Nancy,
I am overwhelmed to think I could be your hero in any way but thank you for the thought.
As I have said about 4 times, this is a very interesting thread:
Reactive Attachment Disorder (RAD) (the real thing) sometimes occurs in children who are with their birthparents who are totally emotionally unavailable (post partum depression, other serious illness in the mother, child who spends a long time in the NICU, etc) even though they have not met the "horrible" living conditions criterion.
What I am not sure I agree with is that the trauma of separation from birth mother of a new born is literally traumatizing to the brain. With the agency we had in Korea, each newborn goes into foster care (one infant per home) to middle aged women whose own children must be over 15. If there are twins, (Koreans have the highest natural twinning rate in the world), there MUST be a mother and another female in the home so each baby will have "someone." This is not the situation that most people envision when you say, "International Adoption." MrNo. went from the hospital to foster mother in Seoul directly to the airport. easy child was in "group care" --The Seoul Baby Home-- for five days after she left her foster mother because this is necessary for infants who are not living in Seoul. Was I distressed at even 5 days of group care? Yes, but we have a picture taken of easy child in the Baby Home and she is smiling in the arms of an adult and in some ways, having that picture validates that care was excellent every step of the way.
So, my kids can't have DSM defined Reactive Attachment Disorder (RAD) even tho' they were not in our home for the first 13 weeks of their lives because I know the interim care was as close to ideal as it can be. Does it constitute a multiple placement? Yes but moving a child who is 12-14 weeks old can be a smooth experience (based on the baby's reactions.) Ours were.
HOWEVER, it is a whole different ball-game PSYCHOLOGICALLY when a child becomes mature enough to understand that in gaining a "forever family," they first had to lose another family (usually at about age 7). Nancy is right, this is a plus and minus in transracial international adoption. The recognition of adoption can be preverbal--easy child --who is a very visual person-- oriented by turning her head to Korean adults in stores before she was a year old. She recognized the resemblance between her and them. I have green eyes, everyone else in the family including the dog has brown eyes. easy child felt sorry for me at age 3 or 4 because I was "odd." When I decided to have "the talk" with her at age 3-1 --I started out in the ususal way referencing someone she knew who was visibly pregnant. I said Ryan's mother was growing a baby inside her and easy child interrupted me, and said, "I no grow in you." I was both surprised and not. easy child had already shown that she was quite bright-- and especially well organized in visual perception, so I was not too surprised that she already knew. But the reasons for her observation, which was quite neutral at 3--just a statement of fact, had to be re-worked emotionally many times through the years, including an emerging understanding of feminist issues in Korea that would make it nearly impossible, and very inadvisable, for her birth mother to try to raise her in Korea.
So with such a neurologically intact person, who has no "problems" that are attributable to neural differences, I do not see separation from her birth mother as a necessary source of executive function problems, Learning Disability (LD), ADHD, etc. She's very bright and a really good student and always has been. We count our blessings.
However, the emotional work takes time and is not predicatable. It helps not to have other problems in attention, learning etc. but freedom from neurological problems is not a free pass. Identity formation is "double" for adolescent adoptees and "triple" for transracially adopted adolescents. We are fortunate to live in a metro area with a large Korean population. Our kids have always been in school with many Asians, with the largest group being Korean. They have never been in a school that didn't have Asian teachers, a Korean doctor lived across the street from us when the kids were in grade school, etc. They attended Korean Culture Camp every summer until they "aged out" as too old. I volunteered there every year, too. There is an impact of going to camp with 175 other kids in the same boat as you.
easy child got home from Wellesley yesterday. At dinner, she told a funny story: she has many Korean friends at college and one of them wanted to comment on the looks of a young man (not Korean) who was sitting close by. So she said whatever she wanted to say in Korean to easy child who said, "Huh?". The young woman said, "Don't you speak Korean?" easy child (whose name is a BIG tip-off she is adopted) --said, "No, why would I?" We all roared with laughter! Appearances trump "rational" knowledge even in college student who, by the way, knew easy child was adopted.
So it is a long task to decide "Who am I?" in my opinion the biggest risk that we can control is the risk of treating our kids as white and then having them rejected by "real" Koreans, i.e. Koreans raised by Korean parents. There is a relationship between acceptance of international adoption and educationa and SES of the Asian adult. So we don't expect recent struggling immigrants to think our children or family are OK. In contrast, the Asian professionals and teachers our kids spent time with have very positive attitudes. We addressed this by making suure no one treated our children as "white" because we are. We ALWAYS speak up regarding racial prejudice, including in school. MrNo was teased a lot and I played the race card rather than the adoption card when he was called a "fat four-eyed Chink" by a bunch of bulies when he was in 6th grade. Those boys were mute with no explanation for their actions and their parents sat publicly humiliated in the principal's office asserting that their children didn't learn racial prejudice at home. The principal was not nice to them. I endured a good deal of criticism for "makeing a fuss," but the message was very clear to MrNo--we don't tolerate racial harrassment and we will defend you.
I should write a book--in case anyone is still reading this--I am appalled by adoptive parents who when their children were small--and I assume these folks didn't know a lot about identity formation--would say, "My child WAS Korean." News flash--you child IS Korean and always will be. Both my kids wrote college admission essays that dealt in part with transracial identity formation in various ways. It is right there for them and will continue to be. Historically 98% of Korean adoptees have married white people. The sample is skewed bec. the first and second wave of adoptees were raised in all-white rural areas for the most part. If they were to marry, it would have had to have been to a white person. It will be interesting to see what kids raised as mine have been will do. Currently, easy child favors blond men and thinks bi-racial children are "more beautiful than either whites or Koreans." MrNo is somewhat into "racial purity" as are Koreans from Korea and thinks that being bi-racial is an additional difference that can be avoided. MrNo identifies much more closely with Korean culture (he reads and writes Korean but is not close to speaking fluently) so he would be more likely to want children who are "racially acceptable" to the larger Korean community. I think that easy child unconsiously realizes that in a white spouse, she would have fewer value conflicts than with Korean spouse and in-laws who would have cultural expectations she is not prepared to meet.
I HOPE spouses and grandchildren are a long way off--regardless of race-- but the above comment shows that closely spaced children raised in the same environment can come to very different conclusions in something as fundamental as what they might like their future children to look like.
The key to all of this in my opinion is to expect your kids to be dealing with this stuff at 17 and 19 and still at 27 and 29 etc. etc. I don't think some families who transracially adopt think through the long term consequences of becoming a nonwhite family.
Regards to all.
Martie
anic: 
