Dana Johnson, the Director of Research and Education at the International Adoption Clinic, speaks on international adoption as the last resort. To learn more about Dr. Johnson, click here.
We just don’t talk about international adoption in terms of what effect it’s having on the countries of origin and how we’re viewed both in the United States and Western Europe by sending countries. I think we forget that the most important thing is for children to stay with their families and the vast majority of children come into international adoption because their families relinquish them because of poverty. Many are single women, but some are families but just don’t have resources to take care of another hungry mouth. You know, instead of bringing them into our countries and adopting them into our families, perhaps we should be sending money over there to help them stay with their families. Or we should be sending money over there to develop the adoption systems within that particular country so that those children can be placed with other families. And there are families in every country that would like to adopt.Only as a last resort should children be taken for international adoption and placed out of their country into a different country.
Dr. Joseph Crumbley, a therapist specializing in adoptive families, discusses racism in adopted children from China.
I was invited by an organization titled "Families with Children from China." They asked me to meet with their children and to see if they were dealing with issues of race. And I met with the children, and I guess they were maybe five or six years old up to ten or eleven. And there may have been about ten children in the group. And I asked them if they knew what prejudice was, and they said "no." I asked them if they knew what racism was and they said "no," so I defined it for them. I defined prejudice as someone having attitudes and ideas about you because of what they heard, not because of them knowing you. And they said, "O.K., all right, we understand that." I asked them if they knew what racism was, and they said "no," and I defined racism to them as meaning when someone feels as though they’re better than you and mistreats you simply because you look different from them. So they got the definition. And then I asked them how many of you have experienced prejudice or discrimination or racism. All the hands went up. So I then went around the group and I asked them what kind of experiences did you have? And they said:
"Well, somebdoy called me a pan face. Somebody called me a round face. Somebody called me a chink. Somebody asked me if I had yellow fever. Somebody asked me where my glasses were, because they figured because of my eyes I couldn’t be able to see. Somebody even said to me that I couldn’t play basketball because the only thing I’m good at is being smart."
So the children were going around with all their different experiences and what people were saying to them. And one of the children in the group was about five years old, and I didn’t really think she could share anything. I asked her, "what was your experience? Did somebody mistreat you because of your race?"No." Well, I asked if somebody said something bad about you because of your race. "No." Well, what did they do and this is what she did, <makes motion.> And the other kids in the group started laughing and saying, "ohh, slanty eyes!" So they kind of knew what was going on, and she said, "but I’ve got an answer for that." And I said, "What are you going to do?"I’m going to have an operation." I said, "What kind of operation?" "Well, I’m going to have my eyelids cut back so that they’ll be round."