Adopciones monoparentales de niños y niñas con «necesidades especiales»: entre el déficit y el empoderamiento

Abstract

Single-parent adoptions of children with "special needs": Between deficit and empowerment Policies and practices of domestic and intercountry adoption explicitly and tacitly establish a matching between older children-or with some type of special need-and single-parent applicants, both of which are usually given lower priority. Based on the results of two qualitative research studies conducted in Chile and Spain with single adoptive mothers, we analyze the heterogeneous motivations and preferences of adopters with respect to the profiles of children declared adoptable, the meanings attributed to technical criteria and professional interventions, especially in the suitability and matching processes. The traditional perspective that considers single-parenthood as a risk factor and this profile of children as the most vulnerable reproduces practices of stigmatization and discrimination. We discuss the need to develop approaches, criteria and interventions focused on the capacities and resources of individuals who have been generally stigmatized in adoptive processes, as well as the political and institutional need and obligation to provide support and support resources in the pre-and post-adoptive phase.

Single mothers by choice in Spain: Parenting and psychosocial adjustment in adopted and ART children.

“…The fact that these differences were observed among adopted children but not among those conceived using ART may therefore be attributed not to the fact of being brought up by a single mother itself, but rather to factors that may be related to adoption by single mothers. Firstly, there seems to be a tendency to place children with special needs with single mothers rather than with couples (Raleigh, 2012), a phenomenon found also in Spain (Salvo Agoglia & Jociles Rubio, 2019), and it may be that this occurred also in our sample, although we do not have accurate information in this regard since we did not collect data regarding the status of the children at the moment of adoption. Secondly, it may be that this difference is due to the origin of the adopted children: While the majority of two-parent families in our sample adopted children from China, in the case of single mothers, as many adopted from China as from Eastern European countries.…”