The excellent article by Maggie Jones on “Looking for Their Children’s Birth Mothers” happily coincided with a conference on international adoption this weekend. Both your article and our conference came to the conclusion that cross-racial succeeds best when parents respond to their children’s questions rather than force answers on them. One presenter at our conference told of her own gratitude that she had been included in her adoptive parents’ culture rather than being forced into a necessarily superficial and artificial submersion in the culture of her homeland. Parents, researchers, and therapists agreed that once a person develops an identity as member of the family in which she is raised she can become interested in the culture of her homeland and her birth family. The most important thing the adoptive family can do is to include the their child in what authentically matters to their family, and allow her to be the leader in restoring what interests her as she grows up. Readers interested in the papers given at the conference can find them on http://www.InternationalPsychoanalysis.net
–Arlene Kramer Richards, North American Cochair of the Committee of Women and Psychoanalysis on the International Psychoanalytic Association
Click Here to Read: The Article by Maggie Jones in the New York Times.