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"Adoptive parents United States 20th century."
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Everybody Else
In the popular imagination, the twenty years after World War II are associated with simpler, happier, more family-focused living. We think of stereotypical baby boom families like the Cleavers-white, suburban, and well on their way to middle-class affluence. For these couples and their children, a happy, stable family life provided an antidote to the anxieties and uncertainties of the emerging nuclear age.
But not everyone looked or lived like the Cleavers. For those who could not have children, or have as many children as they wanted, the postwar baby boom proved a source of social stigma and personal pain. Further, in 1950 roughly one in three Americans made below middle-class incomes, and over fifteen million lived under Jim Crow segregation. For these individuals, home life was not an oasis but a challenge, intimately connected to the era's many political and social upheavals.
Everybody Else provides a comparative analysis of diverse postwar families and examines the lives and case records of men and women who applied to adopt or provide pre-adoptive foster care in the 1940s and 1950s. It considers an array of individuals-both black and white, middle and working class-who found themselves on the margins of a social world that privileged family membership. These couples wanted adoptive and foster children in order to achieve a sense of personal mission and meaning, as well as a deeper feeling of belonging to their communities. But their quest for parenthood also highlighted the many inequities of that era. These individuals' experiences seeking children reveal that the baby boom family was about much more than \"togetherness\" or a quiet house in the suburbs; it also shaped people's ideas about the promises and perils of getting ahead in postwar America.
eBook
Not in This Family
Many Americans hold fast to the notion that gay men and women, more often than not, have been ostracized from disapproving families. Not in This Family challenges this myth and shows how kinship ties were an animating force in gay culture, politics, and consciousness throughout the latter half of the twentieth century.Historian Heather Murray gives voice to gays and their parents through an extensive use of introspective writings, particularly personal correspondence and diaries, as well as through published memoirs, fiction, poetry, song lyrics, movies, and visual and print media. Starting in the late 1940s and 1950s, Not in This Family covers the entire postwar period, including the gay liberation and lesbian feminist movements of the 1960s and 1970s, the establishment of PFLAG (Parents, Families, and Friends of Lesbians and Gays), and the AIDS crisis of the 1980s and 1990s. Ending her story with an examination of contemporary coming-out rituals, Murray shows how the personal that was once private became political and, finally, public.In exploring the intimate, reciprocal relationship of gay children and their parents, Not in This Family also chronicles larger cultural shifts in privacy, discretion and public revelation, and the very purpose of family relations. Murray shows that private bedrooms and consumer culture, social movements and psychological fashions, all had a part to play in transforming the modern family.
eBook
White on Black: Can White Parents Teach Black Adoptive Children How to Understand and Cope With Racism?
In this article, the authors examine White parents' endeavors toward the racial enculturation and inculcation of their transracially adopted Black children. Drawing on in-depth interviews, the authors identify and analyze themes across the specific race socialization strategies and practices White adoptive parents used to help their adopted Black children to develop a positive racial identity and learn how to effectively cope with issues of race and racism. The central aim of this article is to examine how these lessons about race help to connect family members to U. S. society's existing racial hierarchy and how these associations position individuals to help perpetuate or challenge the deeply embedded and historical structures of White supremacy. The authors use the notion of White racial framing to move outside of the traditional arguments for or against transracial adoption to instead explore how a close analysis of the adoptive parents' racial instructions may serve as a learning tool to foster more democratic and inclusive forms of family and community.
Journal Article
Lyman C. Wynne and Transformation of the Field of Family-and-Schizophrenia
(It also included a few young researchers from all over the world, including the writer of this piece, a very wet-behind-his-ears witness of that encounter of giants.) The conference evolved in the sometimes-fascinating, sometimes-boring way conferences do, until Seymour Kety (Harvard University), David Rosenthal (NIMH), and their team introduced the first results of a totally novel research strategy on the subject: the \"high-risk adopted-away\" approach, namely, a life history follow-up of offspring of a parent with confirmed diagnosis of schizophrenia given for adoption at birth to a family without any known pathology. If, when compared with a matched cohort of offspring of parents without psychopathology also given away to similarly nonpathology adoptive families, the \"high-risk\" cohort would show a higher prevalence of schizophrenia during early adulthood, then this would prove that schizophrenia is genetically predetermined regardless of family interaction variables.\\n The degree of adoptive family functionality/dysfunctionality-a composite index of global ratings and qualitative observations, including Bob Beavers's questionnaire and variables stemming from Lyman and Margaret Singer's earlier research on family and schizophrenia (Singer, 1968; Tienari et al., 1987)-proved to be a significant predictor of the development of schizophrenia-spectrum disorders in adoptees of high genetic risk when reaching early adulthood: A high index of functionality in the adoptive families acted as a protective factor against the expression of the genetic trend of the \"highrisk\" adopted offspring.
Journal Article
Foreign Adoptions and the Evolution of Irish Adoption Policy, 1945–52
In recent years it has become increasingly common for childless couples from the U.S. and Western Europe to look overseas--to Eastern Europe and Asia--to adopt the \"unwanted\" children that are no longer so readily available for adoption at home. In Ireland at the turn of the twenty-first century the fact that Irish couples are enthusiastic participants in this \"trade\" has been juxtaposed with the stark and unpalatable reality that, as late as the 1960s, thousands of healthy Irish children were sent to the United States for adoption because they were illegitimate and thus \"unwanted\" at home. Until the 1952 Adoption Act provided for the legal transfer of parental rights from biological to adoptive parents, the only alternative to an institutional existence or an insecure boarding-out arrangement for these unwanted children was adoption by foreign, primarily American, families. From the early 1940s to the mid-1960s thousands of Irish children were sent abroad under an informal (and probably illegal and unconstitutional) adoption scheme. This article examines the story of Ireland's overseas adoption scheme, and the evolution of Ireland's adoption policy in the 1940s and 1950s, and is part of a twentieth-century Irish social history that has for the most part been neglected by historians.
Journal Article
The Determination of Child Custody
This article reviews briefly the history of child custody decision making and describes current custodial arrangements in the United States. It examines both the manner in which parents and courts make decisions regarding custody and access, and the changes in visiting patterns in recent decades. The author discusses the impact of reforms in the law and the implementation of newer dispute resolution and educational interventions, and then makes recommendations for policy and practice.
Journal Article
Families Made by Science: Arnold Gesell and the Technologies of Modern Child Adoption
This essay considers the effort to transform child adoption into a modern scientific enterprise during the first half of the twentieth century via a case study of Arnold Gesell (1880-1961), a Yale developmentalist well known for his studies of child growth and the applied technologies that emerged from them: normative scales promising to measure and predict development. Scientific adoption was a central aspiration for many human scientists, helping professionals, and state regulators. They aimed to reduce the numerous hazards presumed to be inherent in adopting children, especially infants, who were not one's \"own.\" By importing insights and techniques drawn from the world of science into the practical world of family formation, scientific adoption stood for kinship by design. This case study explores one point of intersection between the history of science and the history of social welfare and social policy, simultaneously illustrating the cultural progress and power of scientific authority and the numerous obstacles to its practical realization.
Journal Article