Last week a Pakistani television host gave away babies on live TV.
He normally gives away prizes such as motorcycles and cell phones to audience members in between his usual broadcast fare of celebrity interviews, game shows and cooking demonstrations. So everyone was surprised when the popular talk show host gave away two abandoned infant girls to two couples for adoption. According to The Washington Post report, the Chhipa Welfare Association, a Pakistani aid organization that scours garbage dumps and other sites for discarded newborns, rescued the babies. As you might imagine, not everyone approved of live TV adoption placement. It was criticized as a cynical attempt to boost ratings.
Today in the U.S. there are half a million children in foster care, without permanent families. Worldwide, according to UNICEF and Childinfo statistics, an estimated 18 million children are orphans who have lost both parents, and who live in orphanages or on the streets.
There has never been agreement about the best way to deal with children whose biological parents are not able to rear them. Orphanages, foster care, family adoption, closed adoption, open adoption, international adoption…each approach generated controversy. When I founded the peer-reviewed multidisciplinary journal, Adoption Quarterly (Haworth Press), I was stunned by the passion of those who work in the field. Up until that time, my experience had been with academics and clinicians, professionals in a range of specialties who, while deeply committed to their fields and their patients/clients, also maintained professional detachment. The passions aroused in the field of adoption seemed unique, and reflected, in my view, the powerful ambivalence that lives in the relationship between parents and children.
Literature often points out truths we struggle with in our hearts and in our society. Although we’ve become pretty comfortable with the idea of children’s ambivalence toward their parents (Kids are permitted to have huge and powerful emotions they neither understand, nor control, nor are held responsible for their feelings.), adults hold themselves – and are held by culture and community – to a stricter standard.
Fiction can confront uncomfortable truths at a safe remove. In the novel We Need to Talk About Kevin, by Lionel Shriver, the mother-narrator admits her ambivalence toward motherhood and toward the infant Kevin, and shows how hard she tried to deny it, stuff it, bury it to conform to the always-loving-nurturing-patient ideal parent. Similarly, in the novel, Defending Jacob by William Landay, we watch a family dynamic unfold and ambivalence emerge, which enables the recognition of truth.
Like literature, television and movies help us work with family challenges. We see new forms of families – the 2009 sitcom, Modern Family, is one, this summer’s drama, The Fosters, is another, the 2010 movie, The Kids are All Right, fits the category, too. They show us new family compositions, with familiar family challenges. Ambivalence will not be denied.
Ambivalence notwithstanding, kids who need parents don’t have time to waste. Nevertheless, the challenge of recruiting, finding and vetting potential parents is ongoing. While in the U.S. we haven’t yet resorted to adoption placement on live TV, local television in many parts of the country broadcast a “Wednesday’s Child” segment that features a particular child awaiting a forever family. There’s no shortage of photolistings on the web of children around the world who are available for adoption. A recent study noted that children’s parties or activity days – opportunities for prospective parents and waiting children to meet one another which went out of style in the 1980s - are twice as effective as any other method of family finding for waiting children (about 30 per cent of children are placed after those events, compared with less than 15 per cent through other channels).
If you think you want to be a parent, embrace the ambivalence that comes with it. Children are waiting.