| This rating
sheet was developed by the Child Welfare
League of America as part of a publicity effort aimed at medical
professionals. Child welfare leaders, especially in social
work, had long tried to explain to their counterparts in medicine,
law, and midwifery why they had no business making placements on
their own: because adoption was a highly specialized procedure.
The persistence of independent adoptions suggests that they were
less than entirely successful, although adoption
statistics indicate that the proportion of non-agency placements
dropped to an all-time low around 1970. The criteria listed
here also illustrate the therapeutic orientation of home
studies during the postwar era. The emphasis was on evaluating
applicants' emotional qualifications, but standards like "acceptance
of sex roles" indicated that judgments of psychological health
and illness were intimately related to normative (and rapidly changing)
social prescriptions rather than fixed or objective truths established
by science.
Some Criteria in Evaluating Couples
Who Wish to Adopt a Child*
Total personality |
Feelings about children |
Family relationships |
Basic love for children |
Work adjustment |
Ability to deal with developmental problems |
Relationship with friends |
Sensitivity to, and understanding and tolerance of, children's
difficulties |
Activities in community |
Capacity to accept child as he is or may develop |
Emotional Maturity |
Feeling about childlessness and readiness to
adopt |
Capacity to give and receive love |
Absence of guilt regarding infertility |
Acceptance of sex roles |
Mutual decision to adopt |
Ability to assume responsibility for care, guidance, and
protection of another person |
Ability to tell child he is adopted |
Reasonable emotional stability |
Attitudes toward natural parents |
Flexibility |
Motivation |
Self-respect |
Desire to have more nearly complete life |
Ability to cope with problems, disappointments, and frustration |
Desire to accept parental responsibility |
Quality of marital relationship |
Desire to contribute to development of another human being |
Successful continuance of marriage not dependent on children |
Desire to love and be loved |
Respect for each other |
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Capacity to accept a child born to other parents |
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* Agencies select adoptive parents by evaluating applicants with
respect to characteristics which seem desirable in persons capable
of developing into parents who will meet an adoptive child's needs.
Adoption agencies may have policies with regard to the age and religion
of the adoptive parents; they may require that a prospective adoptive
couple be married a certain period and may give preference to childless
couples. Among the reasons for rejecting an adoption application
may be the couple's advanced physical or mental illness, overemphasis
on prestige, or wish to replace a lost child.
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