Welcome Home!: An International and Nontraditional Adoption Reader - Hardcover

Schwartz, Lita Linzer; Kaslow, Florence

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0789017733 ISBN 13: 9780789017734

Publisher: Routledge, 2003

Synopsis

Examine the pros and cons of nontraditional adoption!

Welcome Home! An International and Nontraditional Adoption Reader is an essential guide to the process, pros, and cons of adopting children from outside the United States, with special needs, and/or from a different racial/cultural background. The book documents every aspect of the adoption procedure from working with facilitators, adoption agencies, and attorneys to mixed reactions over a child’s possible loss of heritage as the result of a transracial or multicultural adoption. Parents and adoptees offer unique, firsthand perspectives on the cautions and benefits of nontraditional adoption.

Americans adopted more than 20,000 children from other countries in 2001, a number that reflects humanitarian motives, the desire to adopt a child from a specific country, and/or frustration with the domestic adoption system. Including a foreword by United States Representative Ted Strickland, Welcome Home! is a practical resource for anyone thinking of establishing a family or adding to their own. The book provides insight into the adoption process, open adoption, biracial adoption, adopting a special needs child, cultural attitudes, and how to handle an adopted child’s questions in later years. It also addresses specific adoption issues, including: how to verify an agency’s credentials; how an agency negotiates with the birth mother; state and country laws and practices; tax benefits; and expenses, including legal and medical costs; and includes research findings on the Northeast-Northwest Collaborative Adoption Projects (N2CAP)

Welcome Home! tells the stories of:

• Naomi and Fred, an intermarried couple (she’s Jewish, he’s not) who adopted a Greek baby in 1962
• Tina and Lee, a lesbian couple, who adopted a baby from China
• Marianne, a professor of child and adolescent psychiatry at the University of Lund in Sweden, who adopted babies from Iran and Thailand several years after her divorce
• Pamela, a divorced mother of four biological children who has adopted babies from Viet Nam and China
• All of her biological children
• Mildred Pamela’s mother and the children’s grandmother
• Karen, adoptive mother and national chairperson for Families for Russian and Ukrainian adoption (FRUA)
• William, adoptive father of miracle sisters from Romania
• and many more!

Welcome Home! is an invaluable source of unusual insight for psychologists, psychiatrists, marriage and family therapists, adoption agencies, counselors, social workers, attorneys, physicians, academics, and, of course, anyone considering adoption.

About this title

Review:

"Anyone Considering International Or Cross-Cultural Adoption Should Go To This Book First.... Gives us new insights into what it really means to be a family and what a combination of love and commitment can do to change lives. The editors raise questions one would never think to ask and carefully guide us through the answers.... the Good News, the Bad News, and the Real News Of Adoption."

About this edition

• Publisher: Routledge
• Publication date: 2003
• ISBN 10: 0789017733
• ISBN 13: 9780789017734
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 282