i just read someone talking about looking for children through photo listings. i know that i was "chosen" in a similar manner. from the beginning of the paper work until i arrived, all my parents had were two photos to go on.
i have a hard time grasping this. it seems rather barbaric, from my adoptee perspective. it makes me feel like a commodity, sold in a catalog.
i'd like to hear some convincing arguments for why this is an acceptable or adequate method of choosing who to adopt.
i am trying to form my opinions about creating families and how this is accomplished. i am really not, at this point, comfortable with the validity of the love at first photo sighting argument, nor do i know much about this practice.
whenever i have this euwww ick feeling, i try and understand it before rejecting it out of hand. welcome everyone's insights
2008-09-14T09:49:17Z
WHY i chose the best answer.
wow. adoption land is so confusing.
because i'm transracial and know how hard that is, i am all for racial matching whenever possible.
however, i also believe adoptive parents should have a higher calling than just wanting a replacement child for the one they couldn't have and trying to choose a child that looks like they were naturally born.
i agree with monkeykitty's analysis of why a photo is valuable
i agree with sly's sadness over the children who get left behind because they aren't photogenic
i finally chose Erin L's because i think she had the healthiest, most decent attitude about the place of looks in adoption.
it still feels icky as an adoptee.
my preference for all adoptions (except newborns) would be for people to hang out with kids and get to know them as people prior to adoption. the barbaric part of adoption to me is how it is stranger to stranger, with the photo as possibly the only artifact of humanity.
Erin L2008-09-12T18:07:30Z
Favorite Answer
I totally understand how you feel. The agency in the country we adopted from doesn't allow pap's to see a photo until they accept the referral. They get the social, medical history report and accept on that. I will say, having gone through the process, I understand really wanting to know what my child will look like, as I'm sure biological parents do to while they're waiting. We didn't accept on a picture, but I felt so much better after seeing the picture and having an image of a specific child in my head, not just because she was beautiful. It was a newborn picture, and she had a cleft lip, so it's not like it was a gorgeous photo, nor did I expect to really know from it what she would really look like, but I finally had a picture of my child, and I felt much more settled.
I don't know how I feel about the photo listings. It's the only way some children find families because it puts a face to a "special needs" child that people wouldn't be drawn to from a description of their "problems", but I would feel weird "picking" a child from a photo listing myself. What's even more disturbing to me is the international adoption programs where you wait in line to be invited to the country to "pick" your child from a photo book and then meet them. I couldn't do it, and the children who aren't found to be the most attractive, or maybe they just didn't have a great picture, don't get picked.
For the poster that wrote "I'm going to select my baby based on pictures if I have to adopt", you need to understand that the children they are talking about on photo-listings are "hard to place" older children, not babies. You would not be able to "pick" a baby from a stack of photos, infact their are far more adoptive parents hoping to adopt domestically then there are expectant women planning to place their child for adoption. The e-mom chooses the adoptive family in domestic adoption and in international adoption a social worker will "match" the baby with a family (except for some special needs adoptions) The adoptive parents don't get to select whichever baby they feel would "fit-in" appearence-wise with their family.
I think that for some people, it's not so much the looks themselves, as needing something tangible... something physical to start with, to make the child more real to them. I think the connection starts for some people when the child is an actual person in a photo rather than just an abstract idea, or words on paper. The photo shows a real live human being, who could become your child, not just an idea pulled from thin air. I think for some people, it's about finding a connection.
I definitely think this can get icky, and it can get into something too much like catalogue shopping. I'm not saying it's always a good and positive thing. Looks are a bad, bad reason to choose to bring a child into your home. Compatibility is much more important.
I just think that for some people who are more visually oriented (I am not personally among those people,) having photos may make it easier to imagine a child in their home, rather than just having this abstract idea of some random child out there. Not arguing for or against it here, just suggesting it as one possible motivation.
Sometimes adoptive families want children of different races or sometimes they want children who look like them so they don't feel left out.
Both my brother and sister were adopted and they are both different races than us. But we never saw a picture of either one of them and it makes no difference how they look.
Don't let a few dumb people who are so concerned with how a child looks bring you down. For the most part, people don't base their choice on looks.