Adoption Bloglandia

[marydell]

You know how certain parenting behaviors and beliefs kinda go together?  Like, moms who are into babywearing often also tend to be into breastfeeding, as well as sometimes co-sleeping and attachment parenting.  I enjoy reading about all of those things, although I don't practice them, except occasional babywearing back when my baby could reasonably be "worn," instead of "hauled."  So my blog reading on that front has been enjoyable, even though much of it doesn't apply to me.

In the land of special-needs parenting blogs, I don't encounter a lot of parents whose kids have the same specific needs as mine, but I do encounter an attitude I like, particularly among parents of kids with developmental delays and emotional challenges.  There's a lot of focus on the unique situation of each child, and a very strong emphasis on communication and reasoning--at least in the blogs I read.  So, yay that; another blog environment where nothing really makes me go "guh?" except the very occasional anti-vaccination thing.

Unfortunately, in the land of transracial adoption and toddler/orphan adoption, there is often a correlation with an authoritarian ideal of parenting, and a control-based approach to solving all problems of behavior and attachment, up to and including forced eye contact, holding, and so forth.  Which is a style of parenting that bothers me a lot, particularly when applied to children who have already been through trauma and/or abuse.  A lot of adoptive parents are also very religious, which sometimes intersects with either authoritarian parenting or racial "colorblindness."  It's not impossible to find adoptive-parent blogs that feature non-authoritarian parenting & racial awareness in a single package, but sifting through the other ones can be....unpleasant.

Is there something you're passionate about, that seems to often go hand-in-hand with something you're passionately against?  (Despite the serious topic of this entry, feel free to provide facetious and/or silly answers to this question :)

Comments

[celestialsoda.livejournal.com]

Unfortunately, in the land of transracial adoption and toddler/orphan adoption, there is often a correlation with an authoritarian ideal of parenting, and a control-based approach to solving all problems of behavior and attachment, up to and including forced eye contact, holding, and so forth.

Not to mention that this quack (and oft times abusive) interpretation of attachment/bonding is also derived from equally pseudoscientific "treatments" for autistic children.

[marydell.livejournal.com]

It seems like a lot of these techniques would be especially upsetting for an autistic child, particularly if they have sensory issues. Unwanted touching is bad enough if you're not hypersensitive; if you are it can be really awful.

ETA: to clarify: as I understand it, some autistic kids and kids with other serious control disorders need to be restrained at times to prevent them from hurting themselves...but these therapies do not seem to be about that.

[celestialsoda.livejournal.com]

Unwanted touching is bad enough if you're not hypersensitive; if you are it can be really awful.

Yup yup, you got it! Then again, it doesn't fly too well with adopted children who've been physically abused and/or molested, either.

these therapies do not seem to be about that.
You're right - these "therapies" dictate coercive restraint NOT as an emergency measure but as the actual treatment itself.

Plus, when it comes to us adopted bastards (whether we've already got a history of abuse or not), the Attachment Quacks compensate for our relative lack of sensitivity by going whole-hog on the forced holding front! Nothing like coercive restraint COMBINED with food/water/sleep deprivation (or overload - ex: Cassandra Killpack & Andrew Burd cases) and the odd beating to really create that loving, lifelong trauma bond, you know?

[marydell.livejournal.com]

The idea that an attachment bond has to be forced is...well, horrible on many levels, but it also seems kind of anti-adoption. There seems to be this assumption that practically every adoption has such a broken foundation that normal attachment-theory-based nurturing and communication can't create a connection. Or maybe the idea is that the children are broken. This is the thing I hate so much about authoritarian parenting -- the idea that children are inherently sinful or subhuman, and need to be broken in order to be built up. Ugh.

[rikibeth.livejournal.com]

This may not be precisely what you're looking for, but it makes me incredibly uncomfortable that some of the most vocal defenders of Israel's right to exist are scary Dominionists who actively hope to hasten the Rapture.

(My feelings on Israel are complicated and conflicted. My most pressing concern is that I'd like to be able to stop monitoring my inbox for the "Your cousins did not get blown up in the market this week, either" e-mails.)

Oh! And, much as I strongly identify as feminist, and find much of value in radical feminist critiques of current society, I am deeply troubled by the pro-censorship subset of the anti-porn theorists, and even more troubled by the transphobic ideas that many radical feminists espouse.

[marydell.livejournal.com]

Amen to all of that.

[tacithydra.livejournal.com]

Yes! Ditto this!

[gailmom.livejournal.com]

Don't know about with blogs, but in face to face interaction in my town: homeschooling and/or attachment parenting far more often than not go hand in hand with fundamentalist christianity.

Since I do practice the first, and don't practice the other, it can be disheartening to find that most mommy groups will disown us when it becomes clear I will not be taking my heathen children to meet Christ. :S

[marydell.livejournal.com]

OMG, I am giggling now as I picture you trying to make small talk with the nice Christian ladies who don't want their kids learning about dinosaurs in school!

[gailmom.livejournal.com]

now that it has been long enough the heartbreaking loneliness has made way for the humor: allow me to give you this picture...

imagine the look on a fundamentalist mom's face, as my child tells hers about how the goddess and the god live together in heaven, and how we are all made by the goddess *with the help of the god*

~snicker~

watching hostess requirements battle with religious beliefs has a certain sad amusement value.

[bifemmefatale.livejournal.com]

Well, the obvious one would be the kink community. Friends, lovers, tribe and empowering, lifechanging experiences...and super-entitled unfeminist dominant guys who think all women are or should be submissive dollies, plus I was sexually assaulted once at a play party (fwiw by a clueless newb who did not understand the rules or kink etiquette).

[bifemmefatale.livejournal.com]

PS: have you ever read this blog? What do you think of it? Zie writes quite a bit about transracial adoption, mostly critically. I gather zie is Asian, adopted by white parents.

http://syndicated.livejournal.com/resist_racism/profile

[marydell.livejournal.com]

I love that blog. I like a lot of blogs that are varying degrees of against adoption or against transracial adoption, even though I'm obviously very much in favor of transracial & other adoption, and even though a lot of bloggers in that arena are exclusively talking about closed, international adoption. I think there are a lot of very big problems in adoption and a lot of cluelessness about race among white adoptive parents, and it needs to be discussed and changed.

Even if I vehemently disagree with someone about adoption, I can enjoy reading their blog as long as they're not also parenting in a way that makes me uncomfortable. I don't mind if someone merely thinks I'm an imperialistic asshole--they have a fair point. (Resist Racism doesn't strike me as being very anti-adoption anyway, just very anti-racism, so it's on my list of "awesome!" blogs)

[unhappytriad.livejournal.com]

I ran into the homeschooling thing as well; middle kid got into a terrible situation at school and was facing a 45-day stint in alternative school (last straw: "almost" turning over a desk!). I withdrew her and homeschooled her for a year, re-enrolled her in a different school, and she's done great ever since. But anyway, the homeschoolers I encountered were either fundamentalists or vaccines-cause-autism-everything-is-poisonous types. I don't have much in common with either group, and I did actually want this kid to be a participant in mainstream culture, so I pretty much put together my own curriculum from the state standards and let taekwondo class be her socialization time with other kids. I don't know what I would have done if I'd had to homeschool her for more than a year, but as it happened it was a nice clean break after 6 years of unremitting bullying and harrassment and boredom with make-work.

[marydell.livejournal.com]

My SIL has just started homeschooling my gifted+hyperactive nephew, and it's going very well. I don't know if she's met any anti-science homeschoolers yet--they will horrify her!

[vcmw]

On the lighter side, I suppose: I'm pretty passionate about the value of words as literature, the importance of storytelling in life, and all that, but every formal discussion of the importance of literature/story has involved either a definition of literature or a logic for that importance that makes me grind my teeth in frustration.

More broadly - education. Love learning, love talking with people about stuff, but there's so much icky authoritarian gunk mingled with the whole concept of evaluating knowledge in a formal group setting.

[ashnistrike.livejournal.com]

It would be nice if the people who agreed with me on parenting weren't so fundamentalist about it. Breastfeeding, for example, I am very much in favor of, but when it's not possible I don't think it's a disaster. Likewise natural childbirth. And I think babywearing and co-sleeping are mostly for the parents' convenience, and should not be clung to obsessively. And really, it's okay if you put the kid down sometimes and leave the room. Good for your sanity even. And why is it not ever the fathers who are expected to spend their days giving the kid constant skin contact?

Do not even get me started on the anti-vaccination movement. There are people whose lives depend on herd immunity.

[marydell.livejournal.com]

LOL, yeah to all of that. We had a lofty goal of no-TV-before-age-2 that went by the wayside when he was in the hospital. We'd managed to keep him from seeing any TV up until that point (age about 7 months). But for 3 days he had an IV in his hand, and no other hand to play with...we just finally were like, ah, fuckit, watch some cartoons, kiddo. It doesn't seem to have rotted his brain yet. Now we watch about 20 minutes most days and only feel a little guilty. And if he wasn't in day care doing cool stuff and activities and playtime all day, it would be probably be a lot more than 20 minutes.

[ashnistrike.livejournal.com]

I guess the "passionate" there would be that I'm passionate about moderation and a willingness to experiment with different techniques until you find what works best for your kid. Not much of a community for that, I'm afraid.

[marydell.livejournal.com]

I think you need a button that says "passionately moderate."

[almeda.livejournal.com]

I think I do, too. :->

Beka is getting more 'moving video on a screen' time than my guiltybrain is comfortable with, because when I'm tired and she won't be put down the only thing I can do to retain MY sanity is watch youtube on my laptop.

She likes nature videos (esp 'The Empire of the Ants' from PBS).

[marydell.livejournal.com]

Ooo, ants, I'll have to check that out. Right now we mainly let him watch bits of some kid-oriented cartoons on Nickelodeon, that we make bearable for ourselves by engaging in meta while we watch.

I wasn't sure how to feel the day that Charlie reached up onto the couch, got hold of the remote, and instead of pushing buttons on it he handed it to me and then turned to look pointedly at the TV. Clever baby! Bad mother!

I think I'm ok with it at this point, though - he's got good concentration, he likes books, he doesn't watch a lot, and he reeeallly enjoys his particular shows. Since he has to live with a bunch of health-related restrictions, it's nice to be able to indulge him where I can.

[almeda.livejournal.com]

When I was growing up, my mother imposed the following rules about TV in her house(*):

Anything (a) on PBS or (b) contained in the nightly network news broadcast, was whitelisted. Later, when TNG started, 'any episode of Star Trek' was also put on the whitelist.

Aside from that, the TV was not to be on except by very special, applied-for-in-advance dispensation. Sometimes we'd watch movies that were being aired (or later, rented ones).

This is why, unlike most of my age-mates, I'd never heard of Schoolhouse Rock until after I was out of high school -- it was on ABC on weekdays, so I never got to see it.

On the other hand, if PBS (11 or 20) found it fit to air, Mom saw no reason why I shouldn't watch it, so I saw a lot of nature shows and BBC products. :->

Watching some of them as an adult, I'm taken aback at how overdone and even somewhat melodramatic many of those classic nature shows are, but I was clearly the right age for them the first time around. And MAN do I know a lot about nature now that I wouldn't if I hadn't spent hours every week with Marty Stouffer and David Attenborough and Jacques Cousteau! Plus I learned to do the accents. :->


* -- at Dad's house on visitation weekends, the rules were rather different; also, Mom didn't try to control what I did or didn't watch at the after-school program (where programming was basically decided by majority vote of the kids present who wanted to watch the one TV available).