Skip to Main Content

Parenting: Adoption

A research topic guide covering aspects of parenting, including discipline, development, single parenthood, sex education, technology, and adoption.

Resources

Research & Reference

Streaming Media

Perspectives

Lionheart

This is the book the authors, each an adoptive parent, wished for at the start of their journeys to raise healthy and resilient adopted children and stay sane in the process.  It honestly and humorously shares their issues, mistakes and triumphs - from the early days, the central issue of trauma, behavioural challenges, the therapy toolbox and parental self-care.

Adoption

A top adoption attorney reveals the insider secrets of successful adoptions. Renowned adoption attorney Randall Hicks demystifies the legal system with this essential resource for adopting a child-domestically and internationally-within one year or less. With practical information and insightful wisdom, Adoption offers advice from a leading industry insider who knows exactly what people can expect as expecting adoptive parents.

Adoption Beyond Borders

Now Available in Paperback, Adoption Beyond Borders endorses international adoption as a viable path to child welfare by exploring key topics including: · Effects of institutionalization on children's developing brains, cognitive abilities, and socioemotional functioning · Challenges of navigating issues of identity when adopting across national, cultural, and racial lines · Strong emotional bonds that form even without genetic relatedness · How adoptive families can address the special needs of children who experienced early neglect and deprivation, thereby providing a supportive environment in which to flourish · Features the author's first-hand accounts of her own adoption journey as she visited a Kazakhstani orphanage daily for nearly a year, and illustrates the complexities and implications of the research evidence

Babies Without Borders

While international adoptions have risen in the public eye and recent scholarship has covered transnational adoption from Asia to the U.S., adoptions between North America and Latin America have been overshadowed and, in some cases, forgotten. In this nuanced study of adoption, Karen Dubinsky expands the historical record while she considers the political symbolism of children caught up in adoption and migration controversies in Canada, the United States, Cuba, and Guatemala. Babies without Borders tells the interrelated stories of Cuban children caught in Operation Peter Pan, adopted Black and Native American children who became icons in the Sixties, and Guatemalan children whose "disappearance" today in transnational adoption networks echoes their fate during the country's brutal civil war. Drawing from archival research as well as from her critical observations as an adoptive parent, Dubinsky moves debates around transnational adoption beyond the current dichotomy--the good of "humanitarian rescue," against the evil of "imperialist kidnap." Integrating the personal with the scholarly, Babies without Borders exposes what happens when children bear the weight of adult political conflicts.

The Girls Who Went Away

A powerful and groundbreaking revelation of the secret history of the 1.5 million women who surrendered children for adoption in the several decades before Roe v. Wade In this deeply moving work, Ann Fessler brings to light the lives of hundreds of thousands of young single American women forced to give up their newborn children in the years following World War II and before Roe v. Wade. The Girls Who Went Awaytells a story not of wild and carefree sexual liberation, but rather of a devastating double standard that has had punishing long-term effects on these women and on the children they gave up for adoption. Based on Fessler's groundbreaking interviews, it brings to brilliant life these women's voices and the spirit of the time, allowing each to share her own experience in gripping and intimate detail. Today, when the future of the Roedecision and women's reproductive rights stand squarely at the front of a divisive national debate, Fessler brings to the fore a long-overlooked history of single women in the fifties, sixties, and early seventies. In 2002, Fessler, an adoptee herself, traveled the country interviewing women willing to speak publicly about why they relinquished their children. Researching archival records and the political and social climate of the time, she uncovered a story of three decades of women who, under enormous social and family pressure, were coerced or outright forced to give their babies up for adoption. Fessler deftly describes the impossible position in which these women found themselves: as a sexual revolution heated up in the postwar years, birth control was tightly restricted, and abortion proved prohibitively expensive or life endangering. At the same time, a postwar economic boom brought millions of American families into the middle class, exerting its own pressures to conform to a model of family perfection. Caught in the middle, single pregnant women were shunned by family and friends, evicted from schools, sent away to maternity homes to have their children alone, and often treated with cold contempt by doctors, nurses, and clergy. The majority of the women Fessler interviewed have never spoken of their experiences, and most have been haunted by grief and shame their entire adult lives. A searing and important look into a long-overlooked social history, The Girls Who Went Awayis their story.

Adoption, Race, and Identity

Adoption, Race, and Identity is a long-range study of the impact of interracial adoption on those adopted and their families. Initiated in 1972, it was continued in 1979, 1984, and 1991. Cumulatively, these four phases trace the subjects from early childhood into young adulthood. This is the only extended study of this controversial subject.Simon and Altstein provide a broad perspective of the impact of transracial adoption and include profiles of the families involved in the study. They explore and compare the experiences of both the parents and the children. They identify families whose adoption experiences were problematic and those whose experiences were positive. Finally, the study looks at the insights the experience of transracial adoption brought to the adoptive parents and what advice they would pass on to future parents adopting children from different racial backgrounds. They include the reflections of those adopted included in the 1972 first phase, who are now adults themselves.This second edition includes a new concluding chapter that updates the fourth and last phase of the study. The authors were able to locate 88 of the 96 families who participated in the 1984 study. Bringing together all four phases of this twenty-year study into one volume gives the reader a richer and deeper understanding of what the experience of transracial adoption has meant for the parents, the adoptees, and children born into the families studied. This landmark work, will be of compelling interest to social workers, policy makers, and professionals and families involved on all sides of interracial adoption.

Where Do U.S. Overseas Adoptees Come From?

Infographic: Where Do U.S. Overseas Adoptees Come From? | Statista You will find more infographics at Statista