Vanier Institute of the Family -- Virtual Library - Transition Magazine - Back Issues

There’s something tragically romantic about the whole notion of adoption—or so it seemed to me as a child looking at adoption through the filter of literature. Some of the most stirring stories ever written feature orphans—not just Canada’s Anne of Green Gables, but also Jane Eyre, Cosette in Les Miserables, and many of Charles Dickens’ most amiable young people. In most such books, orphanage workers and adoptive parents are either saintly or satanic, and the orphans themselves are always ideal children—unusually attractive, intelligent and affectionate, with apparently no long-lasting effects from their years of privation.

In real life in Canada today, most children who are adopted—or who are waiting to be adopted—are not orphans, and there’s nothing very romantic about their lives. Some have suffered more than their share of tragedy; others have lived as a happy member of a loving family for as long as they can remember. They come in all shapes and sizes, like other kids, with perhaps a few more problems, especially if they’ve been abused or neglected or moved from one home to another.

The professionals and parents in the real-life world of adoption are rarely as black or white as characters in a Dickens novel. Nevertheless, most could be called heroes, for they do a tough but absolutely essential job in a society that’s barely aware they exist and that seems unwilling to provide the necessary support. Like all parents, adoptive parents deserve to be recognized for their courage, strength and love. And those who take on the challenge of raising a child with special needs should be well and truly celebrated by everyone who cares about children.

Adoption may not be the typical way to form a family, but the number of Canadians touched by adoption is actually quite large. Besides the thousands of parents and children directly involved in creating a new family, there are also the birth parents— the often hidden members of the adoption triad. In the new home, the adopted child may have brothers or sisters born into the family. Most likely they have living grandparents in both the adoptive and birth families, as well as aunts, uncles, friends, neighbours, teachers, doctors and social workers. Eventually, the child grows up and has new relationships that inevitably will be affected by the fact of the adoption, though it happened years before.

Adoption is such an important and complex topic, and it affects so many Canadian families in different ways, that we can’t hope to do justice to “the adoption experience” in the few pages of this magazine. We can, however, open a window into the world of adoption, with articles by guest writers who can speak about adoption both professionally and as parents.

In this issue of Transition, Judith Wine has written the very personal story of how she and her husband came to be adoptive parents. In “A Family at Last,” she talks about the disappointments of “the medical make-a-baby treadmill,” and the intensely emotional ups and downs of their search for a baby to adopt.

We also include here an article about the history of adoption by Dr. David Kirk, as well as one about his “shared fate” theory—a theory that has influenced how parents and professionals deal with the fact that adoptive families are different from other families.

Canada has a shocking number of children without permanent homes. We also have many couples and single people willing to be adoptive parents. The real tragedy is that the kids and their would-be parents don’t always find each other. Judy Grove talks about one solution to the problem, in her article “Waiting for Parents: Canadian Kids Need Homes.”

I was not at the birth of my son. He was five hours old when I met him. Sometimes I wonder about those hours I missed. Did he cry out? Did he sense that the people who would most shape his life were not near, did not yet know he had taken his first breath?

I wonder if he was held. I mean really held—snuggled at a breast where he could hear a heartbeat and feel comfort. I wonder if Debbie held him. Debbie—the woman who gave birth to my son.

Before my husband and I met Debbie, she was simply “her.” We had talked on the phone, but she was not yet real. She was this voice that had control over our happiness, our lives. Every word she uttered caused us to either ascend into bliss or plummet into despair. We were so scared—scared we would not like her, scared she would not like us, scared it would all fall apart.

When we finally met, it was wonderful. She was wonderful— warm, caring and intelligent. She thanked us. She thanked us. She said she no longer felt like she was giving us her child but that she was giving her child a family. All the air seeped out of my chest. I let myself hope, just a little, that the years of trying, waiting and hoping might soon be over.

We had been on the medical make-a-baby treadmill for almost three years. Three years (a short period for this sort of thing) of physical and emotional hell. That first December, I wrote my own version of The Twelve Days of Christmas. Every day of treatment my doctor brought to me: three self-inflicted needles, two bruising blood tests and an ultrasound by a novice nurse.

Each attempt was the one that was going to work. Each failure was worse than the one before. Weeks of praying for the right result followed weeks of treatment followed weeks of recovering from the previous attempt.

Our relationships with family and friends suffered. We felt isolated. They felt uncomfortable.

They were never sure if they should invite us to their kids’ birthday parties. They hesitated before telling us that they were once again pregnant. We were quick to say that we wanted to share those moments, that we were happy for them. Yet they knew that sometimes, just sometimes, we also felt a little sorry for ourselves.

One day, it was enough. Actually, there were months of slowly sinking spirits before I finally broke down and said: “We must move on.”

For us, moving on meant adoption. A childfree lifestyle was not an acceptable alternative. I was excited when I made that first phone call to the government adoption agency. We were finally strong enough to walk out of the casino. We had been like gamblers who keep placing money and hope in a slot machine, sure that the next pull will be the one.

Days of frustration followed nights of despair. Then someone mentioned “private adoption.” Although we had heard about it, we didn’t really understand what it meant.

A friend arranged for us to talk to a couple she knew who had adopted a child. They told us their story and then arranged for us to meet another couple. We were amazed at the compassion of virtual strangers. They shared their sorrows and joys with us, simply because they too had been through this hell.

Private adoption is not an illegal or unethical adoption, but simply an adoption that is not arranged by the government. Which does not mean you can do whatever you want. Provincial laws must still be met—laws that attempt to protect all parties: the adopted child, the biological parents and the adoptive parents.

We learned that we need not sit and wait. We learned that we could fulfill our dream by finding a pregnant woman who wanted us to adopt her unborn child. The harder we worked at letting people know we were looking, the greater our chances of success. Unbelievable: a process that allowed us to regain some control over our lives. We were hooked.

We told everyone we were trying to adopt—every friend, acquaintance, business associate, shopkeeper, hairdresser, taxi driver. We wrote every doctor we or our friends or our friends’ friends knew. We rode the ups and downs of finding leads, only to have them go nowhere, of having a pregnant woman choose us to parent her child, only to change her mind. We worked for months and months and months until, on Christmas Eve, a card from a stranger brought us more than season’s greetings.

D ebbie was six months pregnant. For reasons that are hers to tell, she felt she could not raise her unborn child. She knew that, with a private adoption, she could meet and choose the adoptive parents. She had heard our story. She wanted to meet us.

When I left our meeting with Debbie, I was literally jumping with joy. In my hands was a teddy bear, a gift from Debbie for our unborn child. That night, my husband and I were so excited that we lay in bed talking until early morning. As exhaustion took over and the room became quiet, it suddenly hit me: There was nothing more for us to do. All we had to do was wait for the birth of our child. Simple. Just wait. Ha!

Just wait and try to ignore the ever-gnawing fear—the fear that Debbie, like that first birth mother, would change her mind. Debbie had assured us that she knew adoption was best for her and her unborn child, but so had the first birth mother. They were not trying to increase our pain. They were simply young women going through the most difficult time in their lives.

As Debbie’s due date drew near, our state of panic became more acute and obvious. I stopped doing anything, going anywhere. I borrowed a cellphone and carried it whenever I left the house. Every time the phone rang, I would forget to breathe. My mouth would go dry. I would have trouble saying hello. If it wasn’t the social worker handling our adoption, I would quickly free the line. When the phone hadn’t rung in more than 15 minutes, I would check to make sure it was working.

When the call finally came, it was Debbie, and not the social worker. “You have a son” are the most beautiful words I have ever heard.

What can one say to describe the feeling as you look for the first time at your child? Wonder. Awe. He was so small, so beautiful. Judith and Mitchell Wine with 18-month-old Braeden.

He didn’t feel like he was mine. I was afraid someone might at any moment scream: “What are you doing? Put him down!”

My son and I are not biologically related, but so what? I also have no genetic connection with the other most important person in my life, my husband.

Our son is a joint effort—from the moment he was first imagined, through finding and caring for him, to helping him learn to take care of himself. No one could convince me that I do not have a child conceived with my chosen life partner.

Someone once said that the process of adopting was “the longest labour on record.” The difficulty of our labour brought us closer. It made us realize the strength of our commitment to each other and to having a family.

I would not change anything that led me here. Because, you see, that boy whose breathing I check every night is my son. It is so much more than the simple idea that I could not love another child any more than I love him. No one else could be my son. I am glad I cannot have a biological child, glad the government adoption agency was unhelpful, glad the first birth mother changed her mind. If any of those events had not happened, my son would not be my son. Unimaginable.

Judith Wine is a practicing mother and writer, formerly a practicing lawyer and college lecturer. She wrote this article soon after she and her husband adopted their first child, Braeden. Their second child, Tobin, joined the family three years later, also through adoption. A longer version of this article originally appeared in Judith Wine’s book, The Canadian Adoption Guide: A Family at Last(McGraw-Hill Ryerson.)

As the Director of Canada’s Waiting Children, a program run by the Adoption Council of Canada, Judy Grove’s job is to bring kids and would-be parents together. In less than four years, the program has proven that finding homes for special-needs children is mainly a matter of getting the word out.

Adoption today is full of myths that damage the placement chances of Canadian children waiting to be adopted. Here are three of the most common myths:

In fact, there are thousands of them. Healthy newborns are rare, but children who are older or who for other reasons are considered to have special needs, can be adopted within months. More than 20,000 Canadian children have had parental rights terminated by the courts and are waiting for a “forever” family.

Thirty-one percent of the families listed with the Canada’s Waiting Children program will consider adopting a child as old as eight. Some will accept children up to age sixteen. Just ten percent will only consider children under two.

In the Adoption Council of Ontario’s recent study of families attending Adoption Resource Exchanges, 39% had biological children, and some had as many as five. These semi-annual events, held across the province, feature older, special-needs children.

The Adoption Council of Canada started the Canada’s Waiting Children program in 1997 to debunk myths like these and to recruit homes for waiting children. The program was made possible by an initial grant from the Dave Thomas Foundation for Adoption in Dublin, Ohio. Dave Thomas, famous for starring in commercials for his Wendy’s Restaurants, was himself adopted. The Foundation has provided grants totalling US$92,000, as well as radio and TV public service announcements that air across Canada. Wendy’s Restaurants of Canada have raised over CDN$200,000 to support the program, and they all display Adoption Awareness Month posters featuring our toll-free information line.

Prospective parents may be a married or common-law couple, or a single man or woman. Some are childless, while others already have children in the home, or children who have grown up and left home. When would-be parents contact us, we mail them an information package that includes photos and profiles of waiting children, general adoption information, and an invoice for $10 to defray our expenses. Also included is a Family Information Form—the application to be registered with the program. When they return their completed form, we enter them in our family data base. If they have expressed interest in a particular child, this information is sent to the child’s agency. The child’s worker is responsible for contacting either the family or their social worker if they are already in the adoption process.

Families registered with Canada’s Waiting Children receive updates to the children’s profiles about every three to four months. We also post the photos and profiles on our Web site.

Families can print and complete the Family Information Form from the Web site and mail it to us. We then e-mail them a password to access the photos and profiles. Since 1997 we have sent out more than 7,000 information packages and have registered over 750 families.

The point of all this is of course to bring more families into the adoption process. I find it baffling that child welfare organizations recognize the need to recruit foster families for children, but often don’t see the need to recruit adoptive families for these same children. They seem to think that enough adoptive families will just walk in the door, despite the high number of waiting children and the fact that many have been waiting for years. The lack of interest in recruiting adoptive parents is all the more frustrating when you consider that placing a child for adoption usually frees up a foster family and saves money—the very things child welfare agencies say they don’t have enough of.

The children described in our information packages are in the care of child welfare agencies in one of seven provinces. They may be living with a foster family, or in a group home or small institution. Since the Canada’s Waiting Children program began, agencies have referred over 300 youngsters and teens to the program. Obviously, they represent only a small percentage of all the adoptable children in Canada.

More boys than girls are referred to Canada’s Waiting Children. Half are Caucasian, one-quarter are aboriginal, and the rest are other visible minorities or have a mixed racial background.

The children are all considered to have special needs, but we define “special needs” very broadly. We believe any child in care potentially has special needs, although those needs may not be immediately apparent. Many have had life experiences that have hampered their physical, emotional or intellectual growth. Some children have ongoing medical conditions or disabilities such as a heart defect or hearing impairment. In 27% of all the children referred to us, prenatal exposure to alcohol or drugs is known or suspected.

Some children are hard to place simply because it’s best to keep them together with a brother or sister—sibling groups of up to four children are common—or because of their age.

Most waiting children are between four and ten years old, but they range in age from newborns to the mid-teens. So far, the oldest one in the program was fifteen when referred. Our youngest referrals have been unborn children diagnosed with medical conditions: three with Down Syndrome, and a fourth with spina bifida.

When a child is referred to the Canada’s Waiting Children program, we first check our family database to see if anyone registered with us has indicated a willingness to adopt similar children. We send the child’s photo and profile to them, and add it to the information packages for future mailings. Then we wait to see if any prospective adoptive parents will respond, letting us know they’re interested in adopting the child. Not surprisingly, we receive many responses for some children and very few or none for others.

Sometimes, one response is all it takes. Only one family responded to the fifteen-year-old boy mentioned earlier, but they were a good match for him and did in fact adopt him. Aten-year-old was listed with us after his agency had tried for more than three years to find him a family. Within two months of his entering our program, a family responded. After he was placed with them, two other families called to say they were interested in him. In the case of both boys, the families that adopted them had never before shown an interest in adopting. The boys might still be waiting if we had not been willing to register the families before they had their “homestudy” done by a social worker.

A subsidy is available for some children but unfortunately not for most. Even though most provinces have subsidy legislation on the books, some choose not to use it. Alberta has the most comprehensive subsidy legislation in Canada. In other provinces, it is the child’s home agency that decides whether or not to provide a subsidy. The decision not to offer a subsidy can mean that the child will never have a permanent home. It can also cost the agency more in the long run since adoption placements with subsidies are usually more cost-effective than long-term foster care.

So far, we have played a role in placing over 120 children. Here are a few more of those who have found homes with the help of the Canada’s Waiting Children program:

When looking at barriers to adoption, people often emphasize the characteristics of the waiting child. However, two separate surveys on barriers (both distributed by the Adoption Council of Canada) indicate that the greatest barriers to placement are worker attitudes and systemic problems in Canada’s public adoption system. Frequently cited barriers include:

This second group of 122 respondents said not enough families were available, yet they went on to rate systemic factors as the main reason not enough families were recruited. Ninety-six percent of them agreed that more children in Canada should be adopted, but 52% said there were agencies and child welfare workers that did not believe in adoption. One respondent, when asked about the use of child-specific recruitment projects such as Canada’s Waiting Children or the Alberta Government’s Wednesday’s Child program, said they weren’t a good idea because the workers couldn’t handle the response. So much for the “not enough families” excuse!

As the adoptive mother of six children who came to our family with a variety of special needs, I know the delights of seeing a child grow and develop. Margaret, Sascha, Carl, Peter, Edie and Terry—each brought his or her own unique challenges and rewards to the family. When Peter arrived at our home as a five-and- a-half-year-old, he couldn’t put three words together. Yet, by the time he was seven, he had improved so much that one day I actually had to tell him not to talk so much. That was a good day, and we had many others.

My husband and I firmly believe we have learned more through special-needs adoption than we ever would have otherwise. Our biological children, Ellen and Joe, have also learned from the experience and are wiser, more tolerant people because of it. In case you’re wondering how they felt about growing up with adopted siblings, I’ll just add that it was their idea to adopt Carl, our last child. Ellen and Joe, who were then 13 and 11, met four-year- old Carl at a party and announced to us that, since he was a foster child, we should adopt him.

Carl is now 23, and shares an apartment with Margaret and Sascha in the same building where my husband and I live. All three have Down Syndrome and manage very well, with the help of a part-time support worker.

Hope for Canada’s thousands of waiting children has come from many sources recently—not only from the success of our program but also that of Alberta’s Wednesday’s Child, as well as from increased recruitment and adoption activity in British Columbia, positive changes to Ontario’s Child and Family Services Act, and a proposed Adopt Ontario program. These are steps in the right direction, but if we hope someday to be able to say that every Canadian child has a home, there is still much work to be done.

Judy Grove has been the Executive Director of the Adoption Council of Canada and Director of the Canada’s Waiting Children program since 1997.

For more information about Canada’s Waiting Children, visit www.adoption.ca, send an e-mail to waitingkids@adoption.ca, or call 1–888–54–ADOPT (toll-free).

What adoption issues are most pressing in Canada today, and what are some ideas for improving the lives of everyone involved in adoption? We asked Elspeth Ross, an educator, researcher, Board member of the Adoption Council of Canada, and the adoptive mother of young adults. Here’s what she told us about some issues and ideas that have come out of her own involvement with adoption and from listening to others in the adoption community:

My title, “From Stepchild to Princess,” refers to the remarkable changes that have taken place in the adoption scene in the last hundred and fifty years. As we roll back the timeline to the mid-nineteenth century Western world, the indigent child is no longer incarcerated in the poorhouse. Increasingly such children are given to families who pledge to take care of them, in return for their labour: boys working on the farm and girls in the household.

But there was no such market for babies. According to Vivianna Zelizer in Pricing the Priceless Child: The Changing Social Value of Children, in the 1870s, “the only profitable undertaking was the business of getting rid of other people’s [unwelcome] babies. For about ten dollars, baby farmers took in these generally illegitimate children,” most of whom died in infancy.

“Yet some fifty years later,” says Zelizer, “adoptive parents were eagerly paying $1,000 or more to purchase an infant.” The trend continued. “As an article in Collier’s put it: ‘It’s the 1939 bonanza…there’s gold in selling babies.’ By the 1950s, a white, healthy infant sold for as much as $10,000. But the creation of a market value for babies was not the result of clever promotion and only partly a consequence of the increasing scarcity of [white] children. This startling appreciation in babies’ monetary worth was tied to the profound cultural transformation in children’s economic and sentimental value in the twentieth century”—and associated with changes in adoptive fathers’ occupational status as men moved more and more into white-collar jobs.

The notion of a ‘child’s value’ can be misleading. A hundred years ago boys and girls were quite differently valued as workers. But later, when they became valued as real additions to the family, why would gender still count? Gender indeed continued to count but, contrary to the traditional wish for a boy as a first child, the tendency among adopters was for a long time to prefer a girl. The preference for girls seemed to stem not, as was long believed, from the future adoptive mother but from her husband, especially if he came from a tradition-oriented cultural (national or religious) background. The mechanism seemed to be this: while adopting a girl would satisfy the couple’s desire for a child, she would not carry on the family name. Agirl would thus not pose a threat to the traditional continuity values of the man’s kin group.

Adoption legislation, the necessary bridge between stepchild and princess status, was slow in coming. In England, says Mary Kathleen Benet in The Politics of Adoption, “Parliament was reluctant to legislate. Most of the legislators feared the effects of adoption on the country’s morality and on the laws of inheritance. [Thus] six Private Members’ Bills were introduced, and failed, before the 1926 session that saw the success of the measure.”

Benet says, “The First World War pushed England into legislating. War orphans made a more sentimental appeal to the conscience than did the waifs of the ‘undeserving poor’ or the bastards of ‘immoral’ women. But when [English people] showed themselves willing to take in the victims of the fighting in Belgium, charitable workers pointed out that while Belgium wanted to keep its own children, there were many to be had right in the heart of England. Interest in overseas adoption thus stimulated interest in the adoption of available children in England itself—a pattern that has been repeated with inter-country and inter-racial adoption in more recent years.”

After World War II, according to Benet, “The movement to rescue the children of the devastated countries was even stronger.” American, British and Commonwealth armed forces personnel were the first to bring home children for adoption. Then North Americans traveled to Europe to find children for the families they could not create, and the pattern was set. Since unwanted childlessness was not confined to North America, Europeans soon followed suit. The Swedes, Danes and Dutch were among the first to set up agencies to mediate child adoptions from Asian countries, many of them from Korea.

While this influx of adoptable children from Europe and Asia was taking place in North America, black-ancestry and native Indian children were still ‘invisible’ in institutions and foster homes where they were wards of the Canadian provinces and American states. The first thrusts to define these children as adoptable came from social workers and lay organizations: in 1948 from Laura Gaskins in Minneapolis, in 1955 from MARCH (Minority Adoption Recruitment of Children’s Homes) in the San Francisco Bay Area, and in 1957 from Harriet Fricke and PAMY (Parents to Adopt Minority Youngsters) in Minnesota. In Canada the thrust came in 1959 in Montreal when Margaret Edgar, a social worker and adoptive mother, founded ODS (the Open Door Society), which became a model for other societies of the same name.

During the 1950s, H. David Kirk and his wife adopted four young children in the United States and Canada, creating an ethnically mixed family of their own. Dr. Kirk is the author of Shared Fate: A Theory and Method of Adoptive Relationships (1964 and 1984), Adoptive Kinship: A Modern Institution in Need of Reform (1981 and 1985), and Looking Back, Looking Forward: An Adoptive Father’s Sociological Testament (1995). This article is adapted and excerpted from a lecture given at “Adoption 2000,” a conference held in Vancouver last November.

Cultural attitudes do not appear to concede to adoptive parents
a full place in the cultural sun of family life.
—H. David Kirk

Becoming a parent through adoption is a very different experience from becoming a parent through procreation. As obvious as this fact may be, it is one that adoptive parents sometimes want to deny. This is understandable, especially if it awakens painful memories of pre-adoption losses from infertility or miscarriages. On top of past losses, the adoptive family must also live in a society that tends to think of them as not quite a “real” family.

While David Kirk—himself an adoptive father—would be the first to assert that adoptive parents deserve their “full place in the cultural sun of family life,” he is also the maverick sociologist who, in his 1964 book Shared Fate, encouraged adoptive parents to acknowledge the differences between themselves and other parents.

In his 1995 booklet, Looking Back, Looking Forward, Dr. Kirk admits that, “When Shared Fate first appeared, it ran counter to much that was practiced in adoption, by parents and even by professionals. Most believed it was best for adoptive families to try to simulate ‘natural’ families, in other words to practice ‘rejection of difference’.” But being different does not mean being second-rate.

Dr. Kirk’s own experiences with adoption, as well as his research with adoptive families in both Canada and the United States, were the paths that led to his “shared fate” theory. In a recent paper (“Adoption in a New Key,” 2000), he says, “Shared Fate showed that adoptive families tend to function best if they do not try to simulate natural families.” In fact, “The superiority of ‘acknowledgment of difference’ over ‘rejection of difference’ has become accepted as fact in the literature of adoption. But the question, ‘In what sense is acknowledgment superior to rejection of difference?,’ is often ignored.”

Dr. Kirk goes on to say that it is the acknowledgment of shared differences that “helps in making child and parent into a cohesive family unit. It helps, but is not sufficient. Living and working together in a ‘shared fate’ atmosphere should over the long haul create a distinct family ethos, and with it a sense of common destiny, a jointly made history—experienced, remembered, and retold.”

Two excerpts from Dr. Kirk’s writing will help clarify what is meant by an adoptive family’s “shared fate.” The first excerpt is again from Looking Back, Looking Forward:

“Shared fate” is an ongoing process, with somewhat opposite developments for parents and children. On the one hand adopters begin to settle down into routines of everyday life, forgetting about obstacles and their special parenthood. On the other hand the adopted child, growing in understanding of what “being born-into-the-family” and “being adopted-into-the family” mean, may grow restless. That is why adoptive parents must remind themselves from time to time how they got where they are. They will need such reminders in order to remain sensitive to the child’s quest. That, however, does not mean that adoptive parents should constantly or frequently remind their child that he or she is adopted. The “shared fate” approach means that parents must make themselves available to the child and that they recognize the call if and when the child “rings the bell.”

Like their adoptive parents, adopted children have, by definition, also suffered a loss. Even if they were adopted at birth and have never known their birth mother or father, they may at times feel that something is missing. Absent birth parents can become shadow figures to be mourned and wondered about at different times throughout life. The issue of missing parents is one way in which the child feels “different” from other children, and just one of the issues that adoptive parents must be prepared to address “if and when the child ‘rings the bell.’”

The second excerpt—this one from Dr. Kirk’s book Adoptive Kinship (1985)—raises the issue of the child’s identity and place in the adoptive family:

How do our identities come into being? How do we learn to become the people we become over a lifetime? The sociological view, first fully formulated by G.H. Mead, is that it begins by what he called “role-taking,” namely taking the attitudes and views that others have of us as our own, by learning to see ourselves through their eyes, and acting by means of their standards. This view makes the process of socialization, of child-rearing and later adult learning, into the mechanism by which personal identity is shaped. Since the family is the forum in which, for the majority of people, these early learnings take place, we can regard the family as crucial for the creation of individual identity. There the person is given those earliest significant experiences, which make up the core of the social self. The family provides for the developing person a matrix of belongingness. One becomes similar to the others in the family because one is considered to belong with them, and accepts that view.

When an infant is born into a family, typically the members [have] one query: whom does s/he resemble? It has often seemed to me that these people are not so much concerned with some particular likeness as with membership and belongingness. They may really be asking whether the new member resembles others in the group sufficiently to become one of them. Any external likeness is taken as reassurance that all is well. Nonetheless, the questioners would probably admit that they themselves are not unimportant in making the new member into the likeness of the group. They would probably recognize that their ways of speaking and walking, their gestures and their preferences enter the life of the newcomer so that they themselves are crucial in helping to form his or her identity. Of course what also irritates some of them is that the new member does not simply become a composite likeness of them all, but also remains to an extent new, separate, and strange—marking him or her as an individual.

In fact, once the ground of belongingness has been assured, the growing child can afford to note and act out his or her own separateness and individuality with impunity. The family is thus of prime importance as the setting in which one becomes identified with a group of special people, people among whom one gains an identity both as a member and as a separate person.

Let us consider a factor that aids in this process: parents and [their biological] children have a strong tie to each other, a tie that they know existed before their social intercourse began. That is so because they have in common a bio-social past which makes them each part of a long line of kin. It is this prima facie connection that the adoptive parent-child relationship lacks. In societies where adoption is a valued and common pattern of parenting, the lack of the blood tie may mean little; in North America it [means] a great deal, surprising as that may appear. Thus adoption must in some way reflect this lack.

At this point I want to tell of an event which occurred in my own family [in 1955]. Our daughter Francie, then not quite five, had pressed to have the story of Cinderella read to her at bedtime. Evening after evening she asked for it, and then she would have nightmares and wet her bed. [My wife] Ruth Kirk began to suspect a connection between Francie’s insistence on the story and her nightmares and bedwetting. But before Ruth could decide how to deal with it, Francie made the overture herself. She said casually, “Mommy, if I had a stepmother, what would she do to me? Would she be cruel?” Recognizing in this question our little daughter’s struggle with the meaning of her adoption, Ruth replied: “Francie dear, I too am someone like a stepmother. I was unable to bear you in my body, but I love you very, very much. Perhaps there are stepmothers who are bad, who would be mean to their children. Cinderella’s stepmother was a very bad mother, but only because she did not love Cinderella.”

Why bring up such dangerous stuff, I thought at the time. Who knows what Francie might make of it? Why emphasize a difference that we all know is real for adoptive parents and children? I wanted to interrupt Ruth and change the subject, but somehow I thought better of it. And it was good that I held my peace, for after a pause during which Francie seemed occupied with her toys she said: “Now I can have a good dream.” And so it seems to have happened, for the bedwetting and the nightmares did not recur. I was aware that something important had occurred, but did not realize that this event was a preview of what subsequent research was to tell me impersonally: it was really a demonstration of “shared fate” in action.

Society of Special Needs Adoptive Parents (SNAP)
1150—409 Granville Street, Vancouver, BC V6C 1T2
Ph 604-687-3114; Fax 604-687-3364
E-mail snap@snap.bc.ca; Web site www.snap.bc.ca

Robin Hilborn publishes two print magazines, Adoption Helper and Post-adoption Helper. Write to him at Box 1353, Southampton, Ontario or visit his “Family Helper” Web site (see below).

“Parent Finders” (a search and reunion support group for all parties to adoption): www.parentfinders.org.

Adoption Council of Ontario, a non-government umbrella organization providing support to individuals/groups involved in adoption in Ontario: www.adoption.on.ca/acomain.html.

Adoptive Families Association of BC. Information on adopting children in BC and from other countries: www.bcadoption.com.

Northwest Territories—Department of Health and Social Services: Children & Family Services Unit www.hlthss.gov.nt.ca

Prince Edward Island—Department of Health and Social Services: Child, Family & Community Services Division www.gov.pe.ca

Yukon—Health and Social Services: Family and Children’s Services, Placement and Support Services www.gov.yk.ca

Countless books cover adoption from every angle, and more and more of them are Canadian. We’ve listed just a few below; others are available through your local library or bookstore, or through the organizations and Web sites listed above.

As If Kids Mattered: What’s wrong in the world of child protection and adoption. (Marlene Webber. 1998. Toronto: Key Porter Books.) A comprehensive portrait of child welfare and adoption in North America.

The Canadian Adoption Guide: A Family at Last. (Judith Wine. 1995. Whitby, Ontario: McGraw-Hill Ryerson.) A practical handbook on ways of adopting a child, especially private adoption. Extensive resource lists. (See excerpt)

The Face in the Mirror: Teenagers and Adoption. (Marion Crook. 2000. Vancouver, BC: Arsenal Pulp.) Based on interviews with teens, adoptive parents, and birth parents. Frank discussion of issues surrounding adoption—especially what everyone involved should know when adopted teens want to discover their past.

Openness in Adoption: Exploring Family Connections. (Harold Grotevant and Ruth McRoy. 1998. Sage Publications.) A comprehensive study of the effects of open adoption on adoptees, birth parents and adoptive parents.

Parenting Children Affected by Fetal Alcohol Syndrome: A Guide for Daily Living. (Sara Graefe, ed. 1998. Vancouver, BC: Society of Special Needs Adoptive Parents, in cooperation with the Adoption Council of Canada.) Indispensable for anyone dealing with a child whose life has been affected by prenatal exposure to alcohol. Total cost: $13. Order from SNAP or ACC (see above).

Books for Children and Teens
A number of books have been written with the intention of helping kids understand and come to terms with adoption. Ask a librarian to recommend one that’s age-appropriate.

We’re Your Neighbors adoption videos. Over 50 participants from both open and closed placements from the 1960s to the present give their perspectives on adoption. Part 1: “Birth Parents and Adoptive Parents.” Part 2: “Adopted Persons Ages 5 to 55.” To order, contact Lethbridge Community College Bookstore, 3000 College Drive South, Lethbridge, AB T1K 1L6, ph 403-320-3341, fax 403-320-5170.

The Vanier Institute of the Family
94 Centrepointe Drive
Ottawa, Ontario, Canada, K2G 6B1
Tel: 613-228-8500 Fax: 613-228-8007
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