Suchergebnisse

People who adopted children from Romania between 1990 and 1992 experienced considerable difficulties arranging the adoptions, both in Romania and the UK. It is not known how many more potential adopters were unsuccessful. Based on a study of 148 families adopting 165 children, Celia Beckett, Diana Bredenkamp, Jenny Castle, Christine Groothues and the English and Romanian Adoptees (ERA) study team shed light on the difficulties encountered in England and implications of agency and non-agency practice in relation to these adopters.The placements are progressing well, but there is some evidence that those applicants who were approved by specialist local authority social workers have a more sustained sense of the importance for the child of issues concerning their background and identity.

This article by Celia Beckett, Amanda Hawkins, Michael Rutter, Jenny Castle, Emma Colvert, Christine Groothues, Jana Kreppner, Suzanne Stevens and Edmund Sonuga-Barke examines attitudes regarding cultural and national identity in a group of 165 young people adopted from Romania. The attitudes of their adoptive parents are also explored. The adoptive parents were interviewed over three or four time periods, when their children were 4/6, 11 and 15 years, and the adopted young people at the age of 11 and 15. The majority of the adopted young people had an interest in Romania and expressed a wish to visit their country of origin. However, there was no association between this interest in Romanian identity and levels of self-esteem. The majority of the adoptees saw themselves as English or Anglo-Romanian. A small minority saw themselves as Romanian; these adoptees had both lower self-esteem and a higher level of deprivation-specific problems. The degree of sustained interest shown by adoptive parents in the importance of Romanian identity was associated with the adopted young people's interest in Romania. However, parental interest in this issue had significantly declined by the time the children were 11 years old, by which time fewer adoptive parents than young people had plans to visit Romania in the future.

Amanda Hawkins, Celia Beckett, Jenny Castle, Christine Groothues, Edmund Sonuga-Barke, Emma Colvert, Jana Kreppner, Suzanne Stevens and Michael Rutter compared views about adoption for two groups of 11-year-old children (n = 180). The team's analyses compared the views of children according to their pre-adoption background: UK domestic adoptees placed before the age of six months versus intercountry adoptees who had experienced extreme deprivation for up to three-and-a-half years in Romania prior to placement (the Romanian group was further broken down by age at placement). Remarkably few differences were found between these groups, with the exception of two areas. Older-placed adopted children from Romania were significantly more likely to find it difficult to talk about adoption than domestic adoptees, and to feel different from their adoptive families. However, supplementary analyses suggested that these differences were due to increased levels of difficulties within the older-placed Romanian group, rather than whether they were adopted internationally or domestically. The implications of the similarities and differences between these groups for policy and practice are discussed.

Service use between six and 11 years of age is reported for children adopted from Romania into UK families, and compared with that for children adopted within the UK before six months of age. Between six and 11, there had been only one adoption breakdown, and about one in ten couples experienced a marital breakdown. Apart from continuing concerns over hepatitis B carrier status in a small number of children, physical health problems were not a prominent feature. By contrast, nearly one‐third of the children from Romania placed in UK families after the age of six months received mental health services provision ‐ a rate far higher than the 11 to 15% in the groups adopted before the age of six months. Such provision was strongly related to research assessments of mental health problems and largely concerned syndromes that were relatively specific to institutional deprivation (quasi‐autism, disinhibited attachment and inattention/overactivity). There were similar differences between the UK adoptees and the adoptees from Romania entering the UK after six months of age in major special educational provision and, again, the findings showed that the provision was in accord with research assessments of scholastic achievement. The between group differences for lesser special educational provision were much smaller and there was some tendency for the early adopted groups to receive such provision for lesser degrees of scholastic problems than the children adopted from Romania who entered the UK after six months of age. The policy and practice implications of the findings are briefly discussed.