal government instituted more social welfare and oversight programs, a link between child welfare and adoption was made. Systems were established to investigate child abuse and neglect, as well as to rehome children who were victims of these practices (Davis, 2011; Solinger, 2004). Children involuntarily removed from their parents’ homes were to be temporarily placed with family members or with unrelated families that had met certain standards. The overarching goal of public foster care was to help the parents meet the child welfare standards and reunify the family; however, lack of resources and ethnic bias in the system had a particularly devastating impact on Black families. Social workers were trained in a culture within which White family forms were considered the norm. In comparison, Black families were perceived as dysfunctional and broken by slavery, evidenced by the prevalence of irresponsible and promiscuous Black single mothers (Briggs, 2012; Patton, 2000). Thus, even though some White birth parents also struggled with access to the housing, education, and medical care necessary to provide for their children, the ethnic bias against Black familial cultural practices resulted in disproportionately large numbers of Black children being involuntarily removed from their birth families (Briggs, 2012; Patton, 2000; Solinger, 2004; Ward Gailey, 2010). A smaller proportion of Black children were reintegrated into their birth families in comparison to White foster children. These ethnic differences also characterized Black parents seeking to adopt; consequently, they struggled to be approved as foster and/or adoptive parents (Briggs, 2012; Carp, 2005; Davis, 2011; Solinger, 2004). Some identify this as the beginning of the crisis in the foster care system in which there are more children of color, specifically Black children, than there are of same-race adoptive parents (Solinger, 2004). Because adoptions across racial lines were rare during this time period, these children of color, relative to their White counterparts, experienced longer wait times for placement or languished in institutions (Briggs, 2012; DellaCava, Kolko Phillips, and Engel, 2004; Simon and Altstein, 1977).

The essential structure of the current US adoption system grew out of these practices, policies, government organizations, and private agencies established during this period of the 1930s to the 1960s. Public adoption commonly refers to state governments being primarily responsible for the administration of the adoption and foster care of children who have been involuntarily removed from the homes of birth parents by child welfare agencies. These children are often older, may have physical, mental, or behavioral challenges, and are commonly labeled as hard-to-place or special-needs (CWIG, 2011; Davis, 2011; Vandivere, Malm, and Radel, 2009). Private adoptions are those facilitated by non-government adoption agencies or attorneys (...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of contributors
• List of tables
• List of figures
• Introduction
• PART I: Adoption in context
• PART II: Diversity in adoption
• PART III: Lived experience
• PART IV: Outcomes
• PART V: Adoption competency
• Index