Systematic efforts to locate families
for children who were “hard-to-place” did not really
occur until midcentury. It was only after World War II that agencies
began to test the feasibility of adoptions previously ruled out
of bounds because they were considered difficult, risky, and likely
to fail: African-American children
and children of racially and ethnically mixed heritage, children
with physical and mental disabilities, older children, and sibling
groups. Efforts to arrange such adoptions challenged older views,
influenced by eugenics, that only normal,
white children were qualified for family life. Special needs adoptions
were founded on a novel philosophy at odds with matching:
“Adoption is appropriate for any child without family ties
who is in need of a family and for whom a family can be found to
meet his need.” This new slogan came to life for the American
public through the writing of Pearl
Buck, a best-selling novelist, and popular narratives like The
Family Nobody Wanted.
Anecdotal evidence strongly suggests that class differences have
significantly shaped Americans openness to the adoption of
children with special needs. Working-class adopters have tended
to be less demanding than their middle- and upper-class counterparts
that adoptees live up to high standards of intellectual achievement
or that children be scientifically selected to meet their specifications.
Before the special needs revolution at midcentury, when social workers
were still reluctant to place less-than-perfect children, many ordinary
families expressed both willingness and desire to raise many different
kinds of children as their own. At the same time, other would-be
adopters actively sought out children who would measure up to their
expectations for background, behavior, appearance, and education.
Well-educated adopters were particularly interested in identifying
children who could take advantage of a college education. (For examples,
see the Letters from Prospective
Adopters to Arnold Gesell, 1939-1950.)
By the 1960s, statewide adoption resource exchanges were helping
with special needs placements. In 1968, the national Adoption Resource
Exchange of North America (ARENA) was founded, partly as an outgrowth
of the Indian Adoption Project. New parent-led
organizations were also crucial in publicizing the needs of children
with a wide variety of special needs. The Open Door Society of North
America began in Montreal in 1959 and migrated to the United States
from Canada, where chapters began in many states. The Council on
Adoptable Children, headquartered in Ann Arbor, also emerged in
the 1960s. Led by adoptive parents Peter and Joyce Forsythe, the
group sponsored an important conference, “Frontiers in Adoption,”
in October 1967. By 1969, there were at least 47 organizations in
the United States whose mission was to advocate for “waiting”
children. Many were local groups, like Transracial Adoptive Parents
in Illinois and Families for Inter-Racial Adoption in Boston. In
the mid-1960s, single parent
adoptions were first tried in order to locate homes for hard-to-place
children.
Special needs pioneers changed adoption culture dramatically. Their
vision of family defied the claim that adoptive kinship had to be
invisible in order to be authentic, insisting instead on the purposeful
and open inclusion of difference. This value, in turn, reflected
an even broader shift in conceptions of national belonging and citizenship
in the United States after World War II. Special needs adoptions
symbolized the civil rights revolution within the adoption world.
Their accomplishment was not only to offer more different kinds
of families to more different kinds of children, but to openly welcome
multiculturalism and multiracialism within the family well as within
the history, demography, and politics of the country at large. |