scholarly journals Domestic adoption in Romania: Behavioral adjustment in a sample of adolescents

2020 ◽  
pp. 002087281989266
Author(s):  
Marta Casonato ◽  
Ana Muntean ◽  
Paola Molina

A considerable body of research has analyzed the development of children internationally adopted from Romania. However, domestic adoption remains largely uninvestigated. Our study examined the behavioral adjustment of 52 Romanian adolescents domestically adopted. Adoptive mothers and their children completed Achenbach System of Empirically Based Assessment (ASEBA) – School Age forms. While overall our sample did not differ from the normative population, the rate of subjects obtaining clinical scores was higher. Behavioral problems did not appear to be linked to the considered pre-adoption risk factors. The overall positive adjustment of this rare sample of domestic adoptees encourages a deeper understanding of the mechanisms involved in the success of this child welfare policy.

Author(s):  
Jean C. Griffith

This essay examines the roles the character Easter in “Moon Lake” plays in the context of early-twentieth-century debates about the roots of poverty and society’s level of responsibility to poor children. By placing the focus of the story not on Easter but on the genteel Morgana girls’ shifting attitudes about her, Welty illustrates the ways child welfare policy was shaped by conflicting attitudes, whereby sympathy for innocent children coexisted with scorn for their parents. Assuming that Easter lives outside the boundaries that mark their own places in Morgana’s gendered, class-bound, and racially-segregated society, Jinny Love Stark and Nina Carmichael imagine the “orphan” to embody a womanhood untethered by race or rank, one, perhaps, more representative of American democracy. Ultimately, though, the girls come to see that Easter’s status as an orphan makes her more marked by and vulnerable to the violence and oppression that shape the South’s racial patriarchy.


2009 ◽  
Vol 34 (1) ◽  
pp. 15-20
Author(s):  
Mark E. Courtney

This essay explores some of the reasons why child welfare policy has too often avoided an explicit focus on child well-being. The historical origins of child welfare services contribute to avoidance of child well-being in policy discourse. In addition, program administrators are reluctant to explicitly take responsibility for the well-being of children they serve because of concerns about added liability, the belief that public institutions other than the child welfare system should be held responsible, and the fear that child welfare services will be unable to ameliorate the damage that children often suffer before entering care. Three empirical studies of child welfare populations in the US are used to examine the inextricable links between child safety, permanency and well-being. It is argued that broadening child welfare policy to embrace child well-being as a policy goal will only enhance the likelihood that child welfare agencies will improve child safety and permanency outcomes.


Author(s):  
Haksoon Ahn ◽  
Philip J. Osteen ◽  
Julia O'Connor ◽  
Terry V. Shaw ◽  
Linda Carter

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