INTERNATIONAL ADOPTION

International Adoption

[Name of Institue]

International Adoption

Adoption is the process of legally placing a child with a parent or parents who are not his/her real birth parents where the rights of the birth parent(s) are permanently terminated and passed on the adoptive parents and in turn, the adopted child gains legal rights as those of a child born by the adoptive parents. International adoption involves adoption of children across the borders of countries. Children who are adopted are usually orphaned, relinquished or abandoned by their families. International adoption is mostly non-kinship adoption where the children are adopted by unrelated families Marre, 2009).

Thesis Statment

Though international adoption is believed to be one way of providing home to homeless children, it has been associated with exploitation and socio-emotional problems for the adopted children.

USA is the leading country of destination of adopted children with 120,000 children being adopted annually, which accounts for approximately 2% of the American children. Many of these adoptees come from South Korea, China, Russia and Guatemala. Sweden, Norway and Spain are also among the top countries with high percentages of adopted children (Wong, 2006). On the other hand, Germany and the United Kingdom have the lowest number of internationally adopted children in their countries. International adoption has evoked a great deal of public interest as it is seen as an equivocal process. Studies conducted by Juffer and Van IJzendoorn in 2005 supported the idea that 15 % of the adoptions are dissatisfactory to both the adoptive parents and the adopted children according to a survey by New York Times (Gray, 2009). Many adopted children suffer from low self-esteem, low school achievement and they result into developing externalized and internalized problem behaviors in childhood and teenage years, and maturity. The following is a discussion of various issues and challenges that the internationally adopted children went through which include mental health issues, challenges in educational achievement and socio-emotional and cognitive development issues (Gray, 2009).

To begin with, international adopted children are seen to be lagging behind in terms of educational achievement as compared to their non-adopted peers. According to Juffer and van IJzendoorn, these children are at a high risk of developing learning problems. One of the reason associated with learning problems relate to language disorder especially if the adopted child is already a tot or older and has already started speaking in their native language and the adoptive parent(s) speak in a different language (Van IJzendoorn, 2006). Some language delay in learning the new language may occur depending on how the child's brain developed at infancy stage. A child may experience difficulties in learning a new language if he/she experienced malnutrition during infancy or traumatizing moments during developmental stages which may consequently affect the learning process of a child as the level of intelligence quotient is affected by such problems. When a child is abruptly disrupted from learning the birth language where basic communication skills are acquired, he or she may experience poor performance in academic language even though the child adapted ...