Arianna

When I download what is supposed to be Gimp 2.8 from the site it installs but it says it is Gimp 2.0. It doesn't allow me to add fonts as versions 2.6 and above should. What can I do?

I'm looking for a single word, an endearment for a girl used in Israel (modern or in the 1990s). I'm hoping for something like "dear one" that could be used both romantically or in a relationship that is simply close, such as family. I have encountered the term "Yakirati". That might fit, but I'm not sure if it is really in use. Any other suggestions? Thank you.

I'm really curious about this. It keeps getting mentioned without any explanation and I'm living in a different country from most of you. Maybe I'm really living in a different social climate. When I adopted my daughter I never expected approval and never felt like anyone approved. A lot of people were sort of neutral but a lot of people were mean and negative about it, starting with the local social worker who we had to file all of our papers through. Private adoption agencies are illegal here, so we only had the one person we could go through. Then, there were my husband's parents. Whoa. You don't even want to know. They've settled down but we watch them like hawks and if we see any sign of negativity, they will not be part of our child's "family." My husband agrees, even though they're his folks. My parents are better, but they have always shown me approval, even of my off-key singing, so they don't really count. My friends mostly just don't comment but all the comments I can think of, other than from my new friends from adoptive parenting classes, are pretty negative. The media seems negative. I was trying to find fictional books on adoption situations that might be fun to read and I couldn't find any recent books where the adoptive parents weren't portrayed as horrid. OK, books for toddlers are pretty rosy about it but they are rosy about everything. I read all the books about adoption anyway and a lot of them are good stories, even if they are usually about the poor adopted kid escaping from his/her mean adoptive parents. I like a good adventure story as much as anyone.

I'm not complaining. My friends and extended family who treat this like just one more normal thing are great people. They don't have to approve of me for doing something that is simply logical and natural. No one had a party because we adopted a child. In fact, they skipped the normal baby shower that they always hold for our friends who give birth. But they treat me and my child fine, so why would I need approval?

But now on this website specifically, I see all this talk about adoptive parents always getting the approval. Has anyone ever actually experienced this in real life or seen it with their own eyes or is it just another stereotype?

In just the last few days, dozens of participants of this forum have accused me and other adoptive parents of seeking approval or pity. I have yet to find one actual example of an adoptive parent asking for either, but I know from 19th-century literature that some of them once did. It would be depressing to see that kind of attitude coming back. So, can you please bring up any actual instances posted on this site?

According to Yahoo, I get to define the parameters of answers to my question, so please cite only exact words, in quotes, No heresay or interpretation. We need to see this actual fact, some adoptive parent obviously seeking approval or advice. Disqualified are people asking not to be insulted. That is not asking for approval. It is asking not to be insulted. Asking for approval is asking for actual positive support, above and beyond asking for the opinions of others. Also disqualified are people talking about their difficult experiences or losses. You have to be able to show that the person is seeking pity. Most people on this particular topic talk about difficult experiences and traumas. It is a tough topic. But I don't see the adoptees, birth families or adoptive parents here seeking pity. But if you have any specific examples, I would like to see them.

If you can't answer within those guidelines, that is fine. But in that case, please never accuse the adoptive parents on this site of seeking approval or pity. Until and unless you can produce quotes from those you accuse, those haranguing accusations need to stop. You probably should apologize, if you have made such accusations personally and can't back them up. If you have never said these things, you can still answer this question, if you can find a quote.

There is such a huge and sudden push against adoption, I'm just wondering who is funding these people. Or perhaps it is sexual arousal alone that motivates them to revel in the pain of children left in institutions? What do you think?

If you actually are one of these anti-adoption hate mongers, maybe you could take just one little moment, once in your life to consider the children involved. Just once, just a little moment! Then, you can get back to your hate spewing. Just consider this for a minute:

In institutions around the world, infants are suffering extreme harm. Basically, the shifting caretakers result in the babies developing actual structural changes in their brains that cause severe disabilities in social and emotional functioning. Here I am in the Czech Republic. The social workers told me that the orphanages are full beyond capacity with Romani children that no one will adopt. They see one or two open-minded adopters every year. There are generally around ten tiny infants for every nurse to take care of. The nurse only has time for swift feeding and diapering of each child before she has to start over again. I saw one nurse who did not eat anything for her entire 12-hour shift, because she wanted to take every minute she could to stroke the babies, just to give them a little human attention. When i was spending a few days at the orphanage waiting for the paperwork for my daughter to be finished, there was this one little boy there, only about 10 months old, but still older than so many of the kids. He clung to me and crawled across the floor and hung onto my legs. He laid on the floor on his back and just sobbed and sobbed for hours. But I was contracted by the state to take only this one little girl. I couldn't take him. I wasn't even officially allowed to touch him. I did sometimes stroke his head or give him my hand to hold when the nurses weren't looking and he snuggled up to me and stopped sobbing, when I did. He was a very dark-skinned Romani baby. He will probably never be adopted. He will grow up in this place that has harried nurses (some kind, some not), toys on the floor, bright, clean rooms and no mama. He is almost guaranteed to suffer brain damage from the experience. Even if you were to volunteer in these orphanages to hold the babies, you would still be part of the problem, a person who is only there some of the time and that is the medical problem. Shifting caretakers cause the suffering.

Anti-adoption people, sit down and THINK about these children for a minute. Just give them a second of your time. Why are you lobbying so hard to harm them and to batter adoptive parents away from them? What is in it for you? If you were harmed years ago by a different adoption system and that is why you are so angry, consider the harm you are passing on by taking it out on these children. You are directly responsible for dissuading adoptive parents from adopting them. You are partly to blame for their suffering. Why would you do this?

I don't want my adopted daughter to grow up thinking adoption is a taboo subject in social situations. But neither do I want her to feel like mama is always dragging private stuff out and airing it. That's embarrassing for kids. Now, she's 19 months old, so she can't really give an opinion on it.

I know I have said in other posts that this is a transracial adoption but from the US perspective it would seem odd to say so. She's not that much darker than white. It is just that the society we live in (in the Czech Republic) is obsessed with racism against the Roma, even if they aren't that different. Anyway, our daughter has a very light face. She is often mistaken for white at first glance. And it just so happens that both she and my husband have almost identical dark brown very curly hair. He works outdoors in the wind and sun, so his face looks as dark as hers in the middle of the summer. They look like they have identical bush heads. Believe me, they really aren't genetically related. The other day I was at a friend's wedding and I was supposed to be interpreting for the groom's parents who didn't speak the local language. But otherwise I didn't know anyone there, except the bride and groom. Then, my husband came in late with our little girl and one of the people I had been talking with called out very loudly and jovially, "Oh, what a darling, but where are your genes in her, Arianna?" I was momentarily stunned and I just sat there with my mouth open and then I said in a joking tone, "Well, nowhere really." Everyone thought this was a joke and I quickly changed the subject. I did not want to cause a big discussion about adoption in the midst of my friend's wedding party and I was supposed to be interpreting.

Still it got me thinking. How do you deal with these types of situations? I've also had people actually notice her darker skin and ask me if her father is Native American, because they know I'm from the US and don't know my husband. I generally just say, "No, he isn't" and not comment further. But if I give a vague answer and don't comment, I am afraid that the message my child will get as she gets older is that adoption isn't something you talk about in public. It puts it in the category of bathroom issues and that isn't good connotation.

Then, there is the whole issue of what to say as she gets older and her racial difference is likely to become more clear. What do you say when people ask outright if a child is adopted or what race they are, when they are still too young to answer for themselves? Do you tell all and perhaps embarrass the child? Do you say "That's private" and risk the child believing it is something to be ashamed of?

How would you respond when someone asks innocently and pleasantly in a social situation about genes or who the child looks like in the family or why she is darker than the rest of the family? If you're an adoptee, what do you wish family members would say in such situations?

This forum seems very politicized. Whether it’s the anti-abortion or anti-adoption folks the focus seems to be on general principles, not on real people. So, I am asking this to promote a serious discussion about ways to alleviate suffering. I am consternated when I see an anti-adoption post tell the adoptive parents on the forum to “lighten up.” Either you are serious or not. This isn’t a subject for recreational ranting.

Let me try to briefly outline the problems in a context that is not so US-centric. In Western Europe, there are almost no domestic adoptions because of the social systems in these countries. In most European countries, original parents must sign papers twice (generally with a six week interval) for a child to be legally adopted. Also, in many countries any and all payment for adoption services by the adoptive parents is illegal. The tax payers cover the expenses. So, this is in essence what the anti-adoption lobby is talking about. There are ways to mitigate the forces that lead to children needing homes. BUT most of the population of the world does not live in such societies. In many other countries, extreme poverty, social disparity, racism and armed conflicts separate children from their families. Without adoption, the “temporary problems” of the parent’s becomes the permanent trauma and medical harm of the children.

Brain research shows that small children who experience multiple unconnected caregivers over an extended period (longer than six months), display structural changes in their brains that can inhibit their social and emotional abilities throughout their lives. Even if the staff of orphanages are caring and kind, infants and small children still show marked signs of social and emotional disability. The same thing happens to a lesser degree when children are moved around between temporary foster homes, or from a birth parent to a foster home and back to the birth parent. If the child has been with the caregiver for a significant period, counting in utero and foster placements, the child experiences trauma from separation. The NUMBER of separations is key. One separation (such as from a birth parent early in infancy) has been shown to cause some traumatic effects but it is usually not debilitating. Multiple separations are far more serious.

In the US foster care system and in children’s homes and orphanages around the world, there are hundreds of thousands of children being subjected to a situation that causes grievous harm. As most arguments against adoption hinge on the trauma of separation, advocates of alternatives must take into account that any repeated separation will multiply the suffering they are trying to prevent. With every new separation brain pathways of distrust and social alienation are confirmed.

I have seen complaints in this forum over judgment of birth parents, yet I mostly read moralistic condemnation of adoptive parents, never of birth parents. The refrain is about blaming adopters for systemic problems and claiming they are inflicting suffering on birth parents. The fact is that most children who come to adoption have already been separated from their birth parents and will not be able to return to them, whether or not they are adopted. Except for rare cases of private adoption or child trafficking, the adoptive parents play no role in the fate of the birth parents. To say that all adoptive parents are exploitative is bigotry.

All reform must focus on what will harm children least. Adoptive parents and birth parents both have decision-making power and should bear the risks. Adoptive parents must, for instance, accept that a birth parent may change his or her mind, perhaps even during the initial weeks that the child is living with the adoptive family. Birth parents, likewise, should not be given unlimited rights to subject their children to temporary situations that cause serious harm. In most countries today, the children absorb these risks by remaining in temporary situations until their fate is decided. We cannot lose sight of the basic reality - shifting caregivers have devastating physiological and psychological consequences for children and they must be protected from this at whatever cost to adults.

So, do you know of any truly balanced counseling materials or services for birth parents, which talk about both the costs of adoption and the costs of temporary placements? How can child trafficking be erradicated? What systemic changes in the US would result in fewer family separations in the first place? How can adoptive parents be better prepared for transracial and transnational adoption? Do you believe that cultural and racial displacement is more urgent than the effects of repeated separation traumas? If so, how do you arrive at this conclusion? Should we take the money out of adoption altogether and if so how? Who should for the real expenses of social and medical services?

I saw an interesting question that touched on this topic but it was about WHETHER one should adopt transracially, rather than what to do when it is already a reality. My husband and I, both white, have adopted one child, who is from a non-white minority group that originated in India. We are preparing to adopt a second child of the same background. We live in the Czech Republic, not in the US, but the issues are the same, if not more extreme in terms of transracial adoption and racism in society and the media. I am a foreigner and thus I will probably always have an immigrant accent and I have a physical disability, so the children would not be the only different people in the family.

However, the antagonism in society against the minority that these children come from is intense and unavoidable, even though we don't even own a TV and we get a lot of our media from other places. There are general stereotypes in almost all world media about people with darker skin. There are also still racially segregated schools in areas with large minority populations in this country.

We adopted transracially because we could not have biological children and it seemed irresponsible and self-centered to only adopt a child that was already wanted by many families. There are about 100 families waiting for every healthy white child in need of a home in this country. It seems frankly racist to support the continued disadvantage of the minority group by leaving one more child in the bleak orphanages, which actively try to strip minority children of their cultural background. I know I can give a child more of their cultural background, then they would get in an orphanage. There is very little foster care here and the social workers say adoptive families open to minority children are very rare (like one or two in each region annually). The poverty, substandard segregated schools, employment discrimination, housing discrimination and so forth mean that the orphanages are full of children of the non-white minority group, whose birth family couldn't cope.

So, my question is how to do the best thing for our child and future children. The main thing I always hear is that we must move to an area where there are people of the same background. That is difficult here because the minority group is only 3 percent in this country. There are segregated housing areas, but they are ghettos. Middle class people of the minority group don't live there. While not everyone in the ghettos is a "bad influence" for children, the high incidence of grinding poverty, drugs, alcoholism, crime, unemployment, depression, police brutality, neo-Nazi attacks and so forth does not make it reasonable to move into a ghetto area. We would like to make friends of the children's background but until they are old enough to join clubs the opportunities are slim. Here is what we have done so far: found dolls of various racial types, including those that look very similar to our child, listen regularly to music of the child's cultural backgorund, attending music festivals of the same music, listen regularly to an internet radio station run by people of the child's background, trying to keep social contact with the few people of the child's background that we do know, found many children's books featuring children of various racial backgrounds, including those that look like our child, attending gatherings of adoptive families with children of the child's background (unfortunately they only exist twice a year), trying to start a local adoptive families group, including similar families, openly discussing racism, the child's birth culture and positive role models that we see as a family and reading a wide variety of books and materials on transracial adoption and the child's birth culture.

I would like to hear any constructive ideas that would benefit the children in this situation. Would you send children in this situation to a school that is almost all white and almost certain to be rife with bigotry or would you homeschool them? We aren't wealthy enough to afford the elite private international schools, which would have some students of other non-white backgrounds. Would you specifically move to an area with a segregated school and enroll the child there, even though those schools are officially for the mentally retarded and provide a severely limited education?

How would you go about making friends in the minority community, given that a great deal of the people of this group are very hesitant to have any social contact with white people because of their many negative experiences?

If one should not tell the child to "turn the other cheek" when racism happens, how should one prepare children for society in such a situation?

Thank you for all ideas.

P.S. I'm reposting this because this horrid layout made it get "resolved" even though it had only been up for a few h

I saw an interesting question that touched on this topic but it was about WHETHER one should adopt transracially, rather than what to do when it is already a reality. My husband and I, both white, have adopted one child, who is from a non-white minority group that originated in India. We are preparing to adopt a second child of the same background. We live in the Czech Republic, not in the US, but the issues are the same, if not more extreme in terms of transracial adoption and racism in society and the media. I am a foreigner and thus I will probably always have an immigrant accent and I have a physical disability, so the children would not be the only different people in the family.

However, the antagonism in society against the minority that these children come from is intense and unavoidable, even though we don't even own a TV and we get a lot of our media from other places. There are general stereotypes in almost all world media about people with darker skin. There are also still racially segregated schools in areas with large minority populations in this country.

We adopted transracially because we could not have biological children and it seemed irresponsible and self-centered to only adopt a child that was already wanted by many families. There are about 100 families waiting for every healthy white child in need of a home in this country. It seems frankly racist to support the continued disadvantage of the minority group by leaving one more child in the bleak orphanages, which actively try to strip minority children of their cultural background. I know I can give a child more of their cultural background, then they would get in an orphanage. There is very little foster care here and the social workers say adoptive families open to minority children are very rare (like one or two in each region annually). The poverty, substandard segregated schools, employment discrimination, housing discrimination and so forth mean that the orphanages are full of children of the non-white minority group, whose birth family couldn't cope.

So, my question is how to do the best thing for our child and future children. The main thing I always hear is that we must move to an area where there are people of the same background. That is difficult here because the minority group is only 3 percent in this country. There are segregated housing areas, but they are ghettos. Middle class people of the minority group don't live there. While not everyone in the ghettos is a "bad influence" for children, the high incidence of grinding poverty, drugs, alcoholism, crime, unemployment, depression, police brutality, neo-Nazi attacks and so forth does not make it reasonable to move into a ghetto area. We would like to make friends of the children's background but until they are old enough to join clubs the opportunities are slim. Here is what we have done so far: found dolls of various racial types, including those that look very similar to our child, listen regularly to music of the child's cultural backgorund, attending music festivals of the same music, listen regularly to an internet radio station run by people of the child's background, trying to keep social contact with the few people of the child's background that we do know, found many children's books featuring children of various racial backgrounds, including those that look like our child, attending gatherings of adoptive families with children of the child's background (unfortunately they only exist twice a year), trying to start a local adoptive families group, including similar families, openly discussing racism, the child's birth culture and positive role models that we see as a family and reading a wide variety of books and materials on transracial adoption and the child's birth culture.

I would like to hear any constructive ideas that would benefit the children in this situation. Would you send children in this situation to a school that is almost all white and almost certain to be rife with bigotry or would you homeschool them? We aren't wealthy enough to afford the elite private international schools, which would have some students of other non-white backgrounds. Would you specifically move to an area with a segregated school and enroll the child there, even though those schools are officially for the mentally retarded and provide a severely limited education?

How would you go about making friends in the minority community, given that a great deal of the people of this group are very hesitant to have any social contact with white people because of their many negative experiences?

If one should not tell the child to "turn the other cheek" when racism happens, how should one prepare children for society in such a situation?

Thank you for all ideas.

I would like to answer the question "Why was there discrimination against Romani people?" The only person who answered it did so in a very blatantly racist manner and also a very ignorant manner, claiming for instance that Roma are called that because they traveled through Romania, claiming that Roma are a shifty and dishonest group of people who choose to travel in caravans and basically answering that Roma face discrimination because they are evil and dishonest, according to "many stories". Unlike this person, I have actually read several sociological and anthropological books about the Romani people, have worked as a journalist for a US national newspaper often reporting from Romani communities and I have a Romani child. I am deeply offended as a human being by the racist garbage in that "answer" and I think Yahoo should let someone respond. However, I can not find any way to "answer" the question. When I click on "Answer" I get sent to a general list of all questions ever asked at Yahoo and there is no way to find this particular question. Is there perhaps a policy at Yahoo that racists are protected at all cost? I have seen other complaints about racist content here in a very brief skim of some topics. I am very close to starting a email campaign to protest Yahoo because of this and unless I get some real answers in the next day or two, I will. There is, of course, no way to make a complaint directly to Yahoo, so it will have to be done through the media. Can anyone shed some light on this situation. Thank you. -A.F.