The Adoption Industry, Part 1: Demand

In exploring the industry of adoption, it is fundamental to first explain why there is a market for children in the first place. Why do adults choose to adopt babies and children who are biologically unrelated to them?

1. Infertility: A heterosexual couple is unable to create and/or carry a biological child. This includes secondary infertility (infertility after the birth of one or more biological children.)
2. Need help: Parents are unable to have a child without reproductive assistance. This includes infertile couples that do not wish to use medical assistance, lesbian and gay couples, and single parents.
3. Health: Concerns about passing on a genetic disorder in the mother’s or father’s family. Pregnancy could cause the health of the mother to be seriously impaired. The mother and/or family have been exposed to certain elements (chemical, medical, etc.) that may cause birth defects.
4. Choosing gender: A family with two or more biological children of the same gender adopt in order to parent a child of the opposite gender. The adopted child is almost always a girl. (These families usually choose international adoption because the children are already born, although some domestic adoption agencies allow adoptive parents to specify gender.)
5. Personal beliefs: Parents who adopt for religious or philosophical reasons. This includes preferential adopters.

The domestic infant adoption system caters to one group of prospective adoptive parents: heterosexual, White, middle and upper class, infertile, married couples (the great majorities of groups 1 & 3, and much of group 2). This system has broadened itself a bit; certain agencies now accommodate same-sex couples and/or single parents (mostly mothers), and a handful of infant adoption agencies actively recruit parents/families of color (The Cradle and Pact are two of the biggest nonsectarian names). Still, virtually all agencies are focused on families who cannot have children without assistance (groups 1, 2, & 3), and many agencies actually will not work with fertile couples.

Adoption fees rule out most potential adoptive parents who are not at least middle-class. Current domestic infant adoption fees for a healthy* baby, of any race, usually run in the $18,000-$30,000 range. This includes homestudy, paperwork, agency fees, legal fees, and living expenses for a pregnant woman. Travel costs, medical expenses (for baby and mother), and legal complications can push the cost even higher. International adoption fees vary by country, but costs often run higher than domestic adoption. About 40% of international adoptions and 20% of domestic infant adoptions cost more than $30,000.

*A note on the domestic infant adoption system definition of a healthy baby. A baby who is classified as ‘healthy’ includes a baby who was prenatally drug and/or alcohol exposed, was born prematurely, has no birthfather medical/social information (i.e. ‘unknown birthfather’), has a birthfamily history of moderate mental health problems and/or a birthfamily history of moderate genetically-transferable medical conditions. When a baby appears to be healthy at birth (no apparent physical, mental, or serious medical handicaps), that baby is part of the mainstream adoptive placement system, including standard fees. Fees are often reduced substantially for infants who are born with clear disabilities, have been prenatally exposed to extremely high levels of alcohol and/or illegal drugs, or have two birthparents who have mental health diagnoses.

When calculating adoption costs, there is the often misunderstood $10,000 federal adoption tax credit. The funds from this tax credit are not available until after an adoption has been legally finalized (usually 6-8 months after the placement of a child); adoptive parents must come up with all the money for adoption fees and expenses up front. In addition, this is a non-refundable tax credit; the tax credit is deducted from the federal tax a family owes over a period of up to five years. In adoption literature, it is often noted that a family is eligible for the adoption tax credit unless a family’s income exceeds federal restrictions (meaning: modified adjusted gross income of more than $204,000). It is never noted that if a family does not make enough money to owe any federal income tax (total income of less than $45,000/year for a family of four) the family does not qualify for the adoption tax credit. If a family owes less than $2,000/year in federal income tax, they will not receive the full adoption tax credit ($2,000 x 5 years = $10,000). NOTE: 4% of families in the U.S. make more than $200,000/year, while 40% of families in the United States make less than $50,000/year.

The majority of prospective adoptive parents waiting in the domestic adoption system fit the description of the people to which the system caters: White, middle/upper class, infertile, married, heterosexual couples. The great majority of these prospective parents are seeking a certain type of baby: usually White (at least 80%), and often also with a very healthy** social/medical family history (**very healthy meaning not only apparently healthy at birth, but also including not prenatally drug or alcohol exposed, no mental illness or major medical issues in either side of the birthfamily, full-term delivery, birthparents not in prison, and often more). Even so, White newborns with health issues, premature birth, mild to moderate birthfamily medical/social history issues, ‘unknown’ birthfather, or minor disabilities are still very desirable to these prospective adoptive parents.

The domestic infant adoption system does not easily accommodate adoptive parents who are outside the target prospective adoptive parent population. (The target adoptive-parent-client population excludes portions of groups 1-4, and all of group 5.) In addition, if a prospective adoptive parent is prepared to care for a child of any race who has been prenatally drug and/or alcohol exposed or has moderate to serious, multiple, or unknown birthfamily medical/social issues, why would they choose domestic infant adoption ($18,000-$30,000 or more in fees) instead of foster care adoption (often less than $2,000 in fees)? The more open a prospective adoptive family is, the less likely they are part of the domestic infant adoption system.

Prospective adoptive parents who fall outside the targeted adoptive parent population (especially working or lower-middle class families, People of Color, and fertile couples) are more likely to choose foster adoption or toddler/older child international adoption-for many different reasons. Because they have family or personal connections to another country. Because they have lived abroad or traveled extensively. Because they know what it’s like to be involved with Child and Family Services. Because they themselves were in foster care. Because they are not afraid (rightly or not) of the issues and history children in foster care, older children, and/or institutionalized children may bring home. Because they have already raised their biological children from infancy, and would prefer to parent older children. Because they want to ‘help’ a child who has less opportunity for a family. Because they know how many children of color are in foster care or orphanages–and how long these children wait for a family.

This is where the domestic adoption ‘market’ becomes extremely unbalanced. Prospective adoptive parents are overwhelmingly White, and they are seeking White babies. (However, it must be noted that Black American families adopt at twice the rate of White American families.) There is a racial hierarchy of adoption. Certain babies, through the unearned privilege of their racial ancestry, are easier to place in an adoptive family. From most prospective adoptive families waiting to least families waiting, the racial hierarchy ranges from light to dark, from undeveloped White American history to most complex; the newborns who are most quickly matched with an adoptive family have White (also known as European American) ancestry, then Asian ancestry, Hispanic/Latino ancestry, Native American ancestry, and finally Black ancestry. In adoption, girls are also easier to place than boys; thus, the easiest child to find an adoptive family for is a White girl, the most difficult is a Black boy. Biracial and multiracial children are shuttled to their ‘darkest’ heritage in the racial hierarchy. Thus, finding an adoptive family for a biracial Black/White boy is similar to finding a family for a ‘full’ Black boy (full Black meaning two Black-identifying biological parents). Within the infant adoption system, it is still common to read or hear descriptions of pregnant women that include the shade of their skin, or even the fair skin-tone of a newborn biracial baby. (The latter could only be information offered by White professionals with no experience with infants/people of color.)

As long as the practice and process of adoption remains an ‘industry’, prospective adoptive parents will be regarded as ‘customers’. In such a system, infants, children, and mothers will necessarily continue to be viewed and treated as merchandise, objects to be marketed to the paying clientele (as in the misleading ‘light-skinned’ biracial newborn). It is an oft-repeated phrase in many corners of the adoption system nowadays that adoption agencies are looking for families for children, not children for families. This statement must become the blanket truth about adoption.

Following segments will address supply in the adoption system (including domestic infants, children in foster care, international infants/toddlers, international older children, and systemic birthparent/family coercion), whether adoption is necessary (including what can be done to lower the ‘need’ for adoptive families), adoption ethics and the rights of mothers (including pregnant women), specific coverage of foster care adoption and international adoption (including a more in-depth exploration of the reasons parents choose different types of adoption), gender choice in adoption, and transracial adoption (including the racial and country hierarchies within transracial adoption).

Please feel free to ask questions in the comments; I will try to address them within the upcoming series segments. A full bibliography for the entire series will be available.

Complexity and Fertility

Over the weekend we spent time with a group of families/couples. There was a meeting followed by a meal, although (and I didn’t know this going in) for the duration of the meeting the children and I were sequestered in a finished basement, which was not really set up for little kids. For two long hours, I was down there with all four of my kids along with three other kids and their moms.

Our basement group included a mother and her only child. The mother spoke only Spanish to her child, and her child only spoke Spanish back to her. We speak a little Spanish, and have several friends with Spanish/English bilingual children (in our friends’ families, one parent’s first language is Spanish). I talked to this mom a bit, introduced myself and my kids after we arrived. She volunteered (in English) that Spanish is not her first language, or her bio child’s. That’s pretty much all she ever said to me.

Because this mother and her child would only speak Spanish, they couldn’t/didn’t talk to anyone else (adult or child) who was sharing this very small space. My Spanish is rusty, but I could understand everything this mother and child were saying–but my kids couldn’t. And the other mother and children present didn’t seem to know any Spanish. It was like being back in high school when two of my best friends learned/invented a secret language they called ‘Gibberish’ (think of complicated pig-latin).

Our friends who are raising their kids bilingually speak Spanish and English to their kids, and they translate for my kids after they say something to their kids in Spanish. (And they are happy to converse in English with my kids and with me.) The exclusionary style of parenting, choosing to converse with your child in a language nobody understands when you both also speak a language everybody else present both speaks and understands, was so unbelievably rude. It came off as the we-are-so-important-we-don’t-have-to-consider-anyone-else philosophy of living.

I often struggle to connect with parents who purposefully have just one child. In my experience, these parents are more likely (than the parents of 2+ kids) to act as though the sun rises and sets over their perfect child. I have struggled through parents-of-onlies who allow their child to cheat at games, cut in line, and snub other kids, and other parents who perpetually treat their single growing child as though they are a baby (picture a parent feeding every bite of a meal to an able-bodied grade-schooler).

The step beyond the only-childers (these people are rarely part of our circle–wonder why?) are the childless-by-choice. I’m talking about adults who purposely choose not to have any children in their life (not biologically, not adopted, not step, not foster, not guardianship, not living with their sister and her two kids–none). There were some of these people at this meeting too. Liberal, over-educated bobos who somehow think it is reasonable for little children to be neither seen nor heard. People who pretend children under the age of ten are not actually there. People who don’t acknowledge kids, who don’t even look at them, smile at them, speak to them, help them, move out of their way. People who glare at the parent (me!) when a child brushes against their leg trying to squeeze by.

What’s beyond childless-by-choice? The people with no children and no pets (yes, there were some of these people present as well). It’s not that I think everyone should have children (or dogs)–not in the least. What makes me skittish is that in my experience people who have chosen not to have children (or children and pets) view their life–and by extension the world–as an eminently controllable thing. The neat, organized life of Choice A leading directly to Point A, with no annoying detours in between.

My life with four young children and one large dog is messy, chaotic, loud, dirty, constant, and (mostly) fun. Many of the moms I know with 3+ kids, especially if the kids are closely spaced, understand the parenting part of our life. But if my friends with 1 or 2 kids struggle to understand how (and why) we do things the way we do, we must apear completely crazy (and hey–they treat us that way) to the no-pets/no-children/1-perfect-child sets. I realize children inevitably create a bit of chaos, I want to say, but you’re scorning the future leaders of the world.

As one of our children’s (young, active, single) uncles said, “Children are so exhausting and irrational!” Uh . . . yep. We were all children once, as exhausting and irrational as the best of them. The adults who cannot find it in their tidy hearts to–at the least–acknowledge the existence of these little people in their presence, I just don’t understand them (and honestly, I don’t like them much either).

At the meeting there was a family with an internationally transracially adopted toddler. The toddler was the only child close to Teri’s age. Teri and the toddler eyed each other, as only tiny children can. I tried to make small-talk with this mother. She turned her back to me. I tried again later–twice–and she literally turned away. I watched her talk to other people, even discuss her child, and couldn’t figure out what was going on.

I mentioned this snub to my partner as we drove home. He immediately said, “It’s probably because you have bio kids.” (Picture me smacking my forehead–Duh!) Like most adoptive parents, this couple is likely infertile. I forget that fertility/infertility is often still an issue for parents who have already adopted. (I’m more mindful of infertility issues with pre-adoptive/waiting couples.) It used to be that I really didn’t get the fertility-bias thing. Since I have always planned to adopt, I didn’t think it would have been a big deal to me if I hadn’t been able to have bio kids. And then a strange thing happened.

At a certain point in our family-building we were planning to adopt, and then it seemed as though we weren’t going to be able to. My partner floated the idea of having another biological child instead–and I was so opposed to getting pregnant again at that point in time. I realized that I didn’t just want a child, I wanted a child through adoption. And suddenly I understood a piece of infertility that had alluded me for years–beyond the grief of not being able to pass on your genes, to see yourself in your child’s face and temperament (not always a good thing, I tell you), there is the additional piece of infertility that frustratingly denies you the ability to do something very basic that you always thought–assumed, even–you would be able to do.

For us, becoming both adoptive and bio parents was relatively simple. In our adoptions, we had one quick match, one ‘instant’ baby, and no failed placements. With our pregnancies, we had two ‘instant’ conceptions and no miscarriages. In the building of our family, our biggest hardships (if you could even call them that) were financial (adoption) and my health (serious problems during and after Rico’s birth from undiagnosed eclampsia).

We interviewed pediatricians while waiting for Jaja to be born. While talking to one doctor (who we eventually chose) we mentioned that we hoped to have a biological child about 18 months younger than Jaja. “You should know,” the doctor said, “after trying to conceive for six months, only 50% of couples are pregnant. Only 80% of couples are pregnant after trying for one year.” She issued these numbers as a warning to us. We talked about these ’statistics’ on the way home: we didn’t want our kids to be years apart. Somehow we didn’t factor in that we were both in our mid-20s, completely healthy, taking no prescription medications, hadn’t been using any medical birth-control for several years, and nobody in any part of our families has ever had any fertility problems (including mothers giving birth at 37 and 40 years old).

Jaja and Rico were born 9 months (plus a few days) apart. That was a busy year.  And that was (and is) complicated in all different ways, some ways in which we (as parents) have absolutely no control.

I embrace that intricate and intimate complexity. To me, those are the most rewarding parts of life.

On Adoption as a First Choice

I always knew I would adopt children. I was less committed to giving birth to children, however pregnancy and homebirth have been parts of my mothering experience as well. I don’t remember the moment I decided I wanted to be a parent–it was in me from the very beginning. I also don’t remember deciding my future family would include both adopted and biological children, I just always knew it would. Maybe it was because my first friend was adopted. I don’t remember life before him; he is just three days younger than me.

As a young child, I took care of my many dolls and dressed up (for several years in a row) as a ‘mother’ for Halloween. I spent a good portion of my early pre-parenting life taking care of other people’s children. I have a brother who is ten years younger than me. I babysat a lot. I ran a summer ‘day camp’ for neighborhood kids. I nannied for children with cerebral palsy and autism, as well as their siblings. I worked with toddlers in a daycare center. I was a substitute teacher.

In my later professional life, I worked with adults with schizophrenia, OCD, and bipolar disorder. I worked with social workers and police investigating child sexual abuse and serious physical abuse. I’ve known many children, and I’ve known many struggling adults who are still dealing with their difficult childhoods.

I have always felt a real responsibility to be of use (as Homer Larch says), to constantly assess my life and myself to see if I am doing all I can. My thoughts and purpose have directed me to be of use to people in need: real, basic need. I completely believe that we are all one world, one people, but I also believe I must first address what is right here in my own back yard: the needs and inequities in my own country.

When we went through our first adoption process, I was not thinking about the ethics of adoption or about the policies (and the ‘values’ behind them) that financially reward women for placing their children with adoptive families–but don’t provide these same women the opportunity to parent their children. I was just thinking about children who needed a family. We knew what we were comfortable with, and we had a fabulous agency, and we ended up with a fully open adoption. Our second adoption was (serendipitously) with a different agency, and again was a completely ethical placement. (Although sometimes it seems like luck that both our adoptions worked out that way. In hindsight, I see so many potential pitfalls that just didn’t materialize.)

Our coming to adoption by choice instead of by way of infertility has caused a lot of confusion for others–for family members, for the general public, and for other adoptive parents. It is an unusual choice, especially with our combining adoption with biological children in such close concert. (Hard-core preferential adopters do not have any biological children, and many adoptive-bio mixed families have a few older bio kids and then a few younger adopted kids–almost like two separate families.)

So, why adopt when we are able to have (and not philosophically opposed to bearing) biological children?

For me, the answer lies deep inside me: every child is my responsibility. As with all things, If not me, then who? This is true in the abstract and in the very concrete (as in, we have the resources and the space, we should be open to another child in our family if a child needs us). The way this deeply held belief has played out in my adult life is a bit more complicated.

I have a life partner and best friend I have been with for almost 14 years. His ideas and plans are not necessarily the same as mine. I now have four children who (through some amazing blessing) are all multiply-gifted. They are healthy, they are beautiful, they are (mostly) well-behaved. They are intellectual and athletic super-stars (yes, I know, this is their mother bragging here). Thus, the thought of adding extremely needy children–I’m talking older child adoption here–to our family at this point in time (our kids range in age from 6 down to 2) gives me pause for the first time in my life. What would that mean for the children we have now? What would our family feel like for a child who has not had most of the advantages our kids have?

I am not traditionally religious at this point in my life, but I do love the writings of the Sufi master Jelaluddin Rumi. In a piece entitled The Real Work, Rumi says:

There is one thing in this world that you must never forget to do. If you forget everything else and not this, there’s nothing to worry about, but if you remember everything else and forget this, then you will have done nothing in your life.

Parts of me want to be a writer, a painter, a small-time homesteading farmer, an antiracist activist and organizer, an educator about multiracial families and individuals, an adoption reformer, an open adoption advocate. But when I dig deep down to my core, my internal compass always points the same way. My true purpose and drive is to provide a family and a home for children who need one.

One place this gets tricky with adoption is in turning down a specific situation because it is unethical: because the child’s parents are not being treated fairly, because you are being asked to do something–or pay for something–that is (at best) a very grey area. If you (as a potential adoptive parent) stick to your ethical values and say no to the situation, it feels like what you are really doing is saying no to the child: No, I’m sorry, you or your mother are involved with an unethical social worker (or facilitator or agency) and so you can’t become a member of our family. But I could not live with myself with even the hint of having ‘bought’ a child, or parenting a child whose first family truly intended to keep and parent them.

I carry all those children–and their mothers– around with me still, the children who joined other families, the children who are still waiting. I carry the sibling group of three Black brothers waiting in foster care, children who require more care (and fewer siblings) than our family can provide. I carry every face from every photolisting, every mistreated pregnant or parenting mother, every statistic about children living in poverty or parents dying of AIDS, alongside the pain in the faces of the mothers on T.V. during hurricane Katrina, the stories of children from Guatemala and Ethiopia stolen away to families overseas. Every mother hurting because of her child’s pain or the loss of her child; every child hurting because they have no parents–I carry them all inside me. I always have.

I constantly ask myself, would I be more effective working on policy issues instead of parenting a house full of stair-step children? But to me that feels like I’d be saying, I’m willing to donate money to the cause because that abnegates me from going to the people and being a part of the work myself. Donating money is important, don’t get me wrong, but it is also neater, less personal, in many ways–easier. Who is responsible for doing the actual hands-on work?

Along a similar line, and one that is with me almost as often: The financial privilege of the world’s middle and upper class has translated into ridiculous–yet seemingly mundane–expenses. Even when we have the money, I struggle to buy myself anything because the thought of what that $40 (the cost of a new striped turtleneck) would buy for a mother struggling to feed her children . . . you know, I’m pretty content in my thrift-store finds and my mother-in-law’s hand-me-downs.

We’re not wealthy, but we do more than get by. My partner and I have been blessed with good health, able bodies, the opportunity to complete college degrees, steady jobs, health insurance, and some very supportive family members. To most people who know us IRL (and probably the rest who don’t), our consideration of adopting another child–or two–into our hopping and popping family, well, they think we’re a little crazy. “Your life’s so perfect,” one relative always says, “Why risk wrecking it? Who knows what another child will do to your family balance?”

To that relative, and to everyone else, I say only this: There are children who need families. I think we have a pretty great family, with a lot to offer another son or daughter, brother or sister. And I love being a mother.

I understand choosing the easier way . . .

. . . but damn, I never seem to do it. It looks like such a nice, quiet, peaceful road. In the sun.

I’ve been feeling a little beat down lately, like, does this never stop? ‘This’ being toddler teething, people asking unbelievable questions about/to my family, having to explain/justify my own multiracial-ness, (because I look White, so maybe I’m lying?), being pregnant or breastfeeding (or both) for almost six years straight, along with the everyday necessities of actual mountains of laundry and dinner that needs to be planned and cooked every single night. (You’d think I would have thought of these chore-related realities before I had four children in four years; what can I say–I didn’t have a mentor.)

I wouldn’t change a thing about our family, how it came to be, the (sometimes wild and challenging) temperaments of each of my I’ll-never-be-a-wallflower children, the endless endless laundry. But I get it now, in a way I didn’t a few years ago. I understand why

1. Multiracial people identify monoracially, often with the ‘racial group’ they most resemble (physically).

2. Couples, who are able, only have biological children.

3. Families have only one or two children.

4. Families choose same-race adoption.

5. Transracially adoptive families choose international adoption.

6. Domestically adopting families choose closed or barely-open adoption.

7. Families space their children 3+ years apart.

8. Parents send their children to school, public school, even when they could certainly imagine a better program. (Somedays I think, I turned down free childcare?)

9. People, including parents, choose not to confront racism wherever they find it: in their families, in schools, in themselves, in their neighborhoods, communities, and governments. (Too hard. Too scary. A waste of time.)

10. White and White-appearing people choose not to be actively antiracist. (Someone else is taking care of it, and it doesn’t really affect me.)

All these choices–that other people were making–used to infuriate me. (Okay, some of them still do, but my reasons have changed.) I couldn’t comprehend why more people weren’t having the same ideas and coming to the same conclusions I was.

The past year has put me (a little more) in my place. I have been going full-steam ahead on all fronts for more than a year. For the first time, it felt like maybe I had too many balls in the air. I could do it, but I wasn’t enjoying it anymore. We made some fairly minor changes about a month ago, and suddenly I’m almost back to my center (which of course makes me think, what else could I be doing?)

Swimming upstream is tiring. And isolating. But these non-mainstream choices are the only things I can do. This is what is right for me (and on some issues, what I believe is right, period). I am not just being “difficult” or “choosing things because nobody else is doing them” (these are both accusations close family members have thrown at me over the years). Although I question ideas and choices that have been fully embraced by the mainstream culture, I question every choice I make and every idea or movement I take on as my own.

But some days, what I wouldn’t pay to be able to go to the store or to an extended family gathering or open up a newspaper without be accosted, offended, or supremely annoyed. I am inclined to wish that society and individual people would change, to wish they would be something or someone other than what they are. This will probably never be.

I recognize and take full responsibility for all the choices I have made and for my life being just the way it is; honestly, I love it. I am also coming to understand why many people arrive at some of the crossroads I have faced in my life–and go the other way.

Different Love

Recent events (and non-events) have forced me to think more deeply about the differences in parenting the children who joined my family through adoption and the children who joined my family through homebirth. Mother On Earth recently wrote about Rebecca Walker’s now infamous comment that the love an adoptive or step parent has for their (adopted or step) child is not the same as the love a parent has for their biological child. The way Walker presents this statement comes across as a slight to adoptive or step parents–that they can’t love these children as much as they would love their biological child.

I am taking Walker’s comment and turning it in a different direction: the love I have for each of my children is not the same as the love I have for any of their siblings. They came into our family in four different ways: through a long-awaited open adoption with 2 months of preparation (and anticipation) after we were matched and before our daughter was born, through a traumatic homebirth in which I was rushed to the ER and don’t remember our son’s first day, through a beautiful homebirth where all 5 of us were gathered together on our bed a couple hours after our daughter was born, through an ‘instant baby’ evening phone call and travel the very next day to pick up our daughter.

Our children have 3 sets of genetic history, 4 sets of medical history, 1 set of food allergies, 2 genders, 3 multiracial mixtures, 4 sets of talents, and 4 very different personalities and temperaments. All these pieces of inborn information are relevant to how I mother my children. I love each of my four children differently–equally, but not the same. I parent my four children differently. We work hard to make things ‘fair’ around here (I remember saying “It’s not fair” a lot as a kid), but fair does not mean the expectations and limits are the same for each of my kids.

Parenting adopted children is more complicated than parenting biological children–and harder, if you’re doing it right. The day-to-day life and sibling relationships are the same. But the parenting has more components, and more unknowns. My children who were adopted into our family have other families, families that came before we did. In my parenting, I am beholden to my children’s ancestors and, more directly, to their birthparents. I am hopefully preparing my children to eventually go out into the world as happy, healthy, self-confident, independent adults. Adults who are culturally and emotionally prepared to be an active part of their birthfamilies, if they choose to. I only have to prepare my biological children to be a part of one family.

With biological children, parents have so much information, more than is available with even the most open (non-kinship) adoption. Whether it is tantrums, early swimming skills, or insomnia, I know which way to point the finger: here. These are all traits my husband or I had (or still have). With our biological children, we know their family/medical history and their complete prenatal experience. We know they have one uncle with eczema and another (on the other side of the family) with milk intolerance. We know that both good teeth and intractable stubbornness run in both our families.

With adopted children, parents worry more. I wonder if they have half-siblings somewhere with an underbite, or who outgrew bow-leggedness. I think about their birthparents and how to foster a relationship between them and my child that is natural, and is comfortable and positive for my child. I wonder about extended birthfamily. I wonder if my child wonders about their extended birthfamily. I wonder if the tantrums or fussiness are related to age, temperament, genetics, tiredness, or hidden anxiety about some facet of their adoptedness. I work to keep adoption a topic on the table, but not to talk about it so much that it becomes tiresome or an overwhelming focus.

I expect all my children will (eventually) tell me all the ways in which I did them wrong, the ways I could have been a better mother. I was too strict. I forced them to be vegetarian. I refused to have a T.V. in the house. But I can’t imagine they will complain that we treated our adopted and biological children differently–based on that fact alone. We have 3 daughters and 1 son; I worry more about treating my gender-different kids equally, more than my arrival-different kids.

Every child requires a different kind of parenting, and their own special love. Figuring out what that is and how to do it–that’s a parent’s job.