Adoption: A bittersweet option?

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It was my idea and not my wifes. My daughter is everything to me. Best decision ever. We do everything together.

B

I agree tht adoption is better than foster care. With foster care, it's just luck of the draw, but they generally have poor reputations. With adoption, you get a real family support system that outlasts childhood. With foster care, even when it's done right, the responsibility for basic needs to include education gets spread out over an unusually large number of children, and the kids cycle through. Once you age out of the system, you better hope you worked harder than anyone else at school because you're going to depend on your educational background to take the next step. You'll likely get a free ride if you DO make it to college, but you'll still have to work to make rent. I'd highly suggest nursing, med school, or law school to pay off debts the quickest, save up your money living in a dump for a few years, then buy a good car and a nice house with cash in hand. But don't expect to have any kind of help along the way.

Adoption? You can always go home. Many people coming from foster care end up homeless.

And I can't imagine it really being that bad. I have two children already and a third on the way. We probably don't deserve to have children, but the beautiful thing it really doesn't take much to be a parent anyway. Keep them clean, clothed, and healthy and you've mastered the basics. Note I didn't say "happy"! That will come and go. It's just enough if you cover the basics and pay attention to them.

The killer part of it is that any moron can have babies and successfully parent them. We're aware that we're one or two steps from squalor. Because of all the thorough background checks that happen with the adoption process, I'm fairly sure that many if not most adopted kids end up in better conditions than our kids!

People really do inherit things like certain characteristics or disposition from their biological parents. I didn't believe that for years (I was a real "all nurture no nature" thinker) until I spent time around someone who was adopted and then met her bio parents for the first time in her late teens. It explained a LOT about her, and what she didn't have in common with her adoptive parents (but did with her biological ones).

That in itself would definitely be on my mind if I was adopted. As it is, the older I get, the more blown away I am by the parts of me that I have in common with my immediate and extended family...stuff I never would have expected.

Incidentally, the same girl I was speaking of in that first paragraph had an unexpected pregnancy not long after that, and insisted on raising the kid herself (because she'd had issues with being adopted). She is a first class f**k-up of a mother. Adoption would have done her children a world of good.

My dad adopted my brother and me, and did his best to do right by us. There were some hard times - he was harder on my brother than he ever was on me (maybe because I'm younger?) - and he and my mom eventually split up, but he's still my Dad and he always will be. I probably talk more on the phone with him than I do with my mom.

I personally would probably not adopt, however if I had a kid I wasn't ready for/didn't want/whatever situation said they would be in a horrible position, I would put it up for adoption, or give the child to my partner's aunt who had never been able to have a child of her own. I think adoption for infertile couples is a gift to them, but the people who adopt "just because" are a sad example of how greedy we are as a species.

@Adopting as baby or later: The above point of attachment is very true. If the child doesn't know you're not their natural parents, or if they've only known of you as their parents, they handle it MUCH better than a child who's been passed around the system or gone family-to-family because their natural parents couldn't keep them.

see: The memory keepers daughter. Phoebe didn't know Caroline wasn't her natural mother, and was born with Downs Syndrome, taken away at birth and raised far away from her family. At 24, she found out Caroline didn't give birth to her, but had only known her to be her mother. In a situation like that, any siblings that had the info forced on them would be more hurt than the lost kin.

When I gave a baby up for adoption an adoption agency came to see me in the hospital and had me look through a book of couples and pick one out.

Did they, now? Figures.

If/when I'm ready to have a kid, I want to adopt. Ain't no way I'm going to pass on my screwy genes.

I have a kid of my own. In India its mandatory to have kids otherwise society just condemns you and relatives
stay away from you, in laws taunt you and many cases they ask the boy to get another wife.

I dont want to go through laborious process of pregnancy etc for 2nd kid because first time it caused serious
problem for me.

Also i dont understand world, i dont like the world, i dont have support system but i was wondering of
bringing home a adopted child.

But i remember seeing a documentary on discovery channel about adopted children. A doctor had adopted
a child which grew upto be a criminal whereas her own child became a doctor like them. When she researched
the adopted child's birth history she found out that the child's mother was a prostitute and father a criminal
who was into voilent activities and in and out of prison.

Somehow the faulty genetic makeup carried on and though brought up in good manner the child took up
its biological parents profession.

A study of 14,427 adopted children, conducted by Dr. Sarnoff A. Mednick discussed in the New York Times, reveals how a propensity to chronic criminal behavior may be passed through the genes. Although Mednick does not believe criminal behavior is directly passed down, he holds that certain biological factors that might be associated with crime can be inherited. He cites a biological predisposition towards substance abuse

According to the FBI, there are more than 500 recorded serial killers in U.S. history, and of those, 16% were adopted. An atrocious statistic to be noted,

http://www.examiner.com/adoptive-famili ... ial-killer

Studies of adopted children indicate that both genetic and environmental factors influence the development of APD. Both biological and adopted children of people diagnosed with the disorder have an increased risk of developing it. Children born to parents diagnosed with APD but adopted into other families resemble their biological more than their adoptive parents. The environment of the adoptive home, however, may lower the child's risk of developing APD.

http://www.minddisorders.com/A-Br/Antis ... order.html

What precisely does that have to do with adoption? By that logic if I was to have biological offspring, they would have as great a chance of being drug addicted alcoholics as adopted offspring.

2 nearly-identical threads about adoption from the same OP have been combined.