Suchergebnisse

This qualitative study analyses the emotions of fear and anxiety as experienced by prospective adoptive parents receiving pre-adoption services. The article draws on 19 narrative interviews with men and women who have pursued an adoption process in seeking to adopt a child from overseas. The findings suggest that the experience of fear was connected with the risk of losing a wanted child through rejection in the assessment procedure or a termination of the process, and also with a loss of control in their position as clients. The prospective parents strive to balance anxiety and hope through their own emotional engagement, while the professionals involved play an important role in regulating those emotions. Further, the fear and anxiety in this situation lead to an inhibition of both negative emotions in interactions with professionals and of engaging with them in a truly open, trusting and reflective relationship.

In an inter-country adoption process, the private issue of becoming a parent takes place within a regulated institutional setting and process with professionals acting as gatekeepers along the way. This qualitative study based on 19 narrative interviews scrutinizes the strategic interaction used by prospective adoptive parents to navigate the controlling institutional setting of statutory pre-adoption services. This social interaction with the professionals is analysed as power negotiations and discussed by utilizing Goffman's conceptual framework of expression management and stage play. The study shows that prospective adoptive parents, whose primary aims differ from those of the professionals, play on different teams than the professionals. Therefore, they utilize expression games through information, emotion, and team management in order to put their best foot forward in the pre-adoption services. But along the inter-country adoption play the audience shifts and the professionals often join the same team as the future adoptive parents. Further, the article discusses the consequences of this on the relationship between the professionals and prospective adoptive parent as a client within a global inter-country adoption scene.

EPDF and EPUB available Open Access under CC-BY-NC-ND. This book explores how children's rights are practised and weighed against birth and adoptive parents' rights and examines how governments and professionals balance rights when it is decided that children cannot return to parental care. From different socio-political and legal contexts in Europe and the United States, it provides an in-depth analysis of concepts of family, contact, the child's best-interest principle and human rights when children are adopted from care. Taking an international comparative approach to these issues, this book provides detailed information on adoption processes and shares learning from best practice and research across country boundaries to help improve outcomes for all children in care for whom adoption may be the placement of choice