Aaron Klein

Clearing the Path for Adoption to Grow

This post is part of a series on the cause of orphan care, adoption and social change that I hope to make you as passionate about as I am. You may want to start from the beginning if you’re just joining us. 

We just established the four obstacles that often serve to keep people from freely pursuing adoption, and have slowed the growth of adoption as a partial solution to the global orphan crisis.

While this isn’t an exhaustive list, here are four steps I think we need to take to remove those obstacles, and another four strategies you can use to directly engage in building solutions.

• We need to make it simpler for potential adoptive parents to get started and understand the pros and cons of the three major adoption choices (international, private domestic and foster adoption).
• We need to make adoption less expensive where we can, and help people understand how they can finance the costs if they aren’t personally wealthy. Most people don’t realize there are a number of grant opportunities, zero-interest adoption loans, and a large refundable federal tax credit to support adoption. Cost should never be an obstacle to uniting a waiting child with willing parents.
• We need to make it easier for adoptive parents to get pre- and post-adoption support to learn the parenting skills they will need to make it through tough times, excel in the many good times and develop each precious child to their full potential.
• We need to reform our local foster care systems to work extensively to reunite children with birth parents for a reasonable period of time, and then shift the emphasis to finding permanence for that child – either through intra-family adoption, or adoption by willing foster parents. (I’ve heard some amazing things about the State of Colorado’s efforts to build permanence into their policy and staffing structure.)

What can you do?

There are a number of contributions you can make to be a part of this solution to the global orphan crisis.

• Adopt a child. Many people aren’t sure they have it in them; others are quite willing but just need help with some of the obstacles. Summoning the will to become an adoptive parent is a long-term investment that will reap rich rewards. I speak from experience!
  And while you’re in the process of becoming an adoptive parent, remember to open yourself up to other families who might be thinking about making that leap. As another adoptive parent said, “it’s hard to tell your friends, ‘we still need X to cover our travel costs’ but in asking them to pray with us about our needs, we’re giving them the wonderful opportunity to see God at work in our adoption.”
• Contribute financially to an adoption. When you hear of a family beginning the adoption process, understand the immense expense they are likely undertaking. Ask how you can help. It’s amazing how a little can go such a long way – between grants, gifts and a unique fundraiser my wife designed by sewing “aprons for adoption” – we owed $16,687 for our first adoption and on the day it was due, we had $16,604 in our adoption fund. We didn’t consider that a coincidence, and we were so grateful for the constant generosity of families and friends.
• Adopt a prospective adoptive family. Perhaps you’re not in a position to become an adoptive parent yourself, but you want to go further than just a financial contribution. Could you form a partnership with another family that is considering an adoption, but is worried about whether or not they can pull it off? Perhaps all they need is access to babysitting, or a loan to finance some of the costs, or help starting a college fund for this child. What a joy you will share with that family and that child that you played such a significant part in creating permanence for.
• Support reforms that will establish permanence for children as a top priority. I’m looking forward to the day when local foster care systems and UNICEF all understand the permanence of a family as the best interests of every child. We need to work through our government – local, state and federal officials – to make these policy changes happen. Great progress is being made, but we can’t rest until the work is done.

I hope this set of posts on adoption has made it clear both how important adoption is in fighting the global orphan crisis, and how critical it is to do even more to arrest the causes that transform one child into an orphan every 18 seconds. So that’s where we go next: orphan prevention.

Photo Credit: Andy and Jill Lehman

The Obstacles to Adoption

This post is part of a series on the cause of orphan care, adoption and social change that I hope to make you as passionate about as I am. You may want to start from the beginning if you’re just joining us.

The last post established adoption as a viable solution to the global orphan crisis, but only a partial solution. It’s really important to understand that each child who is adopted would have grown up without the love and permanence of a family otherwise, in almost every case.

In other words, if being orphaned was a medical condition, we need to work on both prevention and treatment, and adoption fits the latter description. We can’t spend all of our time on orphan prevention and ignore the children in need of permanence today.

So how do we dramatically grow the impact of adoption on the global orphan crisis? I see four key obstacles that need to be knocked down.

1. Adoption is intimidating to plan

Getting started in the journey of adoption is really tough for many people. I remember the feeling of being completely lost and not knowing exactly where to start – and I was already a part of a family that had adopted! There are three major types of adoption – international, private domestic and foster – and there are pros and cons to each choice.

2. Adoption can be expensive to finance

The costs to adopt vary widely based on the choices adoptive parents make. Foster adoption (if available) can be very affordable, depending on the local area you work with. Private domestic adoption is often quite expensive (though not always). International adoption can be very expensive or relatively affordable, depending on the country program and fee.

3. Adoption presents unique issues in parenting

No matter what kind of adoption you pursue, you’ll be having a series of very special conversations with that child about how they were born, and how their first parents weren’t able to care for a new child, but loved them so much that they made an adoption plan for them. This can be a beautiful conversation, but I’m sure it’s one that many adoptive parents approach with trepidation.

In addition, adoption often presents a unique set of things for new parents to worry about. Some wonder if they’ll be able to love and bond with an adopted child just like they would a biological one. (The good news is: the answer is yes!) In the case of international adoption, many wonder whether extended family members, friends or neighbors will embrace their transformation into a multi-cultural, multi-racial family.

Finally, some adopted children are deeply scarred as I wrote about previously – neglect, abuse, poverty and war are often the causes. The cumulative effects can result in physical disabilities, but more often than not, this kind of child has special emotional needs or developmental delays. Put simply, wounded children may require you to learn parenting skills you didn’t expect to need (the good news is, many of those resources are easily available).

4. Adoption is often opposed by powerful interests putting children’s needs last

This is a controversial subject that probably deserves its own post some day, but this is an important obstacle: from county governments in the United States to UNICEF’s work around the world, some very powerful interests are opposed to placing priority on a child’s need for permanence.

Look closely, and you’ll see the hidden priorities. Local foster care systems often work until the bitter end to reunite children with birth parents unable or unwilling to care for them. Whether this is driven by financial incentives (an adopted child no longer a ward of the state reduces funding for that agency) or anti-adoption attitudes, this approach does not consistently put the child’s best interests first.

On a global scale, UNICEF has become quite controversial for their dramatic and stubborn opposition to international adoption, literally preferring that children grow up in horribly understaffed orphanages in their “native culture” rather than be adopted by parents in another culture. Senator Mary Landrieu (D-Louisiana) is a hero in the adoption movement and has led efforts to get them to change their attitude and policy approach.

What UNICEF perhaps doesn’t understand is that, in all modern cases that I’ve seen, the child’s culture becomes deeply interwoven into that family. My own family isn’t just an American family any longer – we’re proud to be a richly multi-cultural Korean-Ethiopian-American family. We feast on Korean bulkogi and Ethiopian doro wat and injera. We cheer for all three teams in the Olympics. We fly all three flags in our house. And while it’s up to our kids, we’d love for them (and for us) to learn the languages of their heritage in addition to the language of their home country.

How do we remove these obstacles?

Now that you see the four major obstacles to adoption, how do we knock them down? The final post on adoption will focus on four steps we need to take to remove the obstacles, and four ways that you can get involved in growing adoption as a partial solution to the global orphan crisis.

Next Post: Clearing the Path for Adoption to Grow

Photo Credit: Casey and Mary Beth Picker

Is Adoption the Answer?

This post is part of a series on the cause of orphan care, adoption and social change that I hope to make you as passionate about as I am. You may want to start from the beginning if you’re just joining us.

I didn’t write this entire “changing the world” series in advance. Partly because it has been quite a process to learn how to articulate this story: what Cacey and I saw in Africa, and what we’ve learned since. I’ve had friends and family say – “you described this as life changing…what did you mean?” and I struggled for the right words to convey it all. Hopefully this series has done a decent job doing so.

But the other reason is that I’m still in the process of learning a lot about the history of problems and solutions in the developing world – what has already been tried, what worked and what didn’t. Much of this story is still unfolding and isn’t even known yet. Perhaps that’s part of what has latched on to me with this issue…the whole problem is like a technology startup – chaotic, disorganized and full of opportunity.

So I’ll preface this post by saying that I’m not holding myself out as the world’s expert on the solutions to the global orphan crisis. I’ll do the best I can to share what I’ve seen and learned, and then I’ll share some exciting news about how I’m personally going to figure the rest of it out.

Is Adoption the Answer?

As John Seabrook writes in The New Yorker, “the practice of adoption goes back at least as far as Moses, [who] was adopted by the daughter of the Pharaoh of Egypt.” International adoption is a much more recent phenomenon, driven into the mainstream after the Korean War when bi-racial war orphans (Korean mother and GI father) were deserted on the streets and rejected by society.

A couple in Oregon named Harry and Bertha Holt saw that story in a newsreel, went to Congress and got the “Holt bill” passed and adopted eight two-year olds. Yes, eight of them. With friends of theirs opening their hearts to orphans overseas, they eventually formed Holt International. (Our immediate family has now been enriched three times by adoption, and all using Holt as our agency.)

The numbers tell a very clear story.

Adoption as a solution to the global orphan crisis is perhaps best described by Melissa Fay Greene in There Is No Me Without You as “a few families from foreign countries…throwing lifelines to individual children.” In 2005, Ethiopia had 4.4 million orphans, 1.5 million of those orphaned by AIDS, and 1,400 were adopted internationally.

Out of sheer practicality, it’s clear that intercountry adoption cannot be the sole solution to the global orphan crisis. That’s for a variety of reasons, but Greene (a five-time adoptive mother herself) probably put it best: “one continent cannot simply adopt another continent’s children.”

Adoption can also be very challenging. There are always risks involved with parenting. There are no guarantees in outcomes for biological or adopted children. Adopted kids tend to struggle with a healthy sense of identity and may need extra help discovering who they are. Many adopted children come from hard places and can be deeply scarred from wounds inflicted by neglect, abuse, poverty or war. Some have special needs, others have developmental delays.

Some of these are time intensive; the vast majority are quite minor. But adoptive parents have to approach this journey with their eyes open, and be brutally honest with themselves about what issues they can commit to handling. I’d venture to bet that the recent sad story of the mom “returning” her child to Russia was a case where this kind of self-honesty didn’t occur. When times are tough with our children, regardless of how they came into our family, we have to come back to the commitment we have made as parents.

Yet despite the numbers and the potential challenges, adoption is without question a critical part of the solution to the global orphan crisis.

Understand this: for children who are adopted (whether domestically or across international lines), this beautiful process for building a family is the only thing that stood between them and spending their entire childhood without the love and permanence of a family.

In other words, it’s the last hope they had to grow up with a mom and a dad.

Adoption – whether it’s international, private domestic or foster adoption – needs to grow dramatically. And that’s the first set of solutions that need to be developed: knocking down the obstacles to adoption.

That’s up next.

Next Post: The Obstacles to Adoption

Photo Credit: Blue Castle Photography