Response to "Adoption helps children."

After reading the article "Adoption helps children", I got an understanding on why some people feel that adoption is best. When you take someone out of an abusive of otherwise neglectful home, and then place them with loving guardians to take care of them, of course it's a good thing. The current issue with child welfare is understandable yet unreasonable. True the welfare system may not have been built to provide homes for every child but they could at least make a decent attempt at getting a child into a permanent home. They cannot keep relying on the biological parents to get better with whatever causes them to be unfit. Weather it's drug abuse, alcoholism, a mental illness, or just not knowing how to raise a child. Baby adoptions are the most successful because the baby has time to from bonds with their adoptive parents that is nurturing and loving. As a baby the child might not remember the abuse as well as a teenager might. That doesn't mean that teenagers aren't unfit to be adopted. Many are adopted, it's just that many are traumatized from their past life that they may need more love and nurturing and a little more patience than a baby who was abused. Adoptive children do well because the adoptive parent(s) love them and know how to raise a child. As for the mothers who are against adoption, and feel that the biological parents are the best parents for the child, they're wrong. Studies show that children who were adopted from abusive homes compared with children who weren't and were placed with their biological parents were better off than the children with their real parents. Many adoptions stay intact which is good although some don't. It is true that the younger the child the more the chances are of the adoption being a success. Baby's make bonds with whomever is caring for them while teenagers are more cautious especially when from abusive homes. They're weary of whom they befriend because of fear of being hurt. Adopted children go into loving homes and are better of than in their abusive and /or neglectful biological home.

"Adoption helps children"

In the article "Adoption helps children" by Janet Alberchtsen, on the Opposing Viewpoints database, she states how adoption essentially helps children by taking them out of their abusive or neglectful home and placing them with loving parents. "Yet adoption remains unfashionable in child welfare circles." She says that a lot of children suffer abuse in the child welfare systems "which was built to react to crisis rather than provide long-term homes for children." Problems with the current system are as pointed out that the state usually ends up keeping the child in foster care until he's eighteen, going from foster parents to biological parents in the states hope that the child's real parents have learned how to care for their child. By doing this, the state overshadows the welfare of the child. "It is painfully obvious that biological ties do not guarantee that children will be loved and nurtured." Alberchtsen talks about a book by a Patricia Morgan, Adoption and the Care of Children- The British and American Experience. In her book, Morgan did research on adopted children. "Baby adoptions are the most successful." "Adoptive families seem to accentuate the positive and minimize the negative factors." "A study which compared children who had been adopted from care with those who had been returned from care to their parents found that the "restored" children did bad in every respect compared with the adopted children. Morgan concluded in her research that "adopted children do so well because the [adoptive] parents are so keen to rear a child." Many "relinquishing mothers" view adoption as unjust and a means of dealing with the children of unwed mothers. These mothers claim that the children are always better off with their biological parents. "Breakdown rates for adoption are about 9 percent. However, the younger the child is at placement, the more likely the adoption will succeed." "Adoption needs to be embraced, not as punishment for unfit parents, but as a gift of loving for the child."