FacePalm Friday

This is where your hosts will list their top picks for what they learned or read about this week that caused them to do a facepalm (the expression of mixed humor and disbelief or disgust or shame as depicted in our Rally facepalm smiley).

We invite you to add your facepalms of the week to our comments. Go ahead and add a link, tell a personal story, or share something on the subject of child welfare or adoption that you became aware of this week that made you facepalm.

Your hosts have 3 entries this week:

1. Adoptive Parent Propaganda. It’s not just adoption industry workers that create propaganda. Adoptive parents create it as well. The book This Means War: Equipping Christian Families for Fostercare or Adoption found here is an example of greatly downplaying what it takes to parent severely special needs children. Additionally, the marketing bit about “miniature heathens” is despicable!

The marketing description is as follows: “Fetal Alcohol effects… bonding attachment disorder… self-abusive… violent, destructive, aggressive… fire starter… Happy, successful, easy adoptions are a reality! Many times the children are no more or less difficult to parent than average. However, sometimes raising adopted kids is extremely difficult.

Are you really prepared to adopt? Read on as experienced foster, adoptive and even grandparents share stories of success, but also of struggles.

Many entered adoption unprepared and were quickly overwhelmed. We wondered why our parenting methods failed. Why didn’t our love heal these children? Why were our previously happy families now falling apart?

We lacked vital information about invisible disabilities; we didn’t know how profoundly neglect damages an infant. We didn’t realize we’d signed up to be missionaries to miniature heathens – nor that a spiritual enemy opposed us. Perhaps we assumed the natural state of man, apart from negative influence or defective genes, would be an ideal person; in the Garden of Eden… maybe.

We’re not in the Garden anymore!

Before you adopt, pray for protection and guidance – and be sure you read This Means War!”

2. Offensive Adoption Merchandise Part 999999. One word for this flip doll . CREEPY! The blogger even misspells this”Sitina” doll as a “Stinta” doll. The Nigerian woman who makes them did NOT manufacture these for transracial adoption storytelling. An AP’s sister-in-law hijacked this friendship doll by her immediate “thought of the illustration of a birth mother and an adoptive mother joined together by the love of their child”.  Just like the red thread has been hijacked for China adoptions, this Nigerian friendship doll has been hijacked for transracial African adoption storytelling.

Original meaning of the doll: “Nigerian woman on one side and a western white woman on the other and she called it her “friendship” doll” according to this website explanation.

3.Research Article Adoption Propaganda. This Creating a Family blog post outright calls self-esteem issues in adopted children a “myth” based on the 2007 meta-analysis Adoptees Do Not Lack Self-Esteem: A Meta-Analysis of Studies on Self-Esteem of Transracial, International, and Domestic Adoptees Psychol Bull. 2007 Nov;133(6):1067-83. Additionally, she links to the Holt website who is using this as propaganda.

Simply put, this study is adoption industry propaganda. Meta-analyses, which examine the conclusions of multiple studies, can have a number of issues. One is author bias. A second is the “garbage in, garbage out” principle of cherry-picking data to disprove what you don’t want to deal with. This study has both issues. We will focus on just 4 aspects.

1. Author Bias. The author of this study is Professor Femmie Juffer. She holds the Chair for Adoption Studies supported by Wereldkinderen. Astute Ethiopia adoption readers will remember that Wereldkinderen is the adoption provider organization that commissioned Against Child Trafficking to study their operations in Ethiopia–Wereldkinderen not-so-kindly shut down their own study–known now as the Fruits of Ethiopia report in our Featured Topic Section.

So, a notorious adoption placement organization funded this research. Positive results will help to recruit more prospective adoptive parents. This is enough to torpedo the analysis’ credibility, but we will cover some important design aspects anyway.

2.Exclusion Criteria. Another important thing to look at in a study is which people they include in the analysis and which people they exclude. The exclusion criteria on page 1071 of the article are as follows “ (a) studies of clinical samples, for example, adopted children referred to psychiatric clinics or given medical treatment (e.g., Mul et al., 2001); (b) studies that exclusively sampled adopted children exposed to alcohol or drugs in utero; and (c) physically or mentally handicapped adopted children.”

So, the author cut out all potential data on adoptees that are prone to issues that may effect self-esteem.  Put plainly, she chose data on a subset happy, healthy adoptees. The best place to look at which studies were excluded is to just glance through the references at the end of the analysis-the ones without asterisks. You will see that important studies on Romanian adoptees, for instance, were not included in the analysis. Maybe the article should be titled “Adoptees do not lack self-esteem (except those that do).”

3. Age ranges and single-point assessments.

The author grouped data in broad category of age 4 to 12.

There is no discussion to indicate how many were preschoolers and how many were pubescent.

On Page 1070, she explains that she selected single-point assessments from longitudinal studies (studies in which data was taken at multiple points over time) “In the case of a longitudinal study, the first assessment with adequate data was used to ensure that every adoptee was counted only once in the pertinent meta-analyses.”

It takes a lot of smoke and mirrors to project self-esteem forward from one point in time (possibly when the adoptee was very young.)

4. Lack of Transracial Adult Adoptee Information and Comparisons of Self-Esteem between Transracial and Same-race Adoptees. Page 1077 discusses the transracial adoptee self-esteem.  “There were only two study outcomes (reported in one paper) on adult transracial and same-race adoptees.”

From the discussion on Page 1078, “Again, we did not find differences in self-esteem between transracial and same-race adoptees, although firm conclusions cannot be drawn because there were only four studies with the most stringent design criterion.” [emphasis Rally]

The worst propaganda is promoting this “adoptees are just fine” analysis to APs on yahoo lists who have adopted transracially.