GUEST BLOG POST: Steve Jobs....Foster Care....and Adoption by Adam Pertman

With seemingly ceaseless regularity nowadays, most recently in the coverage of Steve Jobs' passing, we are inundated by conflicting messages relating to adoption.

For the last few weeks, the wonder of adoption has been on display. November is National Adoption Awareness Month, so media outlets nationwide have written and broadcast stories about children whose lives are improved as a result of moving from foster care into permanent, loving families. President Obama even issued a proclamation, as he and his predecessors have done routinely in past years, extolling the benefits of the process and adding that “we celebrate the acts of compassion and love that unite children with adoptive families.”

At other times, of course, a very different picture is transmitted. Sometimes the focus is on parents who seem to regard adoption as child rental (remember the mother who "returned" her son to Russia?) or ones who purportedly use the child welfare system as a means of getting monthly support payments; the most sensational case took place several years ago in New Jersey, where a couple allegedly starved their four adopted sons in order to retain more of their state subsidies.

Press accounts cast an appropriately suspicious eye on parents who commit such horrid acts but, all too often, they also raise broader concerns about the competence and motives of adoptive parents per se; in particular, they implicitly or explicitly suggest that people may adopt children for dubious reasons or even that adoption itself is somehow a less-legitimate or less-desirable means of building a family. In the coverage of Jobs, for instance, we regularly saw and read reports that questioned his being "given away" by his "real parents" – language that hardly affirms adoption as a positive option.

So which is it? Lucky kids or kids relegated to second-class families? Good people trying to do the right thing for their children, either by placing their children for adoption or adopting them, or desperate people with suspect motives? What are we to think when we receive such disparate impressions, not just this month, but time after time when there's a high-profile story involving adoption? Or even when adoption is depicted in either very positive ways ("Modern Family") or chillingly negative ways ("Orphan") in the movies and on television?

Based on available research and extensive experience, two unambiguous realities emerge: that most adoptive parents are doing the same things as most biological parents – that is, providing their children with all the affection and care they humanly can; and that, with rare exceptions, boys and girls are far better off in permanent families than in foster care, orphanages or any other temporary or institutional setting.

But adoption's history of secrecy has afforded us with too few opportunities to learn about its realities. So we tend to assume we're learning far more from singular, usually aberrational experiences – man bites dog is a story, after all, while dog bites man is not – than we usually are.

Yes, financial payments intended to increase the number of adoptions from foster care can cause complications, but that's the clear exception. And, yes, families sometimes struggle because of the challenges their children face as a consequence of having been mistreated and/or institutionalized before they were adopted. But there is no indication that horrors such as the ones that typically make the news are being repeated with any regularity elsewhere, even though many thousands of parents throughout the country receive state subsidies – and even though the number of children being adopted from foster care is at historic highs.

Moreover, even in the most troubled systems, good things are happening daily. Most children are being reunited with newly healthy mothers, fathers and other biological relatives, while a fast-growing number of kids (over 52,000 last year alone and over 57,000 the year before that) are being adopted by loving parents who treat them very well. The same is true for the hundreds of thousands of girls and boys who have been adopted from orphanages abroad over the last couple of decades.

It's hard to learn much from secrets, so we as a culture don't yet know enough about adoptions from foster care and institutions to put the aberrational stories in perspective. That's changing, to be sure; organizations such as the Evan B. Donaldson Adoption Institute, which I'm proud to lead, are providing more and better research and knowledge – please take a look at www.adoptioninstitute.org to read our most recent work – and, partly as a result, the media are doing a better job of informing the public, policy-makers and others who profoundly affect the tens of millions of children and families for whom adoption and foster care are daily facts of life.

Even as we make progress, however, the still-widespread lack of knowledge has tangible, negative consequences that play out in the attitudes all these people encounter and the policies that impact their lives.

I am not defending any system that does less than everything possible to protect the children within it. But we live in a society in which nearly every program that helps vulnerable children receives insufficient resources; in which well-intentioned quick fixes replace (rather than augment) thoughtful, long-term solutions such as post-adoption services; and in which cases like the ones I've cited above fuel our worst stereotypes about adoptive parents, birth parents, their children, and adoption itself.

A positive and interesting question for the media to explore (but I haven't yet heard it asked) would be something like this: Would the world have had Steve Jobs without adoption?

During National Adoption Awareness Month, states across the country have celebrated by holding public ceremonies at which hundreds upon hundreds of children have received the opportunity to move into permanent, loving and successful families.

I'd like to suggest it's also a good time for all of us to start learning more about adoption, foster care and institutionalization (orphanages), because the problems will be fixed more rapidly if faulty stereotypes are replaced by genuine understandings. And the ultimate beneficiaries will be the hundreds of thousands of boys and girls, in our own country and others, who will still need homes long after we turn another page on our calendars.

Adam Pertman is author, Adoption Nation, and Executive Director of the Evan B. Donaldson Adoption Institute www.adoptioninstitute.org.  Visit his blog www.adampertman.com.

My Tribute to Steve Jobs - by Cara Potapshyn Meyers

I opened my Apple MacBook laptop this morning, Oct 6, 2011, and was stunned speechless that there was a photo of Steve Jobs, creative genius behind all of Apple computer products, with 1955-2011 underneath his picture. I thought, my goodness! He was so young! What happened?

I called my husband, who is in the radio business and knows when a major disaster occurs before it even happens. He told me Jobs died of pancreatic cancer. The most aggressive and lethal cancer there is. I was shocked. 

As I am typing this blog on a two month old iPad 2, I recall bursting with joy just yesterday. I found out that first, iCloud, a satellite entity that will sync every Apple item you own, seamlessly, second by second, with complete wireless connection, coming out the following week! This meant that next week at this time, as I edit a blog on my iPad, the exact same blog will already be on my laptop, edited within seconds after I correct. No more syncing with cables, no more waiting for downloads. 100% wireless connection across every device I own. After spending an hour syncing my iPhone to my computer and my iPad to my computer, I was thanking Steve Jobs for this much awaited and anticipated creation. I thought to myself, this is the last time I have to waste a whole hour getting all of my electronic machinery in sync via cables.

I was equally amazed to learn that the much anticipated iPhone 5, renamed iPhone 4S, would be available to purchase two days later! I chose to bypass the original iPhone 4 after hearing about all of the glitches. Now that Steve Jobs has passed, I will be on my computer at midnight, pre-ordering the iPhone 4S which is scheduled to be released next week. I planned to purchase the iPhone 5/4S regardless. But the iPhone 4S is going to be legendary. I will be keeping it long after cell phones become the size of Bluetooth devices. This piece of equipment will be the last electronic wonder that Steve Jobs will have had his personal touch on. That alone carries an enormous amount of weight. Not only in the world of cellular phones, but among all computer related equipment and especially the computer economy.

I remember when I was first introduced to an Apple MacIntosh computer in the library of my graduate school, back in 1987. There sat a rather intriguing but ugly, beige box on another box, with a six inch by six inch hazy screen. I HAD to learn to use this device if I was to get my Master's thesis written on time! It was either this beige box or an electronic typewriter that had seen it's best day! With the help of some very patient and very knowledgeable classmates, I was slowly introduced to the world of Apple computers. In fact, my graduation present was a newer version of the ugly, beige box on a box! But slowly, I came to rely on this odd device more and more.

As I became more proficient at using my ugly beige box, I was also realizing that it was quickly becoming more and more obsolete. If I wanted to keep up with the fast pace world of software upgrades, I would need a new, more powerful computer. I was working at the time and was additionally expanding myself by enrolling in a second Master's program. Upgrading my computer was a necessity. So much so, that the big wide world of something called the "Internet" was fast approaching. Once the Internet entered my world, my computers needed to be upgraded just about every 2-3 years, and remains so to this day. The technology far outruns what the fastest computer can do even at this very moment. It is beyond awe inspiring. More importantly, it was being led by Steve Jobs and his genius behind Apple computers.

Several computer upgrades later, the iPhone was introduced. I HAD to have that crazy cool device! I couldn't afford the first generation of iPhone, but WAS able to afford it two generations later: The iPhone 3G! The very same phone I have to this day! The phone I use as my alarm clock, my calendar, my camera, my GPS, my train schedule, my e-mail device, my everything except drink my Starbucks lattes gadget! I used to take my old cell phones with me but would forget them in the car or in my pocketbook while the battery died. No other cell phone "called" to me the way my iPhone has. My husband was so fed up with me leaving my other random cell phones in inconvenient places that he made me swear that if he bought me an iPhone, I would carry it with me constantly. And carry it I did. So much so, that I found a way to use an old camera wrist band and wrap it through the cell phone case so that I could have it dangle off of my wrist and have it with me 24/7! The wrist holder is helpful, but that phone became more than my constant companion. In it is my life. And it always has been and always will be in my life. 

Next came the first generation iPad. For the life of me, I just couldn't figure out what the purpose of this big, bulky, version of an iPod Touch was. I thought Apple was losing it's mind. I realized, after sitting in doctor's offices, or waiting for my son's karate class to finish what a great tool it would be for me to use for my blogging! Right before the iPad 2 came out, I purchased a used (but found out from Apple that it was brand new), first generation iPad! I was hooked. I could start a blog while waiting for an appointment, e-mail it to myself, and finish it up on my much heavier laptop at home! Genius! Then came the vastly improved iPad 2 which allowed me to do so much more, include taking it on trips and Skyping with my son on my husband's computer 3000 miles away! And it weighed even less than my pocketbook!

I ended up giving my son my original iPad because there are so many educational Apps out now that I felt he would benefit from it. Just this morning, I watched him shake it and then point at various areas on it. I was intrigued as to what he was doing. He was playing Monopoly. When you shook the iPad, it would shake the dice so that the dice would roll. Just like playing the actual game. I said, "Bless You, Steve Jobs," to myself. Bless your incredibly creative mind and insight to come up with an entity that has literally "shaken up" the whole world!

Five and one-half hours until midnight. Let's just hope it's not Pacific Standard Time.