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HomepageRECOMMENDATION 1: All adoptions of orphanage children should be considered by both prospective parents and adoption officials to be special-needs adoptions. Like other special-needs adoptions, e.g., those of physically or mentally handicapped children, adoption of orphanage children must be acknowledged to involve extra commitments of parents' time, energy, acquisition of expertise, and willingness to work with helping agencies.
RECOMMENDATION 2: Because each month a child spends in orphanage contributes to lower intellectual ability and more behavior problems in that child, officials arranging international adoptions from orphanages should aim to place the youngest children available whenever that is possible. When older children are placed, parents must be made aware of the greater commitment and resources that will be necessary to rear these children. No parent should ever adopt an older child believing that because the child is past infancy, parenting will be easier.
Comment: There are times that parents will want to or will be forced by circumstances to adopt older children from orphanages. Some countries of origin will not release young children. Some specify a maximum permissible age difference between parents and child, so that older parents must adopt older children. Some prospective parents are willing to, or prefer to, adopt a child with severe problems. The intention of this Recommendation is not to deny prospective parents the opportunity to adopt older children, but to make them and the people arranging the adoption fully aware of the greater commitment involved.
RECOMMENDATION 3: Agencies and individuals facilitating international adoptions should be required to provide specialized pre-adoption preparation for parents planning to adopt from orphanages.
RECOMMENDATION 3a: In addition to dealing with the customary concerns of adoptive parents, such pre-adoption preparation should include detailed information concerning the short-term and long-term characteristics of adopted orphanage children and their distinctive problems.
RECOMMENDATION 3b: Pre-adoption preparation should stress the personal and family resources necessary for parents to deal with the problems of orphanage children, especially older children who have spent a long time in orphanage. Parents should be cautioned that the time and energy necessary to meet an orphanage child's needs are such that it is unwise to adopt more than one child at a time, or to bring the child into a family that already has several young children.
RECOMMENDATION 3c: Pre-adoption programs should provide opportunities for the prospective adoptive parents to have contact with support groups or individual parents who have already adopted children from an orphanage setting similar to the one from which, they hope to adopt.
RECOMMENDATION 3d: Pre-adoption programs should involve both parents in two-parent families, and should help parents to reach agreement concerning whether family resources of energy, understanding, commitment, and time are or are not sufficient to meet the needs of an orphanage child.
RECOMMENDATION 4: All internationally adopted children should receive a thorough medical checkup upon arrival in Canada.
RECOMMENDATION 4a: Physician Guidelines for Medical Assessment of Children Adopted from Foreign Countries should be prepared and publicized in each province by relevant medical authorities.
Comment: The Manitoba College of Physicians and Surgeons has such a set of guidelines.
RECOMMENDATION 4b: A brochure for parents to present to their physicians should be prepared. The brochure would briefly suggest medical tests that should be done on all international adoptees, and would further alert physicians to the more detailed Guidelines (Recommendation 4a).
Comment: The B. C. Adoptive Parents Association has prepared a brochure for parents to present to their physicians on the child's first visit.
RECOMMENDATION 5: All children adopted from orphanages should be entered into infant development programs or specialized preschool programs for older children, in order to assist their development. It is important that these programs include parent participation in order to help parents provide extra stimulation and guidance in the home. They should also be skilled in linking families and children with other community resources that will be of benefit.
RECOMMENDATION 6: Agencies facilitating international adoptions 'Should be required to provide post-adoption support for parents adopting from orphanages, and all such parents should be encouraged to participate in the support program.
RECOMMENDATION 6a: Post-adoption support programs for parents of orphanage children should include the following topics: the promotion of parent-child attachment; teaching good social behavior; and constructive ways of dealing with behavior problems such as attention-demanding behavior, distractibility, hyperactivity, and indiscriminate friendliness,.
RECOMMENDATION 6b: Introduction to these topics could be provided either in a series of group sessions or through a series of individual consultations. In either case, counsellors skilled in the identified areas should be available to families on an individual basis, and information should be provided concerning community resources available to help parents on an ongoing basis, e.g., parenting courses, speech therapy, and special education.
Comment: The availability of specialized support groups is especially important for parents of children from orphanages. Because of their children's distinctive problems, they may not feel comfortable as part of a group that includes parents who have adopted domestically. Trading arrangements for respite care may be made within such specialized groups.
RECOMMENDATION 7: Longitudinal research should be undertaken on adoptees from orphanages in other countries, as well as continued with the present sample, in order to investigate the effects of orphanage variables that may help prevent poor outcomes, for example, better education and training of caretakers, lower child-to-caretaker ratio, low caretaker turnover, less age-segregation of children, better nutritional and health standards, and the provision of play and education programs for children.
Comment: Research on orphanages of varying quality in different places and times has been remarkably consistent in showing similar adverse effects of orphanage rearing. It is important to study how long-lasting these effects are. Furthermore, because it is presently impossible for all children in the world to be reared in family settings, there are both humanitarian and practical reasons for learning which specific factors of orphanage life are most damaging and could be remediated to provide orphanage-reared children with the best start possible.