adopttalkcanada.com

First off let me say that this is a fictional person, I very much doubt the person I am about to describe exists.

Many of you probably have an in depth understanding of the various criteria governments and agencies have for adoptive parents….age, health, income, etc… Generally those criteria are appropriate or I at least understand why someone else would think so. For the sake of discussion I want to go beyond these criteria though. With the adoption world the way it is, what else is there that would set someone looking to adopt apart…make them “perfect”. Well here are a few things I have come up with:

1. Has a desire to be a parent but would be equally happy to never be one.
2. Has a clear understanding of their strengths and weaknesses as parents and does enough research to understand just what level of special needs they can handle, if any at all.
3. Is willing to put themselves forward to adopt, but only if the right match is found and they are clearly the best choice for that particular child.
4. Able to wait for a match that may never come with no expectations and with boundless patience and once a match is made be able to embrace that child and everything about them with love and energy and a commitment to being the best parent possible.

Ok, so like I said a fictional person, right?

So what is the point of even talking about such a person? Well let me put it this way, I think to the extent possible prospective adoptive parents should try to make the choices and decisions that go into becoming an adoptive parent based as much as possible on what is best for a particular child. Few prospective parents will ever get all the way there, I know I hardly even made a few small steps towards that goal myself while we were paperchasing and waiting.

So what might a practical example of this be? Well I am sure I could think of quite a few but here is a quote from an adoptive parent that actually inspired this post:

Also, domestic adoptions often are open, meaning continuing contact between the birth family and the child, which some adoptive parents are not comfortable with.

My almost visceral reaction when I see things like this is something along the lines of “get over what you are comfortable with and start thinking about what will be best for the child”.

Anyway that is probably enough for now…I will come back to the particular issue of the resistance to openness in a couple of days with a request to anyone reading.

Tags: Advice to those adopting by Windthrow
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Over time I will add some links to adoption related blogs that I like (see link to the right in the “blogroll”). Some are more intense then others, but I thought I would start with the one that is the most fun. Her writing is impressive and while always done in a light hearted way I think any new parent, adoptive or otherwise, could learn a lot from what she says.

If you are interested in what the adoption trip to China is like start right at the beginning and you will be educated and highly amused I think.

If you want to know what life is like with a toddler then start with the April 28th post.

Cheers and happy reading.

Tags: Adoption links by Windthrow
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My daughter isnt really old enough that I have had to do any “adoption parenting” yet, and to be honest most days just being a plain old regular parent is more than enough challenge for me.

I do think about the difficulties and challenges we are going to experience that are unique to an adoptive parent. I also know that there is no set road map to follow. In many ways I am going to need to let my daughter guide me on these issues. And that brings me to the subject of this post.

I hear it time and time again in the online adoptive parent community. “It will be my sons decision as to what sort of relationship they want with their birth family”, “It will be my daughters decision whether we look for her birthmother”, “I will leave it up to my daughter to decide how much of her birth culture she wants to incorporate into her life”.

To be blunt, I often think this is just a parenting cop-out. If we are ambivalent about these issues as parents, isn’t that going to result in the same ambivalence in our children? If not ambivalence might we not end up with a confused child. The classic example is the adoptee that would like to look for birthfamily, has a thousand questions, but is afraid to ask for fear of hurting their parents feelings. I have heard this very comment from more than one adult adoptee.

Parenting is hard, adoptive parenting harder still sometimes, but I think it pales in comparison to being the adopted child. As parents we need to have a plan and be faithful guides to our children as they grapple with these issues. Yes we should listen to the child and adjust our approach to fit that particular child, but parenting means making the tough decisions on behalf of our children.

Tags: Parenting by Windthrow
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• Finding an adoption practitioner
• Doing research
• Getting a homestudy done and the paperchase
• Selecting the type of adoption
• Finding a match
• More paperwork
• etc, etc, etc….

The time from when you decide to adopt until the time you become a parent is at best an incredible challenging period in anyones life and at worst a nightmare of stress and anxiety. So what good advice do I have for people on this journey? I participate in seminars on occasion telling my story and answering questions so this is a question I think about quite a lot.

The single most important advice I would give is to take complete and total ownership of the process yourself. Your adoption practitioner and any agencies you might hire are there to help you yes, but under no circumstance should you rely on them as your best and certainly not your only source of information. Adoption practitioner’s will and have admitted to me that they can’t keep up with changes in the IA world. Agencies serving the same purpose will and have give different information on identical issues. So yes use these people as a resource, but dont stop there:

• if you have a question about a particular IA program, find one or more parents that have very recent experience with the program
• if you are unsure about how to go about completing part of the paperchase correctly or more efficiently, find people that have just done it
• if something you are hearing doesn’t feel right or make sense, don’t accept it on faith, do more research, ask more questions

There are lots and lots of resources out there for people pursuing adoption, hopefully this blog and the attached forum will become one of them. I have started a thread in the forum on this subject. If anyone has any hard earned lessons from their journey through the adoption process, please sign in and share!

Tags: Advice to those adopting by Windthrow
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A few weeks ago I updated my ongoing analysis of the RQ polling data and did some predicting in the forum. There was nothing new in what the graphs showed though so I didn’t even mention it here. I have put some more thought into what this data means in terms of what might happen to the wait and have come up with some thoughts

Ok first things first. We have this graph which is all we have for completely factual information:

All of the sites out there that you can plug your LID into and get a wait estimate are extrapolating from this graph. Using this graph for predicting future waits, particularly longer term waits is completely meaningless in my opinion.

So do we have anything better?

Well for short term predictions RQ’s poll data is about as good as we have. Using her poll data I produced this graph.

This is identical to the approach RQ has taken except I have done it graphically and arbitrarily selected different prediction categories with results as follows:

So at the current pace (red line) we get cut off dates of: Jan 27, Feb 9, Feb 17, Feb 27, Mar 5 & Mar 9
For the worse or slower pace (gold line) we get cut off dates of: Jan 25, Feb 6, Feb 13, Feb 17, Feb 24 & Mar 1
For the better or faster pace (green line) we get cut off dates of: Feb 6, Feb 16, Feb 28, Mar 9, and then we run out of poll data.

Ok so nothing new there either. What about longer term predictions. In my opinion there are just too many unknown variables to make meaningful predictions, but let me try to demonstrate why.

One of the things that I did with RQ’s poll data is I took all the daily polls she has done and using the overlapping dates in each poll adjusted all the previous polls to match the current poll. This isn’t statistically perfect (far from it), but there is enough overlap in each poll that I think the data does have some value. The result of this gives the blue part of the line in the graph above and if I show all the data you get this graph:

In theory this graph shows the trend in actual NSN referrals the CCAA has been sending out over the past two years or so. I don’t think it is completely accurate but it is in the ball park anyway. Now we finally get to my point about long term predictions. Using this graph, what would it look like if the CCAA went back to referring full months again immediately? It would look like this:

So is going to happen? Most likely not of course, but I think it is interesting to see how this looks in the context of where they have been over the last two years. It gets more interesting if you consider that this is showing what would need to happen to cover a a months worth of LID’s in what we believe are still fairly large months. Imagine we are a year down the road and they are referring May 06 instead of March 06. What if the numbers that month are 50 or 60% of March 06 numbers? With what we know from the polling and with additional attrition is that unreasonable? What if post olympics there is a 40% increase in the number of children being referred? Is that so hard to imagine? So what would the graph look like if that happened? Well if you move the red line down by a factor of 60% and the blue line up by 40% you get this:

What does this tell me? Well simply that it is not radical thinking to think that at this time next year they could be doing full months again and the wait will have stabilized at between 3 and 4 years.

Ultimately though my point is that we simply do not know what is going to happen with the wait. Sure it is possible that the wait could stabilize as I have shown above, but personally I think it is also quite possible that the program will close completely and people currently in line will never get NSN referrals ever. :dontknow:

Tags: China by Windthrow
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Altruistic Adoption

A few things have happened in the past few days in the adoption world that got me to thinking about altruism and adoption.

First there is the latest development on the Angelina Jolie Ethiopia adoption. As I understand it AJ originally thought the child had no parents. Now she knows that this is not true. Fortunately the story pretty much ends there and despite the “misunderstanding” everything still appears to be on the up and up and the birthmother is reported to be happy with how things have turned out. As with many Ethiopian adoptions the birthmom simply felt she could not provide for her new child and made the decision that placing her in an orphanage where she could be adopted was the best possible solution. What I started thinking about though is the unique factors that come into play when you have someone is adopting with the resources that AJ has. I wonder whether she would have still adopted this particular child if the only reason that the child was available to be adopted were economic ones.

Moving away from AJ specifically (I dont intend this to be about her really…I certainly do not intend to be critical of her). What about all of us? What if we had more money than we knew what to do with. Would we approach the ethics of expanding our family differently?

With respect to situations where the child is available only due to economics, would it be a more “ethical” decision to simply fund the support of the birthmom so that the family could remain united? Certainly it would be argued by many that this would give the best possible outcome for the child. Could this argument be made even for less affluent people? Do the practical difficulties of actually doing such a thing make this a non-issue? (Although it is much easier to think about this sort of hypothetical situation with respect to Ethiopian adoptions, there are also adoptions from China that are the result of purely economic issues…inability to pay the fine for extra children…in those cases I think it truly is impossible for adoptive parents to solve that problem)

The next thing that happened was a comment in another forum. Not a rare sort of comment, just a statement about choosing China over other options because there are so many children needing homes. I think it is now clear that if one was trying to find a program where you were most likely to provide a home to a child that would otherwise not have one, China is likely near the very bottom of the list.

Ok so what am I getting at? Well I think I have once and for all come to the conclusion that most of us…whether we admit it or not…are adopting mainly for selfish reasons. I am not saying I think there is anything wrong with this at all. I don’t think it is the job of anyone to solve all the world’s problems. I think the selfish desire to be a parent…to provide boundless love to a child…to want to raise them…hopefully see them grow into healthy, self reliant, successful adults…is more than enough reason to want to adopt.

Let me also say that I think there is a clear need for many many adoptive parents. In many cases there is way more involved than simple economics, certainly this is the case with many adoptions from China, Ethiopia and our own countries as well.

For me, recognizing and understanding my own motivations for adopting make me a better parent. It makes me more ready to see things through the eyes of my daughter.

Tags: Hard Thinking Series by Windthrow
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Open vs Closed Adoptions

Here are my general thoughts on Open Adoptions, what they are and how they work. These are somewhat generalized and there are exceptions to everything I think:

1. Open adoptions are really any adoption that isn’t what is known as “closed” or “semi-closed”. A “closed”adoption is one in which no identifying information is exchanged either way and there is never any contact. A “semi-closed” adoption is one in which no identifying information is exchanged but some contact is made through an intermediary. Unfortunately that leaves every other possible arrangement (and the possibilities are endless) left with the term “open”. China adoptions are by their very nature “closed” adoptions for example.

2. There are a lot of good reasons to feel uncomfortable with pursuing a private adoption and if you do pursue one there are lots of good reasons for being very careful about accepting any particular match. I personally do not believe that a fear of openness in and of itself is a good reason to not pursue an open adoption.

3. One of the reasons we originally chose not to pursue a private adoption was the lack of control you have over the process and the risks involved. First you need to find a birth mom to pick you and then you need to hope that she doesn’t change her mind. This power imbalance is rightly a huge issue for many, but ultimately it has nothing to do with the “openness” issue. Once an adoption is finalized the power imbalance completely reverses. We signed an agreement with the birthmom with respect to the level of contact we were prepared to live with. These agreements are quite common I believe, but are not legally enforceable in most jurisdictions (I believe there may be a state or two that are working on trying to make them enforceable, but am not as up to speed on that as I used to be). Enforceable or not, I don’t think it matters. If you made an agreement you were truly comfortable with then the only problem that could arise would be the birthparents pushing the envelope and then you would like it to be enforceable anyway.

4. That brings up another downside that results out of the original power imbalance. Parents may be willing to commit to a greater level of openness than they are comfortable with just so they will be chosen.

5. “Oh you are so brave”, “Oh I don’t think I could ever do that”, “Aren’t you worried she will want her back”. We get all those and more. Let me approach this two ways. The very first time we discussed the concept of openness with our SW (even before we chose China) she made this simple statement “No child can have too many people that love them”. A bit too sappy for my personal taste, but is still one of the most concise description of the advantages of open adoptions that I have come across. Secondly, and also kind of sappy…but you know the old question that people ask about what the first thing you would save in a fire is? Well for me it would be to make sure I had copies of the picture we have the day after she was born that shows both families together in the hospital and the one we have from the day before her 1st birthday of the same group. Those pictures, with everyone smiling and happy are simply priceless.

6. Ok, I also know that we have been very lucky with respect to the particular birth family our lives have been forever joined with. For me though that is a reason to make sure that people find the right match as opposed a match at all costs. However, even if our relationship with them deteriorated, we would still be in control of the situation and would go to any length to provide the right environment for our daughter. This is where the matching process is so important though. The birthgrandfather and I got to wait outside the L&D room together…I went for a short walk just after she went into labour…and when I came back ten minutes later she had been born, he rushed up to me and shook my hand and told me I was a dad and I better hurry up and get in there. That is just typical of how the whole family is and makes it truly impossible for us to have any worries.

Well that is probably enough for now. If people have specific questions I suspect I could go on some more , but let me finish by trying to explain how I think this is also relevant to people that have chosen the IA path.

Like many, when we first started looking into adoption I thought the inherently “closed” nature of many IA programs was an advantage. Through a lot of research and reading, and even before our path changed, I had begun to realize that the very opposite is true. Maybe the simplest way to explain it is to imagine a time when your son or daughter begins to ask the very hard questions about their story. Why? Why me? How could they? Didn’t they love me? Well in our case we are extremely lucky. We will as a minimum be able to pull out those two pictures we have and show her that her path to our family was made in love and with some sadness but also with a lot of happiness. Even better we hope she will get to know her birthmom and be able to ask those questions herself. I think understanding the loss that comes with not having the ability to do this is a good first step at being able to help your children deal with these issues.

Tags: Hard Thinking Series by Windthrow
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Early each month the CCAA (China Centre for Adoption Affairs) send out a batch of referrals and the latest batch has begun to arrive. They appear (still not confirmed) to have referred more days this month (8) than last (only 3), but as always it is hard to tell what that really means.

Over the last several months I have spent a bit of time trying to analyze the available information out there. It isn’t well suited to the blog and would probably bore most of you anyway. I will post the latest graphs in a room in the forum. Feel free to register and have a look if you are interested.

And congratulations to those getting referrals, it truly is a life changing moment.

Tags: China by Windthrow
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This is one of the first in this series, originally posted on May 17, 2007

Untitled

So there on the front page of one of the papers I read is a story about how the number of teenage pregnancies in Canada continues to decline. Good news of course…so why is there a part of my brain that immediately thinks about the fact that this will also lead to less opportunities for adoption.

From reading posts online I suspect I am not the only person who has these thoughts, and I think it is interesting to ponder why we think these things sometimes.

For many many people in the adoption world I think there is a tendency to focus primarily on the positives of adoption, how lucky we are, and how lucky our children will be. Focusing on what went before is not often given the spotlight. Again, not a bad thing…during a long wait of trying to stay optimistic, trying to just get through the stress of it all, it is easy and maybe even a good thing to push aside the negative parts of the adoption story just to try to keep your sanity. I think it is also important to challenge your thinking on adoption now and then. I think I can safely say that no one reading this thinks about adoption in the same way now as they did when they first started on their journey.

So…what are some of the hard truths that I think about when I am trying to give myself a reality check:

• at their core, adoptions are simply making the best of a bad situation
• parenting is hard work, parenting an adopted child is likely to be even harder
• somewhere down the road when my daughter is a teenager (or maybe sooner) and I have earned her wrath I can fully expect to hear “well you aren’t my real father anyway” and I suspect it will hurt…no matter how well I am prepared for it and how much I know that she doesn’t really mean it.

After a sleepless night of standing over a crib am probably thinking about this stuff way too much so better stop there!

Tags: Hard Thinking Series by Windthrow
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Originally posted on October 19, 2007.

The Biological Imperative

So there I am last night…all is well in the world…daughter is asleep…managed to stop worrying about which way the lady is turning (thanks arw)…just reading a book for pleasure when I come across this passage…a conversation between one of the main female characters and a stranger on a rainy day in an art gallery:

“He wants us to adopt. I want my child — his child — a family that’s real, one that we create, not one that we apply for…..It wouldn’t be mine, I tell him. It wouldn’t come from me. It wouldn’t come from us. I couldn’t love it the same way if it isn’t mine.”

“No,” he said. “That’s very true. You wouldn’t love it the same way at all.”

She grasped his arm. The wool of his coat was damp and scratchy beneath her fingers. “You understand. He doesn’t. He says there’re connections that go beyond blood. But they don’t for me. And I can’t understand why they do for him.”

“Perhaps it’s because he knows that we humans ultimately love something that we have to struggle for — something that we give up everything to have — far more than the other things that fall our way through chance.”

I know this doesn’t cover any new ground and I think every human is somewhere on a continuum between the two positions described. Many of us that are adoptive parents or pursuing adoption, I suspect, started closer to the womans position than we often might care to admit. Some of us may still have doubts even.

I guess the point I would make is that it is a continuum…there is no right or wrong way to feel on this subject in my opinion. It is a useful thing for me to remember I think, when dealing with those who haven’t made the journey that I have made in my thinking with regard to adoption.

Tags: Hard Thinking Series by Windthrow
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