Adoption and the ownership of children

Abstract

Adoption has traditionally served infants, but an increasing number of children today come to adoption from divorce and remarriage and from foster placement. Many of these children are well out of infancy and have memories of and even existing relationships with persons from their past. A sense of continuity is clearly important to a child's development. The biological parents' serving as an object of projection by the adoptive family and an object of mystery and fascination by the adoptive child are well known sources of clinical problems. These phenomena might exert less influence if some kind of contact between all three parties were maintained. Suggestions for changing adoption policy open the door to potentially destructive relationships and loyalty conflicts. On the other hand, there are reasonable questions as to how well current practices serve all children. It is time to further our understanding of the effects of current practice so that adoption might optimally meet the needs of these young people.A desire to assure oneself of a degree of immortality and a sense of continuity through children is a basic human motivation [1]. While the adult wish for continuity through children is accepted without question, the need of the child adopted after infancy for continuity with his or her past is an issue which has not been adequately considered.For the most part, adoption has traditionally served infants, and adoption practice reflects the intent to recreate for the adoptive family the image of a nuclear biological family. Today, however, an increasing number of children come to adoption from divorce and remarriage and from the child welfare system. Many of these children are well out of infancy and have memories of and even existing relationships with persons from their past. Yet most of them must experience the complete break with former relationships as stipulated in a recent case: "public policy demands that an adoption carry with it a complete breaking of all ties" [2].There are indications of change in the legal area which mitigate some of the rigidities of accepted adoption practice. Some of the variations on Dr. Derdeyn is Associate Professor of

Do “Little Emperors” Get More Than “Little Empresses”? Boy-Girl Gender Discrimination as Evidenced by Consumption Behavior of Chinese Households

“…The expression of PDT takes many forms, including day-to-day parent-child interactions (psychological aspects) to goods parents give their children (physical aspects). As parents tend to regard their children as possessions, children can be viewed as an extension of the self (Derdeyn 1979). From a parent's point of view, giving more (or fewer) material objects to their children is not only a way of conveying how much they care about their children, it is also a way of attempting to bring about desired behaviors in their children.…”

Place Attachment

“…Until the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, however, women were treated as chattel property in much of the world (Dworkin, 1981). Children are still legally regarded in many ways as possessions of their parents or adoptive parents (Derdeyn, 1979). And recent battles over rights to abortion (Paul & Paul, 1979) and the embryo (Zelizer, 1985) show that we regard even the unborn possessively.…”