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.

GUEST BLOG POST: Leap Into Something New by Karyn Scott

What happens when a stay-at-home mom with two young children discovers a struggling rock singer at a party and thinks, “What if I could turn him into the next big American rock star?” Sounds like a crazy idea, and it was, but this is what happened when I heard a band named Alpha Rev play at a backyard party four years ago.

As an overwhelmed mom with two pre-schoolers in tow, I had no clue about the music business. I was a 39-year-old former attorney who had never played an instrument or seen a mixing board—and yet managing this band felt like what I was meant to do. At the time in 2006, Alpha Rev was only one of thousands of talented bands that called Austin home. The band’s lead singer and writer, Casey McPherson, was mostly living out of his beat-up car and I had no idea how to download songs to an iPod (we were an unlikely pair to say the least). I should point out that managing a rock band was nowhere near my comfort zone. In fact, most of my friends would point out that I’m the kind of person that considers making lasagna without burning it quite daring.

As I contemplated helping the band, I wondered if it was possible to become more daring after having children, instead of less? Still, it is one thing to go back to a responsible career, but quite another to find your passion in life. What was it about finding a struggling wanna-be rock star that made me want to find mine?

Casey McPherson was scruffy from top to bottom and didn’t exactly drip with star quality when he walked into a room, but when I heard him sing, I knew he had a special gift. Some crazy inner voice told me, “the world should hear him … and you should help.” That voice got louder when I learned from a band member that Casey’s father and brother had both committed suicide. Music was his way of coping, he explained. As it was mine… throughout my life, music had provided the constant soundtrack to all my joys and sadness. Even though I had no experience in the business, I had always been passionate about great music. I soon learned that in the Internet age, passion sometimes goes further than experience.

A few months later, I would become his manager and would start my own record label, Flyer Records (a name I coined with the idea that I would “throw it out there and see if it flies”). I never imagined how monumental this task would be, as I travelled with the band throughout the United States hoping to get them discovered—and find a reliable babysitter. Looking back, I was, a middle-aged mom with a temperamental computer and two rowdy kids hanging off my legs as I tried to make “office space” seem official in the laundry room. Yet, despite all odds, I succeeded: after flying across the country in 2007 for a New York City showcase that was the almost-magical musical culmination of our efforts, Alpha Rev got offered a deal with Disney juggernaut Hollywood Records. It was everything we dreamed of… but I soon began to question whether I had really been chasing Casey’s dreams, instead of my own.

This realization led me to start Kids in a New Groove (K.I.N.G.), a nonprofit mentoring organization that provides free private music lessons for kids in foster care. As Alpha Rev scored a top 10 hit video on the nationally televised VH1 countdown in June, 2010, and their catchy song “New Morning” became one of the most popular rock songs in America, my heart pulled me toward these kids who saw music lessons as their only hope. By the end of 2010, I had doubled the size of our program, and was amazed at the healing benefits music was bringing to children who are frequently shut out from the arts. I thought having a hand in a hit song would be exciting, but it paled in comparison to seeing the joy music can bring to foster kids.

Starting a new business helped me discover the power of an everyday mom to make a difference in the world by seizing a dream, no matter how crazy. While moms might be more conservative in their decision-making, we have to remember that motherhood is a leap of faith too; when I hug my kids at the end of each day, I know that journey was worth it. Finding your passion isn’t that different—sometimes you have to close your eyes and jump to find the right opportunity. Just as with having kids, you can’t plot out every hard day, every blind curve in the road. In retrospect, if I hadn’t decided to manage Alpha Rev, I wouldn’t be changing the lives of American foster kids.

It’s a New Year . . . what’s your leap?

To find out more about Kids in a New Groove, please visit http://www.kidsinanewgroove.org/.  You can see Alpha Rev as a special guest on tour in 2011 with Bon Jovi; Alpha Rev's new record "New Morning" is available on itunes.