The Changing Faces of Adoption: Combining ethnicities and cultures, modern adoption approaches can foster loving families, researchers say
Gone are the days when a typical adoption meant matching couples and infants by their blonde hair and blue eyes or other physical characteristics. Also gone is the secrecy surrounding adoption in which those involved agree never to discuss it.
Barriers and isolation have given way to more openness in adoption and increased numbers of transracial, transcultural, stepparent, older child, single parent, adoptions by foster parents and by relatives as well as gay and lesbian adopters.
"According to the U.S. Census (2006), 1.7 million households in America have adopted children," said Dr. Ruth McRoy of The University of Texas at Austin School of Social Work. "We have found that one type of adoption is not best for everyone," she said. "The same glove does not fit every hand."
McRoy has spent 25 years researching changes in adoption, especially the areas of open adoption, adoption through foster care and family preservation. She is the author of seven books and is a senior research fellow at the Evan B. Donaldson Adoption Institute in New York.
Studies of adoption are important, said McRoy, because it is reported that 90 percent of health and mental health service providers indicate a need for more education in adoption issues. More and more families are seeking adoption competent professionals. Each year, there are more than 135,000 adoptions in the U.S. and 51,000 of these involve children in foster care.
"Historically, adoption was all about matching children and families who looked like each other," McRoy said. "But over the years, the number of healthy white kids placed for adoption has decreased dramatically in this country — from 37 percent in the mid-1960s to 2 percent currently. "Today, there is less stigma associated with being a single mother, and more women with unplanned pregnancies are choosing to keep their babies rather than place them for adoption."
The trends have changed and more and more agencies are seeking to place older children for adoption through foster care or adoptions by relatives. There also are more people adopting children from other countries and more transracial adoptions, which used to be prohibited by law in some states. However, since the mid-1990s, laws have prohibited child welfare agencies that receive federal funding from considering race, color or national origin in the foster and adoptive placement of children except in extraordinary circumstances.
Most studies, said McRoy, have concluded that transracially adopted children of color do as well as other children on measures of general adjustment, although some differences have been found in terms of racial identity development.
Over the past 10-15 years, U.S. adoption agencies also have moved toward offering more opportunities for openness in adoption. Fully disclosed adoptions are becoming more common while confidential adoptions continue to decrease, said McRoy, who is the co-author with Harold Grotevant of the book, "Openness in Adoption."
In the book, the authors point out that adoption should be viewed as an ongoing process rather than a one-time event. It is likely that most children desire information about their birthparents, possible birth siblings and their genetic heritage, they say.
"The increase in openness may buffer adolescents from problems because both the secrecy and uncertainty of their origins is greatly reduced," McRoy said. "With more openness, trust issues between everyone involved also are increased and adopted children have fewer fantasies about their birthmother and feel greater empathy toward her."
Five years ago McRoy turned her attention to research on adopting from foster care. In 2002, the Adoption Exchange Association was awarded a five-year contract from the U.S. Children's Bureau to establish the Collaboration to AdoptUsKids in order to design and implement a national adoptive family recruitment and retention strategy.
As part of the collaboration, the Center for Social Work Research at The University of Texas at Austin was awarded a contract to conduct two Congressionally mandated research studies — one on barriers and another on successes in foster care adoption. McRoy is directing both studies — research that has involved at least 25 students and staff in the School of Social Work.
Susan Ayers-Lopez has worked with McRoy over the years and is coordinator of the AdoptUsKids research project. "We wanted to find out what factors are leading to success in adoption from foster care and identify the barriers — agency, child and family factors — to this type of adoption," Ayers-Lopez said.
Several federal initiatives in recent years have called for research in order to better understand the process of adopting and increase the success of adoptions from foster care, McRoy pointed out. Study participants included a nationwide sample of 161 adoptive families, 300 prospective adoptive families and 544 adoption agency staff recruited through public and private adoption agencies in 47 states and the District of Columbia.
"Despite the dramatic increase in the number of children adopted from foster care, 114,000 children are still awaiting adoption," McRoy said.
Patricia Cody, who has worked on McRoy's foster care study since the beginning, said although interviewers heard some challenging experiences and barriers in trying to adopt, the majority were about successful adoptions from foster care and the families' abilities to overcome challenges. "Many of our families did describe challenges, but most were able to overcome them," she said.
Cody recently received her doctoral degree from the School of Social Work. She has worked with foster children for the past eight years and developed a therapeutic horsemanship support program in Dallas to help children adopted from foster care who are experiencing emotional and behavior problems. The purpose of the program is to increase the self-confidence and self-esteem of the children as they learn to ride and care for the horses. Mothers and children participate in the program together.
"There are thousands of foster children available for adoption right now," Cody said. "These children are amazing kids with tremendous potential. It is so important for our future and theirs that these children are raised in loving homes and that the families who foster and adopt are supported."
McRoy found some couples decide to adopt from another country or decide not to adopt because of difficulties or perceived difficulties with the U.S. adoption system. She strongly believes that the Collaboration to AdoptUsKids project and her research findings can help identify and alleviate some of the problems — at least with adoption through foster care.
Besides foster care adoptions and studies on confidentiality and openness, more research is needed in areas such as birth family preservation, the impact of adoption on marriage, effective strategies to increase older child placement and the birthfather's involvement in and adjustment to placing a child for adoption, said McRoy.
Few studies have included birthfathers, she said, adding that most are not included in the adoption process and viewed as "signers" only. Most, too, have never seen their babies for whom an adoption plan was made.
"Adoption impacts children, birthfamilies and adoptive families and in a very powerful way touches upon universal human themes of abandonment, loss, parenthood, sexuality, identity and sense of belonging," said McRoy.
by Nancy Neff, University Office of Public Affairs
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Nancy Neff
neff@mail.utexas.edu