Schwartz, Lita Linzer, & Kaslow, Florence W. . Welcome Home! An International and Nontraditional Adoption Reader - Eds - Book Review

Adolescence, Winter, 2003

SCHWARTZ, Lita Linzer, & KASLOW, Florence W. (Eds.). Welcome Home! An International and Nontraditional Adoption Reader. New York: The Haworth Clinical Practice Press, 2003, 262pp. $39.95 (h), $24.95 (p).

Welcome Home! is a guide to the process, pros, and cons of adopting children from outside the United States, with special needs, and/or from a different racial/cultural background. The book documents every aspect of the adoption procedure--from working with "facilitators," adoption agencies, and attorneys to mixed reactions over a child's possible loss of heritage as the result of a transracial or multicultural adoption. Parents and adoptees offer unique, firsthand perspectives on the cautions and benefits of nontraditional adoption. Americans adopted more than 20,000 children from other countries in 2001, a number that reflects humanitarian motives, the desire to adopt a child from a specific country, and/or frustration with the domestic adoption system. Including a foreword by United States Representative Ted Strickland, Welcome Home! is a practical resource for anyone thinking of establishing a family or adding to their own. The book provides insight into the adoption process, open adoption, biracial adoption, adopting a special needs child, cultural attitudes, and how to handle an adopted child's questions in later years. It also addresses specific adoption issues, including: how to verify an agency's credentials; how an agency negotiates with the birth mother; state and country laws and practices; tax benefits; and expenses, including legal and medical costs; and includes research findings on the Northeast-Northwest Collaborative Adoption Projects (N2CAP). Welcome Home! tells the stories of: Naomi and Fred, an intermarried couple (she's Jewish, he's not) who adopted a Greek baby in 1962; "Tina" and "Lee," a lesbian couple, who adopted a baby from China; Marianne, a professor of child and adolescent psychiatry at the University of Lund in Sweden, who adopted babies from Iran and Thailand--several years after her divorce; Pamela, a divorced mother of four biological children who has adopted babies from Viet Nam and China (including the stories of all of her biological children and Mildred--Pamela's mother and the children's grandmother); Karen, adoptive mother and national chairperson for Families for Russian and Ukrainian adoption (FRUA); William, adoptive father of miracle sisters from Romania; and many more.