Essay Sample on Adoption: International vs Domestic

Introduction

When a family seeks to adopt children, it is easy for them to get overwhelmed with questions, information, and decisions. One issue that affects many families is on whether to adopt internationally or from within the United States. For example, families ask how easy is it to adopt children from another country? Which process is cheaper or what is the difference between international and domestic adoption? Some of the things foster care experience internationally as in the films are cultural, emotional or linguistic. In the film the dark matter of love, the adopted twins Marcel and Vadim refuse new names as they think they should keep their Russian names according to their culture. According to the psychologist Dr. Robert Marvin, the children also struggle with having a parent-child relationship and feel that they have lost attention as revealed by Sassy who says she is no longer daddy's girl anymore.

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Challenges of Foster Care Children

Many children in foster homes experience mental health and behavior challenges. In the US, almost 80% of children in foster care have significant mental health issues (Badillo-Urquiola 109). From dark matters of love, young children face challenges such as the feeling of being powerless leading to disruptive behaviors as a way of influencing decisions about their future. Young children may also lack the attention they need from parents. The third challenge is that they may feel neglected leading to the development of problematic behaviors in the future such as aggression. For older children above 16 years, they experience mental health challenges such as anxiety, depression, post-traumatic stress among others. the periods of uncertainty that children in foster care experience especially after leaving the foster homes. Other issues include ambiguity about the resolution of placement and inconsistency. The uncertainty along with marginal identity and intrinsic transience connected with foster children reduces the sense of attachment, stability, and predictability. Foster parents may not share in the child's experience leading to worse cases of anxiety and depression.

Role of Nature/Nurture in The Behavior of Foster Children

Nature and nurture have a significant effect on the behavior of foster children. The early environment of a child has significant effects on their wellbeing. For foster children, a problematic environment affects their brain stress response system, interfere with healthy development and reduce the quality of care the child receives. There has been a question of whether adopted children are at a greater risk of developing behavioral problems compared to biological children. In my view, adopted children are likely to have behavioral problems due to the unique challenges and struggles they experience. Adopted children have a unique story about their history, feelings, and thoughts about the adoption process. Such struggles play a vital role in influencing the behavior of the children.

Things Learned About Foster Care Children

There are several things that one can learn about foster care children based on the two films. First, foster children have a lot of unique struggles they experience in their day to day life and for this reason, they require a lot of love and patience. One needs to learn who they are on the inside, beyond their names, age, gender and case file. One needs to listen and learn from them as no one knows more about them. Foster children's care also requires one to be patient and wait for attachments to form between the child and the foster parents (Negrao 68). One should also be ready to understand the pain that foster children may have gone through. Some children have faced abuse and neglect that is beyond explanation. However, it is surprising that the children would miss the people that hurt them the most. By understanding the pain that the children have been through, one can love them more.

Works Cited

Badillo-Urquiola, Karla A., Arup Kumar Ghosh, and Pamela Wisniewski. "Understanding the unique online challenges faced by teens in the foster care system." Companion of the 2017 ACM Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work and Social Computing. 2017.

Negrao, Mariana, et al. "Foster care process: Challenges and coping of youth and families." EUSARF 2018: XV International Conference "All Children, All Families Promoting Excellence in Child Welfare Research, Policy and Practice". 2018.