This is a unique compilation of cross-cultural and international attitudes towards adoption research and outcomes. Whilst informal adoption of children has probably always existed across all human societies, this work is timely in that interest in the role of legal adoption as both a child welfare solution and as a means of alternative family formation for adults wanting to become parents has never been higher. This book is an edited collection of 13 papers based on invited keynote presentations or paper symposia presentations given at the Second International Conference on Adoption Research (ICAR2) 2006. It gives a unique Cross-cultural look at adoption from worldwide, multidisciplinary community of distinguished and emerging adoption researchers. International appeal, with different countries laws, attitudes and outcomes fully explored

The practice of adoption has changed dramatically in the past twenty years. Most adoptions are now transracial or special needs cases. This book will allow Practitioners to gain insights into the psychological issues facing the adopted child.

With essays by well-known adoption practitioners and researchers who source empirical research and practical knowledge, this volume addresses key developmental, cultural, health, and behavioral issues in the transracial and international adoption process and provides recommendations for avoiding fraud and techniques for navigating domestic and foreign adoption laws. The text details the history, policy, and service requirements relating to white, African American, Asian American, Latino and Mexican American, and Native American children and adoptive families. It addresses specific problems faced by adoptive families with children and youth from China, Russia, Ethiopia, India, Korea, and Guatemala, and offers targeted guidance on ethnic identity formation, trauma, mental health treatment, and the challenges of gay or lesbian adoptions

Since the mid-1970s, adoption practices in the United States have changed dramatically, and the confidentiality maintained in the past is no longer the norm. The trend is toward openness in adoption in which either mediated (through an adoption agency) or direct contact occurs between the adoptive family and birth parent(s). Some adoption professionals argue that openness is harmful and experimental while others argue that the secrecy of confidential adoptions has been harmful to all parties involved. WhoÆs right? In Openness in Adoption, this question is addressed via a nationwide study of 720 individuals (190 adoptive fathers, 190 adoptive mothers, 171 adopted children, and 169 birthmothers) that was conducted over a five-year period. The book begins by presenting the issues and debates surrounding open adoptions and then examines them from the perspective of the adopted children, adoptive parents, and birth mothers. The volume concludes with implications for adoption practice, public policy, and future research. A groundbreaking volume, Openness in Adoption provides a wealth of information to professionals and practitioners in the fields of family studies, sociology, developmental psychology, social work, clinical psychology, and social psychology.

Adoption is practiced globally yielding a multidimensional area of study that cannot be characterized by a single movement or discipline. This handbook provides a central source of contemporary scholarship from a variety of disciplines with an international perspective and uses a multifaceted and interdisciplinary approach to ground adoption practices and activities in scientific research. Perspectives of birth/first parents, adoptive parents, and adopted persons are brought forth through a range of disciplinary and theoretical lenses. Beginning with background and context of adoption, including sociocultural and political contexts, the handbook then addresses the diversity of adoptive families in terms of family forms, attitudes about adoption, and characteristics of adopted children. Next, research examining the lived experience of adoption for birth parents, adoptive parents, and adopted individuals is presented. A variety of outcomes for internationally and domestically adopted children and adoptive families is then discussed and the handbook concludes by addressing the development, training, and implementation of adoption competent clinical practice. With cutting-edge research from top international scholars in a diversity of fields, The Routledge Handbook of Adoption should be considered essential reading for students, researchers, and practitioners across the fields of social work, sociology, psychology, medicine, family science, education, and demography. Interviews with chapter authors can be accessed as podcasts (https://anchor.fm/emily-helder) or as videos (https://bit.ly/2FIoi0a).

This book explores what it is like to be involved in contemporary open adoption, characterised by varying forms of contact with birth relatives, from an adoptive parent point of view. The author’s fine-grained interpretative phenomenological analysis of adopters’ accounts reveals the complexity of kinship for those whose most significant relationships are made, unmade and permanently altered through adoption. MacDonald distinctively connects adoption to wider sociological theories of relatedness and personal life, and focuses on domestic non-kin adoption of children from state care, including compulsory adoption. The book also addresses current child welfare concerns, and suggestions are made for adoption practice. The book will be of interest to scholars and students with an interest in adoption, social work, child welfare, foster care, family and sociology.

The first social history of disability and difference in American adoption, from the Progressive Era to the end of the twentieth century. Disability and child welfare, together and apart, are major concerns in American society. Today, about 125,000 children in foster care are eligible and waiting for adoption, and while many children wait more than two years to be adopted, children with disabilities wait even longer. In Familial Fitness, Sandra M. Sufian uncovers how disability operates as a fundamental category in the making of the American family, tracing major shifts in policy, practice, and attitudes about the adoptability of disabled children over the course of the twentieth century. Chronicling the long, complex history of disability, Familial Fitness explores how notions and practices of adoption have—and haven’t—accommodated disability, and how the language of risk enters into that complicated relationship. We see how the field of adoption moved from widely excluding children with disabilities in the early twentieth century to partially including them at its close. As Sufian traces this historical process, she examines the forces that shaped, and continue to shape, access to the social institution of family and invites readers to rethink the meaning of family itself.

Social Policy Review provides students, academics and all those interested in welfare issues with critical analyses of progress and change in areas of major interest during the past year. This year the Review takes the opportunity of the 60th anniversary of the key legislation founding the welfare state in the UK to provide a comprehensive overview of policy developments in the UK and internationally. The first part brings together a selection of papers which have been commissioned to examine historical and contemporary developments in policy tackling Beveridge's five evils of want, idleness, disease, squalor and ignorance, looking at how policy has changed since the aims and ideology of the inception of the post-war welfare state. The second part looks at the issue of the current challenges facing children's welfare services internationally: always a contemporary and contentious issue. The final part brings together a selection of papers looking at the effect of policy development at various governance levels on social policy. The contributions bring together an exciting mix of internationally renowned authors to provide comprehensive discussion of the some of the most challenging issues facing social policy today.

The scope of these chapters reflects the strong influence that Sandra Wood Scarr’s scholarship—her empirical research and theoretical contributions—has had on what we know about experience and development via the lens of the psychological sciences, especially the fields of developmental psychology, behavior genetics, early education and child care.