Adoption, identity and the child's best interest

The last two decades has seen a surge in inter-country adoptions in many Western countries. Along with Ireland and Spain, Sweden remains one of the countries receiving the largest number of such adoptees per capita – more than 135 per million. Now a series of inter-disciplinary projects by three researchers at the Department of Child Studies at Linköping University examine the politics of adoption, identity issues and notions of ‘the child’s best interest'..

Adoption research has long been dominated by psychologically oriented studies on the adjustment, psychological health and identity formation of inter-country adoptees. Adoption, however, is a phenomenon that not only concerns individual children, mothers and fathers. In adoption, families are created with the aid of legislation and public policies. It is the courts and the child welfare authorities that decide who is a suitable parent, and it is through bilateral agreements that children from faraway countries receive new mothers and fathers in Sweden. Hence, adoption is politics and it is only by critically scrutinising the notions of the family and the best interests of the child that underlie adoption policies, and by taking seriously the voices of those children and adults who were adopted as a result of these policies, that the legislation on and regulation of adoption can be improved. By having an inter-disciplinary approach to adoption, including for example history, psychology and social work, this is what the research group constituted by Judith Lind, Cecilia Lindgren and Karin Zetterqvist Nelson is striving to do.

“The official Swedish policy,” says Cecilia Lindgren, PhD, one of the three researchers collaborating on the adoption projects, “is that every adopted child has the right to know everything there is to know about their background.” It’s a commendable policy, but not always so easy in practice. It has to be negotiated with the policies and views of the sending countries. Some may think that it is often too painful for the child to discover their background and that it would be better to make a ‘fresh start’ as part of their new family. “Today however, the lack of information is a larger problem. In many countries abandoning a child is not allowed, and therefore many children are left in the street or in public places with no information about their background”, Lindgren says. In those cases there is actually very little to tell.

“With the increase in inter-country adoptions, questions concerning the roots, origins and backgrounds of inter-country adoptees have gained importance,” says Judith Lind, PhD, principal investigator of the ‘culture of origin and culture of living’ project. Through an analysis of the information material published by the Swedish Intercountry Adoption Board, she has found that the origins and backgrounds of intercountry adoptees have been ascribed importance for various reasons. “In the 1970s it was seen as easing their sense of culture shock upon arrival; in the 1980s it was viewed as important for the child to gain a sense of pride about their roots, to counter xenophobia; and by the 1990s it was considered helping them better understand the events and decisions that led to their adoption.”

Through analysing articles from 1991-2000 in Att adoptera (To adopt), the magazine of Sweden’s largest adoption agency, Lindgren and Lind found the majority of adoptees featured were portrayed as having an interest in their roots and visiting their country of origin. In these representations of young adoptees and their reasoning on roots trips, three positions available to roots travellers were discursively construed: the ‘homecomer’ spoke of returning to a place they belonged to, the ‘explorer’ set out to establish new relations with the birth country and its people, while the ‘guest’ has an interest in their birth country but has no urge to belong there.

So how do inter-country adoptees themselves feel about the importance of origin and identity? As part of the above project, a number of young adult inter-country adoptees were interviewed in focus groups.

“The adoptees’ narratives revolved around two themes – time and space,” says Professor Karin Zetterqvist Nelson, the third researcher in the project group. “The time dimension related to the way the participants construed their life trajectory from the moment they were separated from their biological parents and adopted by their Swedish family. The space dimension related to the process of being transported from their birthplace to Sweden. But the way these dimensions were handled by each participant varied extensively, depending on their individual experiences.”

Through her own research, ‘Adoption, parenthood and the child’s best interest 1917-1975’, Lindgren says you can see the state and adoptive professionals debating the same central question as today, for domestic adoptions and later for inter-country ones, namely, what is in the child’s best interest and what families should adoptees grow up in? “Meanings ascribed to “the child’s best interest” also contain basic norms for what constitute a “real” family. In the 1920s, what gave the adoptive family legitimacy, and made it into a real family, was the parents’ will to assume responsibility for the child. In the 1950s a real family was a family that corresponded to an ideal version of the biologically based family. At the start of the 1970s a real family was an open and social family. It was supposed to be a platform for the child who was to acquire a place of its own in society”.

The question concerning who is a good parent and in what families adoptees should grow up is central, and the focus of the most recent project. A recurrent theme in the recommendations issued by Swedish authorities as well as in the interviews with adoptees is the role of the adoptive parents. The assessment of their ability to provide for an adopted child is an important aspect of the responsibility of the state to ensure that the best interests of the child are safeguarded in every adoption.

Although adoption is a research field that is growing quickly and that has increasingly recognised the role of the state and its authorities, prior research of adoption homestudies in inter-country adoption is scarce. In the project ‘Assessing adoption applicants. Family and parenthood norms in adoption homestudies’, the research group therefore aims to analyse homestudy reports as well as to interview social workers and presumptive adoptive parents about the homestudy process.

Click here to access the Child Studies website in the Department of Thematic Studies at Linköping University.

Published: Wednesday, 28th September 2011