Cultural Identity and Place in Adult Korean-American Intercountry Adoptees

ABSTRACT

This study explores the interrelationship between cultural identity and place in the lives of adult Korean adoptees living primarily in the Twin Cities area of Minnesota. Using life histories derived through multiple semi-structured interviews, a web of related themes emerged which reveal the interplay between ethnicity, identity, gender, and place. From childhood to adulthood, most Korean adoptees followed a similar developmental trajectory of denial, self-awareness, and emerging cultural consciousness about their Korean heritage, particularly upon their departure from their adoptive homes after high school. These journeys were mediated and nuanced by environmental factors including -but not limited to -places adoptees lived or visited in Korea, the U.S. or elsewhere abroad. This study highlights the limitations of previous studies that focused only on adoptive parents or adoptees as children, an approach which loses the life course perspective of inter-country adoptees' search for identity, belonging, and a sense of home.     

Training for Transracial Adoptive Parents by Public and Private Adoption Agencies

ABSTRACT

Social work literature strongly suggests that parents who adopt across race need specialized training to develop cultural competence in order to help their children develop positive racial identity and survival skills for life in a multicultural society. None-the-less, there is little documentation of agency training for transracial adoptive parents. The purpose of this study is to describe aspects of training provided to transracial adoptive parents by public and private adoption agencies in the United States. Utilizing a survey with a random sample of public and private agencies, results (n = 195) indicate that about half of the agencies that facilitate transracial adoption provide relevant training. Implications for social work practice and research are discussed.     

Searching for the Self: Adult International Adoptees’ Narratives of Their Search for and Reunion With Their Birth Families

In this case study, five international adoptees from Finland were interviewed about their search and reunion experiences to find out what meanings they ascribed to their identities and family relations. The thematic analysis yielded three themes: search and reunion in significant periods of life, meaning of reunion for identity, and belonging and relatedness within family. The first theme was characterized by the changing interest in birth family from the inability in childhood to fully understand the meaning of adoption and the growing interest in adolescence to adulthood where participants’ own parenthood intensified their interest. The second theme was characterized by the sense of coherence and sense of continuity that the adoptees, despite the conflicting emotions of reunion, felt they had achieved through reunion. In the third theme, reunion with their birth family appeared significant, even though belonging to a family was interpreted more as an outcome of attachment and nurture than biology. Particular for all themes was the meaning of communicating about adoption-related issues for the adoptee–adoptive parent relationship. Future research is needed to concentrate in more detail on the broad themes and to investigate how the meanings of the birth family for adoptive identity change over life courses.     

A visual narrative analysis of children’s baby loss remembrance drawings

Children experiencing the death of baby brother or sister have reported individual, familial, and communicative challenges. Siblings also have indicated that the loss of a baby in their family enriched their lives despite their pain. The present study extends this work by focusing not only on siblings but also other children enmeshed in the family system. Additionally, we heed the call for the use of arts-based methods in family communication by performing a visual narrative analysis of children’s baby loss remembrance drawings. This analysis of 131 drawings completed by children ages zero to 18 yielded three main themes, including narration of identity, narration of life and death, and narration of growing sense-making. Two continua capture these themes, including the subject of narrativization and the mode of narrativization. In presenting these findings, we provide a unique (means of) understanding children’s experience of baby loss in the family.     

Young Adult Moral Exemplars: The Making of Self Through Stories

The purpose of our research was to explore the differences between young adult moral exemplars and comparison individuals by studying their life stories. Moral exemplars were nominated for their extraordinary moral commitment to the social organizations where they volunteered or worked. Forty moral exemplars, along with 40 matched comparison individuals (total N=80), participated in a life narrative interview. These interviews were coded for specific narrative features such as narrative tone, awareness of others' suffering, helpers and enemies, agency and communion themes, redemptive experiences, contamination scenes, personal ideology, and future goals. Moral exemplars differed from comparison individuals on agency themes, redemptive experiences, contamination scenes, awareness of others' suffering, enemies, ideological depth, and future goals. These findings are discussed within a narrative identity development framework.     

Letters from the future: an exercise with child welfare predictions

Abstract

The article presents an empirical exercise about predictions in child welfare. In the exercise, social workers imagined letters which they could receive from a child and his/her parents in five years’ time. The children had been in care for one year at the moment of letter-writing. When the social workers wrote the imaginary letters, they used their professional imagination, based on practice knowledge and experience, and were involved in a role-play. The analysis of the letters (34 from ‘children’ and 33 letters from ‘parents’) demonstrates four themes shared by the letters: ordinary life, family contacts and return home, social problems as shadows and assessment of the placement. Two narratives were performed: the narrative of future of ordinary life and that of the troubles. It is suggested that imaginary letters are helpful in highlighting practitioners’ sense of the future, professional imagination as well as the empowering and critical points in practice.     

Listening to Older Adult Parents of Adult Children With Mental Illness

This article uses qualitative research and narrative analysis to examine the experience of women age 55 and older who are parents caring for adult children with mental illness. Knowledge about the conflicts of older parents with dependent children is underdeveloped. In this study, analysis of women's stories about parenting in later life reveal that the women have two sets of feelings: wanting to be free from the responsibility of caregiving and feeling responsible to continue the support and protection of their adult vulnerable children. The women's conflicts are palpable and are found in the ideational themes of the narratives, as well as the structure of how the narratives are spoken. The discussion highlights the relevance of the theory of ambivalence for clinical practice when working with older women who are caregivers for their adult dependent children.     

Communicative Openness Within Adoptive Families: Adoptive Parents' Narrative Accounts of the Challenges of Adoption Talk and the Approaches Used to Manage These Challenges

Policy and practice relating to openness in adoption have changed substantially in the last 30 years. There is a growing body of empirical research that supports both structural and communicative openness, and there is widespread consensus that communicative openness is desirable within adoptive families. Despite this, there is evidence that some adoptive parents and their adopted children struggle to achieve the level of communicative openness to which they aspire. This paper presents data from a small-scale exploratory study of adoptive family life. It draws on the narrative accounts of adoptive mothers and fathers to explore some of the sensitivities of adoption talk, the communication challenges experienced by adoptive parents, and the ways that adopters manage these challenges. Finally, some suggestions are made for practice.     

Identity Concerns in Intercountry Adoption-Immigrants as Adoptive Parents

The psycho-social sense of identity, which is an important component of the sense of self, emerges during childhood and adolescence but is a lifelong process. In intercountry adopted children, additional layers are added to the initial difference of being adopted—in outward appearance and in cultural heritage—that do not match those of the adoptive parents. These may interfere with empathic bonding and with the integration of facets of identity into a meaningful narrative. The article addresses a particular subgroup of adoptive parents—those who have immigrated to Israel in their recent or remote past. Using the framework of self psychology, it suggests ways of helping immigrant adoptive parents to create an empathic affect-bridge with their children, who immigrate to a new family as well as to a new country, by tapping their own experiences as immigrants.     

Erickson’s identity theory and the importance of ethnic exploration for transnational adoptees

In an effort to promote their child’s ethnic identity development, parents of transnational adoptees regularly engage in cultural exploration activities with their children. This practice is aligned with Erik Erikson’s identity theory and constructs of exploration and commitment. Using qualitative analysis of interviews with adult adoptees, this study identifies four themes common to participants including: (1) travel to one’s birth country is a transformative experience; (2) relationships with other adoptees are important; (3) adoptees feel differently about the importance of cultural activities during childhood; and (4) adoptees feel both unique in their personal ethnic identity and have feelings of marginality.     

Ethical Adoption Practice

Abstract

Dr. Paul Denhalter completed his doctoral candidacy research on adoptive family attachment and entitlement. Nineteen parents were interviewed about what elements of adoptive family life contributed to a sense of entitlement. The act of care giving increased entitlement; negative comments from others about adoption tended to decrease it. In his social work practice, Dr. Denhalter counseled adoptive and birth families and advocated education, counseling and support for successful open adoption relationships. His positive perspective on adoption included his father's adoption at age five. Dr. Denhalter was critical of the current trends in adoption that have pathologized adoption for political purposes. He emphasized the results of the Search Institute's study that had positive conclusions about adopted children as well as a blueprint for successful adoptive families to follow.     

Sense of home in a transnational social space: New Zealanders in London

In this article, I explore the ways in which ‘middling’ migrant New Zealanders living in London and New Zealand discuss and identify with home. For these multi‐local individuals, the discursive and material aspects of New Zealand as home form a framework for their everyday life as migrants living in London. Interpretation of the interviews using thematic and narrative analyses works through a conceptualization of home, migration, and identity as interdependent, through three interrelated themes: the symbolic or political nature of home; the importance of family and familiarity for a sense of home; and the role of physical material objects and places. Participants in this study see New Zealand as their home, yet by being away from home they gain new perspectives on home. In London, they engage with or resist a collective imaginary of New Zealand as home that is both self‐perpetuated and externally imposed, and which both reveals and conceals ideas about individual and group identity and community. On returning from London, the idealistic and sometimes simplistic visions of New Zealand as home that structure their lives in London are often disrupted by the more complex yet more mundane version of home and self with which they are confronted.     

“It Was Like This,I Think”: Constructing an Adoption Narrative for Chinese Adopted Children

Using qualitative survey data from 35 adoptive parents of children from China, I explore the type of narrative parents construct about their child's “abandonment.” Parents tell the story they know best—the child's adoption story—being careful to not overly burden the child with harsh abandonment realities. Most parents opt to tell a dominant narrative, portraying the child's Chinese birth parents as parents who loved their child and struggled with the decision to give up their child pressured by outside forces to do so. Any counternarrative told seems to be for the adoptive parents themselves, not for their children.     

Working with Narratives

ABSTRACT

This article will discuss healing across cultures and describe narrative practice as a means of access to coping strategies in African American folk beliefs and traditional healing practices. Four elements were found in empirical research on folk healing among African Americans: spirituality, ritual, the power of words, and dreams. These culture-specific healing elements often emerge as themes in personal narratives about coping in response to stress, crisis, and trauma. Viewing healing elements as themes is a useful framework for construing meanings from clients' experiences of stress, trauma, and crisis and coping strategies embedded in folk beliefs and traditional healing practices.

Additionally, the author presents a structured interview questionnaire for identifying folk healing themes, illustrates narrative practice as an approach for integrating folk beliefs and healing practices, and discusses implications for clinical training.     

Navigating in an unknown land: Post adoption contexts of children adopted from China

Abstract

This qualitative/ethnographic study investigated how children adopted from China construct their identities. The authors describe the subtle interaction of home, school, and community cultures that influenced these children's identity formation. Focusing on the children, the researchers followed 13 adoptive families over the course of 16 months. The setting for the study was in several metropolitan areas of the American Midwest. Children's post adoption experiences, family life, schooling, and Adopted Children from China (ACC) activities became a window for viewing many of the core issues in constructing cultural identity. Children in this study actively negotiated their identities in various social contexts.     

Identity Formation in Children and Young People in Open Adoptions from Out-of-home Care in New South Wales,Australia

Semi-structured interviews were used to explore identity development for nine adoptees (aged 9–23 years) who were adopted by their foster carers in New South Wales, Australia. Adoptions were open, with court-ordered face-to-face contact with birth families. Findings suggest that participants had healthy adoptive identities, with coherent and meaningful narratives about their life histories. Adoption provided a sense of security and belonging. Openness provided information to build a self-narrative and encouraged discussion of adoption issues within adoptive families. Adoptive parents were critical in helping children understand their adoption and facilitating direct contact with birth families, thus laying foundations for positive identity development.     

Personal narratives, relational selves: residential histories in the living and telling

This article is set in the context of debates about how far social identity and agency should be seen as individualised or relational concepts. It examines how people in a qualitative study in the North of England constructed personal narratives about their residential histories. These were fundamentally about identity and agency, because they centred upon ‘what mattered’ more widely to the narrator, and upon what had constrained or enabled action and change in their life. The narratives were characterised by contextuality, contingency and in particular by relationality. Four styles of relational narrative are explored: relational inclusion and co‐presence, relational participation, relational constraint and conflict, and relational individualism. Overall, it is argued that both agency and identity need to be understood relationally, and that through their narratives people in the study were constructing relational selves. It is suggested that a misreading of personal narrative as an individualistic discursive form has fuelled the hold of the concept of individualism on popular and sociological imagination, in the face of increasingly compelling empirical evidence about the extent and nature of people's connectivity with others.     

EDITORIAL

ABSTRACT

This paper presents the results of an exploratory study that examined the preparation of children for adoption from the perspective of 55 adoptive parents and 26 caseworkers. Results indicate little consistency in practice and highlight the pivotal role of the adoptive parent. From the caseworker perspective, preparation for adoption is often seen as a process that ends at placement with the adoptive family. Adoption issues often arise at developmentally significant times in a child's life and adoptive parents may need to continue working with the child, building on the foundation of preparation work done by the child's caseworker or therapist. If the preparation work is insufficient or ineffective, adoptive parents may face greater challenges as they help the child resolve issues related to their past, present and future.     

Examining rates and risk factors for post-order adoption disruption in England and Wales through survival analyses

PurposeThis paper reports findings from two research studies that set out to calculate the rate and predictors of post-order adoption disruption in England and Wales.MethodsAll available national level administrative data on adopted children in England and Wales were analysed, supplemented by national surveys adoption managers. Complete national datasets were available 12 years in England and for 11 years in Wales.ResultsOf the 36,749 and 2,317 adoptions considered, 565 in England and 35 in Wales had disrupted over the follow up period. Kaplan-Meier analyses indicate that cumulative post-order adoption disruption rates were 3.2% and 2.6% respectively for England and Wales. Cox regression models indicate that being older than four years adoptive placement, adoptive parents taking longer than a year to legalise the adoption, being a teenager and previous multiple placements in care were risk factors for post-order adoption disruption.ConclusionThe post order adoption disruption rate is low. Implications for policy and practice are discussed.     

Parent-Child Interaction Styles Between Gay and Lesbian Parents and Their Adopted Children

SUMMARY

While myths exist that call into question the parenting ability of gay and lesbian parents as well as the impact of such parenting on children in their care, there is an ever increasing body of literature that clearly demonstrates the capabilities of these parents with their birth children. However, there continues to be a dearth of research on gay and lesbian adoptive parents and their children. To address this deficiency in the literature, this article explores the parenting styles of gay and lesbian adoptive parents and strengths of their children between the ages of 5–9 years (N = 94), using scores from the Parent-as-a-Teacher Inventory and the Behavioral and Emotional Rating Scale. Results illustrate that the gay and lesbian adoptive parents in this sample fell into the desirable range of the parenting scale and their children have strength levels equal to or exceeding the scale norms. Finally, various aspects of parenting style significantly predicted the adoptive parents' view of their child's level of care difficulty which subsequently predicted the type and level of strengths assessed within their adopted child. Recommendations for practice, policy and future research are highlighted.