In this conference
presentation, a representative of the Montreal-based Open Door Society
described the revolution in thinking about matching
that accompanied the era of special
needs adoptions. The emphasis on resemblance and similarity
was supplanted by an appreciation for children’s needs and
adults’ abilities to meet them. This transformed adoption
from a selective operation that included promises of predictability
and practices such as home studies
to a much more inclusive and educational process that required everyone
involved to tolerate uncertainty as well as difference. For more
information on the research and theory of H. David Kirk, which is
mentioned by McCrea, see the description of his classic 1964 book,
Shared Fate.
As all of you know here, we were on a matching
binge for years and years. The pediatricians assured us that it
would be a better adoption for the child and the family if we simulated
the normal family in every way. If we had a family who wanted a
baby and we got them a baby as young as possible, then this was
the best chance there was for a successful adoption. Now research
being done at the moment shows that the rate of success in these
adoptions is actually not any higher than ones done in any other
way.
We came to the point where we began to ask ourselves: what does
create success in adoption? We have asked and studied, questioned
and compared and we haven’t reached very many conclusions,
but I think that what we discovered in Montreal in working with
the mixed race adoption program is a basic philosophy for social
work which has since been substantiated by Dr. H. David Kirk in
Shared Fate. He says adoption is not exactly the same as
having a biological family. The success, happiness and security
for a child and a family exists in knowing this, accepting it, and
not being unsettled by it. In other words, from the newborn baby
up to the oldest child, from the perfect match of blue eyes with
blue eyes through to the complete mix-match, adoption is still different
from giving birth. The most successful adoption is the one in which
agency and family are very aware that there will be differences
to be faced. They may not know all the answers to dealing with the
differences; social workers haven’t got all the answers because
we were the happy-ever-after school that placed the baby and then
let the adoptive family find out how to work it out. So we haven’t
answers, but we know the families that pull through are the ones
that live comfortably with difference.
When you talk about mix-match, I don’t think it makes any
difference what you’re mix-matching. It’s whether you
have a child who needs a home and a family who can accept the difference
that goes with him—the fact that he is adopted—that
he may be a different color—that he suffers from a handicap
they had never expected to work with. Whatever the difference, you
find parents who can work with a difference and then the only thing
you match is their potential with a child’s need.
We made a chart one time of what bothered adopting parents. Do
you know it’s much harder to place cross-eyes than it is epilepsy?
The proportion of people that will balk at the cross-eyed child
is much higher than that of ones who will balk at epilepsy. It’s
just one of these things that is difficult to understand. We had
theories that if people have dealt with a disability or had it in
their family and have seen it that it wasn’t an overwhelming
problem, they are better able to cope with it. But this isn’t
true either. Sometimes you’ll have a high proportion of people
who’ve had a disability in the family and they say, “Well,
I saw what a lot of trouble it was; I don’t want that,
but I’ll take something else I don’t know anything about.
I’d rather be surprised.”
So you write off having a pattern that you’re sure you can
put into your office manual, for instance, the formula that someone
will come in and ask for an epileptic because he knows what it means
to be an epileptic. As soon as you get it in your manual, he won’t
take the epileptic; he’ll take the asthmatic and do beautifully
with him. What you’re measuring is not difference in the sense
that some differences are good and some are bad. You’re trying
to find a universal parent—a person with the potential to
accept the fact that this child isn’t going to enter the home
the same way as a natural-born child would have done; a person who’s
motivated to involve the child, include him, accept him, absorb
him totally and completely as if he had come as a natural child;
a person who requires no support of background, of appearance, of
intellectual potential, no guarantees. This is not applicable just
to mix-match. This is a basic sound philosophy of all adoption. . . .
Audience: If you don’t match physically or intellectually,
how do you decide what child will go to what family?
McCrea: We gave up matching (simulating is probably a better
word to use)—we match need to potential. There’s no
problem at all. When your family comes in, you start this educative
approach and say: “We have these kinds of children coming
through our agency and this is the kind of thing they require.”
As you talk to the families, the ones that really want guarantees
drop out. . . .
Whey you meet the parents you tell them what you know about the
child and they talk to you about what they could work with and what
they couldn’t. In the end what you match is what the child
needs and what they can do for him. It isn’t just drawing
a name and picking a card. It’s giving up the matching (the
simulating) of externals and instead matching need to potential,
which is what you do in any personnel office, isn’t it, when
someone comes into you for work?
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