A reader recently pointed out an article to me from the New York Newsday newspaper titled, "Adoptive Couples Revel in the joys of big families brought together by love-and by will-if not by birth."

The article takes a look at several Long Island, NY couples that have created larger-than-normal families through multiple transracial adoptions.

The article discusses the declining number of biological children in typical households in the United States, as well as the increasing number of transracial adoptions and the impact that the increasing number of transracial adoptions is having on society.

From the article...

The numbers of American families saying "yes" to transracial adoptions amounts to a whole revolution in adoption...

Besides societal changes in America, the trend in overseas adoption has been influenced by world events, such as the fall of the Berlin Wall, which revealed large numbers of children in orphanages needing homes, and the Chinese one-child policy, which led to the abandonment of baby girls...

"It's challenging our understanding of what is a family, when families don't look the way we used to think of families," Pertman said. "It impacts the whole community."

While the importance of helping transracially adopted children "find" and know their cultural identity, it is also stressed that these parents and children see each other and love each other as family, and do not "care" that they do not look the same. International adoption, domestic infant adoption and foster care adoption are all mentioned (and happy families resulting from all three types of adoption are featured), without any one method of adoption being depicted as "better".

I ilke the way that the article doesn't glamourize or belittle large adoptive families, and does a good job of making them sound pretty "normal".

This has been a sad week for large adoptive families, as it seems Ethiopia has joined the list of countries saying "no" to allowing their children to be adopted by big families. If what we've been hearing is accurate and not changed, families with more than five children in the home will no longer be allowed to adopt from Ethiopia unless they are adopting a large sibling group (doesn't make a whole lot of sense to me...you have too many kids to adopt one child, but SURE take three????) or a child with HIV or another significant special need.

Sadly, at this time they are not planning on making exceptions for families wanting to adopt older children, which is unforunate because typically it is the larger, more experienced adoptive families that want to adopt the older children. Many people are hopeful that exceptions will be made and that successful large, adoptive families will be able to show that they are a wonderful resource for Ethiopian children.

With yet another country coming off of the list of adoption options for large families, I was appreciative of this article talking about the joys of large adoptive families.


Resources for large adoptive families...

Adoptive Parenting Blog

Largerfamilies.com

Parenting Large Families Forum