Sunday, December 15, 2013

The Children Who Wait

- Marsha Traugot (1951)
               
In this essay, Traugot discusses the changing trend of adoption in America. Now, a lot of families accept the children for adoption who were not adoptable in past.
               
Twenty years ago, there were certain criteria for the adoption of a child. Firstly, the child had to be white. Second, he or she had to be an infant, i.e. below 18 months old. Third, s/he had to be a normal and healthy child. Single parent adoptions were also not possible. Until about 1960, middle or upper class childless white couples adopted healthy white infants. Handicapped children were more or less regarded as damaged goods. Minority and mixed racial children were virtually ignored. So, these children waited.
               
This situation remains no longer. Children once labeled not worthy to adopt are being placed with substantially more types of families. It has been possible because of various civil rights movements, birth control, changing mores, and social science researches. The black civil rights movement raised the consciousness of the people and encouraged international adoption. Liberal whites started adopting black and mixed-race infants.
               
The women’s movement changed people’s attitude toward birth control, abortion and marriage. As a result, fewer unwanted babies were born. Even unwed mothers were allowed to keep their babies. They kept their babies with themselves with the support of their families. Because of all these things, the number of healthy infants drastically reduced. They became scarce. This severe scarcity of the normal children turned childless couples’ attention toward the other children, the waiting children.
               
The research has shown that the children kept in foster care suffer from various problems such as pseudo-mental retardation, learning disabilities, mental illnesses, delinquency, sexual perversion, etc. Moreover, keeping them in foster care is very much expensive. So, today’s social workers give emphasis upon ‘matching’ for child adoption. First the workers evaluate the child’s personality, cultural background and emotional state. Based on these factors, the workers search appropriate family for the child.
               

To find potential adoptive parents for a child, the adoption agencies go through certain steps. First, they look through the families listed to them. If they don’t find any of them suitable, they register the child with the regional or state adoption exchange. This agency distributes a photo and description of the child to all other agencies. Sometimes, they hold monthly meetings and sponsor parties where the prospective parents and the children get chance to meet each other informally. Finally, when the match cannot be made, the child welfare organizations depend upon media blitzes. These are often aggressive like commercial advertisements. They are quite effective. 

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