New Worlds of Adoption Conference

At the Transracial Korean Adoptee Nexus, a great overview of the New Worlds of Adoption Conference, which explored the intersection of research and policy. I was particularly intrigued by this part about adoptive parents and post-adoptive services:

Dr. David Brodzinsky, Professor Emeritus of Developmental and Clinical Psychology at Rutgers University, co-founding member and Senior Research fellow of the E.B. Donaldson Adoption Institute, thinks that there are unrealistic expectations placed on adoptive parents to understand their adopted children. He says that perhaps it is this that needs to be corrected before any solid strides can be made moving forward.

And while I do believe that these expectations may seem daunting, I don’t find them any more daunting than an expectation that if an adoptive parent decides to adopt transracially, then he/she should make an effort to understand the complexities and ramifications of raising a child of color in America. Perhaps it’s not the expectations that need to be reduced, but the methods and ways in which we educate parents both pre- and post-adoption.

Yet at the same time, Dr. Brodzinsky also brought up some important issues regarding the status of post-adoption services.

Read the whole list of problems, but these are a few that really struck a chord with me:

1) Inadequate Training of Professionals – Both for child development and in mental health capacities, professionals are just not being trained well enough to support the needs of adopted children and families. And as I mentioned before, he believes it’s hard to stay current on newly emerging research and intervention methods.

4) Adoption Issues vs Non-adoption Issues – He says that all too often, adoptive parents and clinicians make the mistake of either overly pathologizing their child’s perceived adoption-related issues, or downplaying its significance.

8) Inadequate Adoption Records – What information is available to adoptive parents at the time of adoption? Unfortunately, some parents are not given the complete story of their children and, as you can imagine, this can lead to problems later on.

10) Comfort Levels for Adoptive Parents – Adoptive parents still struggle to be open to understanding and discussing sensitive issues. Unrealistic goals, he explains may be a factor at play here.

Thanks a million-kajillion to KAD Nexus for bringing this information to us! Please. go read the whole thing. Lots to think about there.

. . . and Another

Add one more to the disruption list -- Artyom:

An 8-year old boy arrived at a Moscow airport from the United States on Saturday morning. “I refuse him”, read the note the boy carried with him.

The Russian internet daily Gazeta.ru quoted the Russian representative on children’s rights, Pavel Astakhov, as saying the child had been earlier adopted in Russia by an American couple. The boy was adopted six months ago.

Can you still say, "Adoption is Forever," without the words sticking in your throat?

A Brief History of Baby Lifts

I missed this in Time Magazine when it came out in February:

An American church group is being detained in Haiti for attempting to illegally take 33 children out of the country to an orphanage. The law notwithstanding, are good intentions enough? Or is kidnapping just that no matter what the circumstance? History offers some examples.

Haiti

Zoe's Ark

The Tsunami

Romanian Baby Trade

Operation Babylift

Pedro Pan

The Stolen Generation

The list provided of mass movement of children is by no means complete -- for example, in the Stolen Generation, it talks of the forced removal of aboriginal children to be placed in white families in Australia without mentioning the similar history in the United States and Canada. The South Korean diaspora of "war orphans" also isn't on the list. Adding these would have given them a tidy "Top Ten," but then there's the orphan trains, the Baby Scoop Era, Georgia Tann. . . .

Another and Another and Another . . .

Another adoption disruption story, brought to light by An-Ya blog and O Solo Mamma. A little girl adopted internationally at age 4, and is now 13, and her parents feel she "never bonded."

From An-Ya:

Ok – we are not talking about a violent child, a sexually aggressive child, a child that is urinating and defecating the walls or destroying property or animals. We are not even talking about a child who is stealing or lying or running away.

This is a teenager who isn’t fun to be around. Mom says that child is RAD but I see absolutely nothing in her post to suggest that anything this child is doing warrants a new home after being there for 9 years.

From O Solo Mamma:

Whatever you do, don’t come here and tell me I haven’t walked in these parents’ shoes. I thought the big headline around town was how forever adoptive family was. The only shoes that count are the ones worn by the kids. Sore feet, bloody feet. It isn’t comfortable.

* * *

I will never let you go. I will never let you down. I will never abandon you.

Truth be told, I promised that the day I adopted.

Jade. Tristan. Toni. Sweetpea. Matteo. Two unnamed boys. Jennifer. Angry Boy. Now this young teen. Just the ones I've heard about that are documented. How many more are there?

According to this 2004 article at the Child Welfare Information Gateway, the numbers are small:

Festinger (2002) found that 4 years after adoption, about 3.3 percent of children adopted from public and voluntary agencies in New York City in 1996 were or had been in foster care since adoption. In most of these situations the adoptive parent reported an expectation that the child would return to their home again.

A study of children adopted in Kansas City showed that 3 percent of adopted children were not living with their adoptive parents 18 to 24 months after adoption (McDonald, Propp, & Murphy, 2001).

In a longitudinal study of families in Iowa who were receiving adoption subsidies, Groze (1996) found that 8 percent of the children were placed out of the home after 4 years. However, in all cases the families did not dissolve the adoption and were considered to be connected to and invested in the adopted child.

A study of public agency adoptions in Illinois reported that adoptions dissolved at a rate of 6.6 percent between 1976 and 1987 (Goerge et al., 1997).

The GAO reported that about 1 percent of the public agency adoptions finalized in fiscal years 1999 and 2000 later were legally dissolved. The report cautioned that the 1 percent figure represents only adoptions that failed relatively soon after being finalized, so the number of dissolutions could have increased with time (U.S. GAO, 2003).

The numbers don't seem small when you hear the stories of these youngsters. Jade. Tristan. Toni. Sweetpea. Matteo. Two unnamed boys. Jennifer. Angry Boy. This young teen. And the numbers are growing -- this UK article reports that disruptions have doubled in the past five years.

I've been blogging about adoption for less than two years, and this 13-year-old is unlucky 13. There are are now 13 posts under the "disruption" label. I wonder how many more there will be two years from now. . . .

Orphan Encounters in School

Both girls came home from school yesterday with stories of watching videos with orphans and/or orphanages in them. Zoe saw part of the musical Annie in music class, and Maya watched a Veggie Tales video that mentioned orphanages and taking care of orphans.

They told me about the videos in the midst of our usual "what did you do at school today" conversation -- they didn't run to tell me about it as if it were anything special.

Zoe thought Annie was "kind of like me because she was in an orphanage." But she was different, too, she says, because her parents left a note with her saying they would come get their baby, and "my birth parents didn't." Zoe thought Annie was pretty lucky because of this. Zoe didn't think the orphanage was at all like hers, since it didn't have cribs. It didn't bother her to see it with her friends at school, because she knew they already knew she was from an orphanage.

Maya didn't think anything of it, she says, because they didn't show an orphanage or anything, they just talked about it. Maya says that it did make her wonder if anyone was going to adopt the little girl in the movie. She figures someone probably did.

Their reaction was pretty matter-of-fact. It didn't seem to be any big deal to them, they didn't feel awkward or singled out, which is good. It was just a typical day at school!

Orphanage Care Can Affect Physical Growth

So says results from the University of Minnesota's International Adoption Project, as reported in the MN Daily:

The first results of an ongoing University of Minnesota study suggest that living in an orphanage can not only can hurt children psychologically but can harm them physically as well.

This information could serve to validate U.S. domestic policy, which since the 1970s has funded foster care in place of orphanages.

The study released Monday shows that through early development stages, the amount of one-on-one affection a child receives not only affects appetite but can also curb the way the brain’s pituitary gland and liver secrete growth hormone. University professor Dana E. Johnson led the study in six orphanages in Bucharest, Romania.

According to Johnson’s findings, children in orphanages displayed slowed growth and development, with more severe deficits among those who were born weighing less than 5.5 pounds.

* * *

Though virtually nonexistent in the United States, orphanages remain prominent in eastern European, Asian and South American countries. Not only are these institutions not able to provide personal care, but even the interaction between children can be detrimental to their health.

“In eastern European and Asian countries, the children are [separated] by age,” Johnson said. “South American orphanages are set up with children of a variety of ages. It’s clear that those kinds of environments are better.”

I wasn't able to find the results on the U of M International Adoption Project website, so I know no more than was reported in the paper!

CCAA becomes China Child Welfare Center

Half the Sky Foundation has announced on its website some changes for child welfare and adoption in China:

• CCAA will soon become the China Child Welfare Center (CCWC), responsible for
protecting the welfare of all children.

• CCWC will serve the interests of all children - particularly orphans, children with disabilities and serious illnesses, children of migrant workers, single parent households and families living in poverty.

•CCWC will renew its efforts to find an adoptive family for every child possible, particularly those with special needs, as the number of “healthy” abandoned children has dropped dramatically with China’s new prosperity.

•CCWC will tackle a major failing of all institutionalization - that children grow up in total isolation from the real world - by opening children’s welfare institutions to the community, turning them into community centers that provide services like HTS programs for all children, especially those who are disadvantaged: preschools and enrichment classes and guidance for teens and young parents who have no other place to turn.

Their source seems impeccable -- Director-General Wang Zhenyao, head of the welfare department at the Ministry of Civil Affairs.

I think this is great news for China's children. It seems the country is going to step up to the plate and take care of their own vulnerable children, with adoption as only a part of child welfare. I'm especially heartened to see the focus on the children of migrants. Maybe we won't see any more stories like this one.

I expect prospective adoptive parents, many of whom have been waiting for over 4 years to adopt from China, will see this news as personally distressing. If CCAA's responsibilities are going to expand in this way, I'd expect more slowdowns in adoption.

Happy Easter!

To those who celebrate Easter, I hope you have a happy one! We have certainly had a busy Easter weekend. My sister, Kim, and her husband Brian drove down from Vermont, so we've been showing them a bit of the town and they've also enjoyed all the girls' Easter activities.

The Easter Bunny brought the girls quite a haul this morning, with stuffed baskets and tons of eggs.

Grandpa's 79th birthday falls on Easter this year, so we had to celebrate that, too!

Here's Kim, Mimi & the girls at the Botanic Garden. It was really lovely, everything in full bloom. This is a Chinese Redbud tree.

The girls worked hard to turn all their dyed Easter eggs into deviled eggs. We put the yolks and mayo and seasonings in a ziploc bag, and let the girls squeeze it to mix it all. Then, we cut a corner off, and pipe the yolks back into the eggs. This is one of the girls' favorite Easter activity, though we do it other times, too. If you look closely at Maya's face, you can see a little evidence that she did her share of tasting as well as piping!

Dying the eggs was a real family affair. In fact, the grownups seemed to be more into the egg-dying than the kids were!

Zoe and Mimi draw on eggs with wax before dying them.

Maya seems fascinated with Kim's two-toned dye job.

Brian is convinced he can make Ukrainian eggs without the proper tools -- his egg turned out looking like a watermelon. Zoe is just happy that Kim and Brian are here!

Babies Without Borders

Fascinating interview with Karen Dubinsky, adoptive parent, professor, and author of Babies Without Borders:

The professor recalls the juxtaposition of these starkly different interpretations of international adoption -- kidnap versus rescue -- in her new book, Babies Without Borders, a study of adoption and migration across the Americas.

* * *

"There is a way in which adoption is easier to grasp if you look at it in miniature, the tiny little telescope of the individual case," Ms. Dubinsky said in a telephone interview from her Kingston home this week. "It's usually pretty easy to figure out, and impossible to argue that something good hasn't occurred to the child. If you broaden the lens a little bit and look at the circumstances of the birth mother, that makes it more complicated. And I'm not talking just about stories of babies ripped out of people's arms, I'm talking about the birth mother who makes the ‘voluntary' decision. We all know that is not an easy decision. Nobody gives their kids away if they don't have to."

* * *

Events like the 1990 Romanian orphanage scandal caused applications to skyrocket, wrote Ms. Dubinksy, and fuelled the "transnational politics of pity." Then came low-interest adoption loans, airlines that featured special rates for adoption travel, "culture camps" that taught adopted children their heritage, and Hollywood mothers with foreign babes. And with adoption agencies bearing such names as Heart to Heart Adoption or Children's Hope, trading in "the vulnerability and cuteness of waiting children, always pictured isolated, alone, devoid of parents, communities and nations, and waiting for rescue," says Ms. Dubinsky, it is little wonder that many parents, and advocates, view international adoption as a humanitarian effort, citing poverty, malnutrition and poor child welfare systems in sending countries.

"The fantasy of the global cabbage patch", she calls it, filled with children who need help.

P.S. O Solo Mamma has an original interview with Karen Dubinsky, Babies Without Borders author pleads for less black-and-white thinking in adoption. It expands on some of the issues in the above article -- a must-read!

Understanding Post-Adoption Depression

The New York Times explores post-adoption depression in an article published March 31, presenting new research conducted by Dr. Karen J. Foli, author of The Post-Adoption Blues: Overcoming the Unforseen Challenges of Adoption:

It’s not uncommon for new mothers to experience depression, which is usually attributed to hormonal fluctuations and lack of sleep after childbirth. But new research shows that depression after the arrival of a child isn’t limited to birth parents: adoptive parents are also at risk for depression after bringing a child home.

Depression appears to be common among the two million couples in the United States who adopt children annually.

* * *

[New] research, published in this month’s Western Journal of Nursing Research, found that the depression experienced by adoptive parents often stemmed from unmet or unrealistic expectations of the parenting experience.

How about you? Did you experience the post-adoption blues? I certainly was stressed and exhausted and busy being superparent after bringing Zoe home, but managed to avoid depression. I think being a more experienced parent helped with bringing Maya home. Despite having to deal with two instead of one child, it was a much easier experience.

Priceless

The girls and I had a rollicking dinner last night, marked by many completely ridiculous April Fools jokes and many repetitions of one of our newest favorite sayings -- "You rock more than cheese!"

One of Zoe's classmates put that on a thank you note to me for teaching the class about trials and taking them on a field trip to a courtroom to put on a mock trial based on the Emperor's New Clothes. Anyway, the little boy who invented the phrase is named Nicholas and goes by Nickel. Maya asked why they called him Nickel, and I said jokingly that it was because he was worth a nickel. Maya, with her usual grasp of high finance, said with awe, "That's a lot of money!"

I then said that children really can't be priced -- they're worth so much they can't have a pricetag, they're priceless.

Zoe responded immediately, in a gleeful "gotcha" voice, "That's not true! You paid money when you adopted us!"

I've posted before about the "money in adoption" conversation with kids, saying I hadn't yet had that talk with mine. Well, now I have!

I told Zoe that I paid money, but the money wasn't for buying them, it was for paying the people who helped me adopt. I explained about fees to the agency, to the U.S. government, to the Chinese government, to the orphanage. I reminded them that we paid people for all kinds of help, like teachers and doctors and plumbers and landscapers.

I also told the kids that sometimes people get confused about what the money in adoption is for, and will ask things like, "How much did she cost?" What, I asked, should I say in response? (Mostly I wanted them to have practice answering the question if it comes up when I'm not there.) Zoe said I should explain about how we pay for HELP not for children. Maya piped up with, "Just tell them I'm priceless!"

An Adoptee Adopts

From the Huffington Post, an article about Bert Ballard, adopted from Vietnam; author of a book for and by teen adoptees, Pieces of Me, Who Do I Want to Be?; and the writing part of Adopted the Comic:

This spring, Bert and Sarah Ballard hope to fly to Vietnam to pick up the little boy they plan to adopt. In the three years since they began the adoption process, the couple, who already have two biological daughters, have experienced the excitement, emotional upheaval, and bureaucratic setbacks typical for adoptive families. In one significant way, though, the Ballards' experience has been unusual.

Bert Ballard is himself an adoptee.

* * *

As the trans-national adoptees of the '50s, '60s, and '70s mature, they have come to add new, and often heated, voices to the debate over the ethics of adoption. They do not, however, offer a unified perspective on the subject. While many adoptees express satisfaction about their upbringing, others see their adoption as a crime that
tore them from their vulnerable birth families. [actually I'm not so sure those are conflicting perspectives! ms]

Ballard's view on the subject lies somewhere in between, and explains, in some ways, his own reason for adopting now.

Interesting person, interesting story -- go read the whole thing! Just ignore the author's ignorant theme that whether an adoptee is for or against international adoption is about whether they had a happy childhood. . . .

More on Asian Fetish Man

Jean MacLeod at Adoption Toolbox tackles the subject of talking to our adopted Asian daughters about Asian Fetish Man:

'SWM, 64, Looking for Asian Woman'

How do I describe the spasm of parental pain, anger and fear induced by Date*Line’s Ad of the Week? Like it’s not enough that I have to worry about prepping my Chinese American high-schooler for student shootings, abductions while jogging, and 16 year old bad boys--now I need to figure out how to talk to her about old white guys looking for fantasy China Doll sex?

Or Geisha sex, or Dragon Lady sex, or Miss Saigon sex? Aaaargh! Yes, I was really happy to add ‘perverts’ to the list of difficult topics I’ve been attempting to address
with my Asian daughters:

* * *

When will ‘Chinese orphan’ become the hot, new, fantasy sexual experience for Asiaphiles?

I like her suggestion to use older movies to start conversations about this kind of stereotyping. I have a few years to learn from Jean MacLeod's experiences before I have to go down this particular trail, I think!

Will I love my adopted child like I love my bio child?

At Adoptive Momma of Two, guest blogger Kiara, who has one bio child and two adopted child and is pregnant with her fourth child, addresses that question:

I worried at least a little about this, myself. (But not enough to avoid adoption -- I couldn't wait to adopt. :) My husband and I speak at our adoption agency about our experiences with open adoption, transracial adoption, etc. during their required education classes. The way I explain that part of our journey to people is that the end result -- the deep, intimate, protective love for our child -- is the same for each child. But the journey there is a little different.

* * *

I think the main thing is that in adoption it's important to realize that the actual bonding journey is different than with a child you gave birth to, and that's normal and doesn't reflect your long-term love and commitment to your child.

Not something I can opine on, having only adopted kids. Those out there with both, do you agree? How was the bonding experience the same or different for you?

See anyone you know?

Take a look at these photos for Angry Asian Man's census photo contest -- you may see someone familiar! And then get your census photo emailed before the end of the day tomorrow, April 1, to be included in the contest.

China as Champion of Gender Equality?

That's the premise of an article in the Asian Journal of Comparative Law, Changing Mindsets: How China's Abnormal Sex Ratio Is Turning Its Government into a Champion of Gender Equality. Here's the abstract:

A combination of factors has led to an increasing imbalance in the sex ratio of China's population. China's sex ratio at birth is 119 boys per 100 girls, far above the global norm of 106. This paper will focus on the abnormal sex ratio as a consequence of traditional Chinese gender attitudes holding women inferior and subordinate to men, which have been brought to the fore by a combination of fertility decline and technological advancement. Accordingly, any solution to the demographic problem must address these prevalent, entrenched mind-sets. The government appears to realise that existing laws prohibiting sex-selective abortion and infanticide will fail to correct the sex ratio. This paper examines the trend in government responses towards efforts to address traditional gender attitudes and argues that the demographic crisis may have turned the Chinese government into an unlikely champion of gender equality.

An Illusion of Citizenship

Another person adopted internationally is being deported under immigration laws that make virtually mandatory the deportation of non-citizens who have committed crimes, according to an article in the Tacoma News Tribune:

Tara Ammons Cohen doesn’t speak Spanish.

She hasn’t lived in Mexico since she was 5 months old.

For nearly all her 37 years, she thought she was a U.S. citizen.

Turns out she was wrong, and now she faces deportation to her native country, where she knows no one, doesn’t speak the language and fears for her life.

“I’ve been an American all my life,” Cohen, a mother of three, said recently in an interview at the federal Northwest Detention Center on Tacoma’s Tideflats. She has been there since July 2009.

Cohen faces two big problems in trying to stay in the United States.

Under federal law, she is not a U.S. citizen and never was because her American parents didn’t take care of paperwork to make her a citizen when they adopted her as an infant.

And though Cohen is not a citizen, she is a felon – and that set up her deportation with no chance of returning to the United States.

Ah, my two worlds collide -- adoption and criminal law! Interestingly, the U.S. Supreme Court handed down an opinion today relevant to deportation of non-citizen defendants. The court held that it is ineffective assistance of counsel for a criminal defense attorney to fail to advise a non-citizen client about potential deportation consequences of a criminal conviction. In this case, the attorney did more than FAIL to advise -- he erroneously told his client that he "did not have to worry about immigration status since he had been in the country so long." Sheesh.

These international adoption cases are not simply a particular individuals's personal tragedy, or just public policy issues about the fairness of visiting the sins of the adoptive parents on the adopted person. They are a reminder for criminal law practitioners that defense counsel may need to ask their clients more probing questions than simply, "Are you a citizen?" And if you ask, "Were you born in the U.S.," an answer of "No, but I was adopted as an infant," means you better ask more questions.

"Daily Mail Baby:" A Vietnam Airlift Story

Above are then-and-now photos of 3 babies airlifted from Saigon to the UK at the end of the Vietnam War. In the middle is Viktoria Cowley who writes in the BBC News Magazine about tracking down other children on that flight and her return to Vietnam:

Thirty-five years ago next month I was plucked from an orphanage in Vietnam and flown 6,300 miles from my birthplace to a foreign country at the behest of a British newspaper.

After years of war, the capital of South Vietnam, Saigon, was teetering as the communist North Vietnamese army closed in.

A mass exodus was under way as thousands feared violent repercussions by the invading troops, and among those helping with the evacuation was Britain's Daily Mail newspaper.

I was one of the 99 babies brought over to the UK on a plane chartered by the Mail - and within 12 months I was living with my newly adoptive family in Eastbourne, East Sussex.

My new family never kept my past a secret and I had been happy with my life as it was. But for years I toyed with the idea of starting a journey into my past. I always knew that searching for information about my history would be a difficult and probably fruitless task.

I didn't know how to go about it so it just seemed easier to ignore it and get on with life. About a year ago, I threw myself into finding and meeting others who had been on the flight to Britain.

Click to read the whole thing -- including reunions with other Daily Mail babies and her visit to Vietnam. And check out the side bar titled, "A Publicity Stunt?" If you're in the U.K., you can watch a video about the "Airmail Orphan."

Rightful "Claims" on Adopted Kids

At Creating a Family, Dawn Davenport has a compassionate and forthright response to a query from an adoptive parent worried about attempts by their recently adopted son's Korean foster parents to contact them:

While you are 100% your son’s real honest-to-goodness parents and will be for life, he also has two other sets of parents—birth and foster. This is both confusing and sometimes hard for us adoptive parents to accept. Even if we accept it on the intellectual level, it’s another matter entirely to accept on the emotional level.

I sense an underlying concern in your question of the foster family’s attachment or “claim” on your son. While I completely understand how that can be unsettling, especially during the time you are trying to establish this sense of attachment and claim yourself, I do want to gently suggest that they indeed are, and have every right to be, attached to your son, and they do have a claim to him. That’s the nature of love. It is this very love that they felt for him that has given him such a healthy start in life and laid the foundation that your love will build on. Who would your son be if he wasn’t so thoroughly loved and claimed by his foster parents? It is possible to foster a child just for the money without forming that sense of attachment, but it
isn’t best for the child. Your son and you are blessed that this family chose the harder route of falling in love even though he wasn’t going to be theirs forever.

* * *

It is worth examining your feelings about his foster family because in addition to a foster family, your son has a first family, and many of the same feelings you have about his foster family are likely intensified in your feeling about his birth family. Working through your discomfort with the foster family’s love for your son and the “rights” they feel towards him will help pave the way for greater comfort towards his first family and acceptance of their “claim” on him and on his possible desire to have a relationship with them when he is older.

The whole thing is a must-read, including the suggestion that some of what is bothering the adoptive parents (naked baby pictures taken by the foster parents) may be merely cultural differences.

More on the Census

Ive already posted some links to issues surrounding the 2010 census, in particular the adoption and race questions. Here are a few more:

AngryAsianMan is hosting a contest -- chance to win a tshirt by sending in a photo of yourself/family holding your census (or if you've already sent yours in, holding a sign that says "I count!"). The contest is really just a fun way to encourage Asian Americans to send in their census forms.

Also from AngryAsianMan, Asian American Legal Defense and Education Fund (AALDEF) has complained to the U.S. Census Bureau about continuing problems in the Bureau's programs and outreach to Asian Americans.

The 2010 Census: Don't Put Me in a Big White Box, from NPR, the difficulty of being multiracial and having to choose which box to check.

Census Sensibility from Mama C and the Boys: "I shared my enthusiasm with my students about my first opportunity to fill this out as a mother, and how important it felt to me that I was recording my multiracial family accurately on the form."

From Adoption Mosaic, Adoption on the Census:

I know many people in the adoption world are upset about this singling-out of adopted children, for a variety of valid and understandable reasons. The issues range from parents, who have both adopted and birth children, feeling they are being asked to unfairly differentiate between their children, to people who feel the profiling amounts to “othering” – singling-out adoptees as exceptions to the norm, to feelings that the question is personal, and frankly, none of the government’s business. (I am simplifying these positions for the purpose of brevity, but welcome comments that explore them further)

Although I respect and understand these viewpoints, I see it a little differently. It doesn’t bother me when adoptive families are shown to be different. It bothers me much more when they are viewed to be the same.

* * *

As a transracial adoptee, with a brother who was born to my parents, I imagine how I would have felt as a child, or teen, had I found out that my parents chose not to complete a (mandatory) survey because they didn’t want to state that I was adopted and he was not. I think it would have been completely confusing to me, and would have caused me to ask the question “What’s so bad about being adopted?”

In Mean(ish) Girls and the Census (those are actually two unrelated topics under one heading!), the complications of filling out the census with a Caucasian mom, a Taiwanese dad, a mixed-race biological child, and a mainland-Chinese adopted daughter.

Jenna from the Chronicles of Munchkin Land reprises her blog post on the census at Blogher.com. The comments there are very interesting. Here's what I said in response to comments claiming that in the absence of open adoption records (which I support) census data would not help adopted persons:

I think gathering the statistics, as imperfect as they are, is helpful to adopted persons as a group. No, no individual adopted person will be helped in terms of geneology or birth parent search and reunion.

But in the way it helps a school district to know when to build an elementary school depending on the number of children reported on the census for a particular area, that group information about adoptees is helpful.

Consider the schools example for a moment -- when universities and teacher colleges see how many adopted children are reaching school age, they can see the importance of training teachers and counselors about adoption issues. Counseling anyone? Given that adopted persons have more mental health needs than non-adopted persons, knowing how many adopted persons there are tell us how many adoption-trained therapists would be needed.

Yes, this is the way census data is used -- it isn't about any particular individual, it's about groups and trends and predictions about the allocation of resources.

If we "hide" how many adopted persons there are in the United States, how do you think it will benefit adopted persons?

Queer the Census, decrying that the census is not explicitly counting gay and lesbian individuals or families headed by gay or lesbian parents: "The data collected impacts issues critical to every American – like our health care, our economic stability, and even our safety. And when LGBT people aren't counted, then we also don't count when it comes to services, resources ... you name it."