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Long before children suffer a physical death, there is the spiritual and emotional death that occurs when they are not loved, nourished, cherished, or cared for by a family. Children suffer silently, since they have no voice in the decisions made about their lives. They languish when they have no place to call home. They are vulnerable. When there is no one to protect them, they are exploited and hurt. Children, and their plight, capture our hearts. It is up to us to speak for them, to guard them, and, when they can't stay with their birth families, to find them homes.
A Peacock or a Crow: Stories, Interviews and Commentaries on Romanian Adoptions is about the children from Romania. The stories told and the lessons learned have much broader implications than just understanding Romanian adoption. If you are an adoptive parent of a child from overseas, this book will confirm your feelings and experiences. However, it may also challenge you to look at your child and circumstances differently. If you are thinking of adopting, this book may help you understand the many, complicated issues in international adoption. If you are a professional working with families who have adopted, this book may help you be a better practitioner in unraveling issues that families face. Finally, if you have any interest in history and Eastern Europe, this book can help you understand and look at Romania from a unique perspective.
At the core, this is a book about hope, about ordinary experiences, and about uncommon events. Life as an adoptive family and for an adoptee is unique. In fact, the beginning of life for many of the children adopted internationally was particularly unusual. They start life in a country far from where they will be raised. Understanding the country where children are born -- the history, folklore and tradition -- serves a few purposes. It lets parents know how their child may have become available for adoption. It could help adoptive families understand how they are perceived abroad. It may serve a more important purpose later. Children, as they get older, may want to understand more about their lives before adoption and about themselves as cultural or ethnic persons. Families can help their children in this quest and answer their questions if they have information to share with them.
Not only are early experiences for adoptees unique, they may also be traumatic. Most of these children have spent time in institutions. To understand this, we describe Romanian institutions and their effects on attachment and development. We also discuss how some of these effects may be reversible while others leave long lasting impressions on children, affecting their behavior and health for many years.
Parents who have "been through it" have valuable insight and can help in the preparation of new adoptive families. Agencies can use the information to educate potential adoptive parents, as well as help parents process what they can and cannot accept in adoptive placements. There is a warning here, however. You cannot take information about the group and apply it to a specific individual. For example, while we know that the longer children stay in institutions, the greater their delays in their development, we cannot say that since a specific child spent a year in an institution that he or she will be a year behind. Each child is different. Also, because we collected information about children at a specific point in time, we cannot say conclusively which is cause and which is effect. Many Romanians believe that only developmentally-delayed children are put in orphanages and institutions. Our knowledge from working and visiting Romania, along with 90 years of previous research, tells us otherwise. Finally, the information presented here relies on parent perception as well as our own analyses and interpretations. Parents' perceptions are critical for understanding the benefits and stresses of adoption. However, parent reports often differ from reports of professionals from the multiple disciplines that evaluate children. The fact is that there are many ways to understand children and look at the information -- all can be accurate, even if they are very different.
All parents profit from knowing the benefits and the risks in international adoption. There should be no filtering of information for families -- families have to be seen as capable of handling any information given to them. Some families, having been given accurate information about international adoption, adoption issues, and the adoption process, will choose not to pursue adoption. They recognize that they may not be successful or that there is a problem between their expectations and the realities of adoption. Still, most families are able to make the changes necessary to be successful in adoption. Success in adoption depends less on the issues that children bring to families and more on the characteristics of strong and successful adoptive families. While results to date are very positive about international adoption and about the children adopted from Romania, there are also areas of concern. Parents need complete and accurate information so they can make the best decisions about this option for building a family.
We wrote this book to accurately reflect the realities of adoption from Romania. We are not media hounds looking for a sensational story -- the media has not given accurate information. What we found were many remarkable stories about Romania and the adoption of children from Romania. We hope that the person reading this book will have a better understanding of the many complicated issues in international adoption in general, and about Romanian adoptions in particular.