I have seen this article linked many times recently and to me the article tries to combine two things that don’t necessarily work together.
Top 10 Keys to using Positive Adoption Language
The article starts off with this:
Every year, our country dedicates the month of November as National Adoption Month. The goal is to raise awareness about the adoption of children from foster care and facilitate the creation of forever families for the 115,000 children in foster care nationwide. Worldwide, the number of children in need of adoptive parents climbs into the millions.
It goes on talking about foster care adoption which I support for children who are legally free for adoption. I take no exception to what they write until it comes to this:
Positive Adoption Language:
Words are very powerful. Positive adoption language aims to end the negative stereotypes and misconceptions regarding adoption, while educating others that all families look different and form in different ways. Here are some keys to positive adoption language.
And specifically this:
5. When speaking about adoption, it is important to note that birth parents make an adoption plan to place the child in a home to be cared for and raised. The child who was adopted was not “given away” or “unwanted.” The child should know he or she is loved and an adoption plan was created for them to live in a forever family.
And how exactly did parents who had their rights terminated by the state for cause come up with that plan, and exactly what was included in that plan to get their rights terminated. Think about that for a minute – the full implications of it – because if you want to use PAL with foster care adoptions then it has to work.
So many other 10 PAL statements do not work in conjunction with adoption from foster care that it makes no sense to link the two together.
Neither does PAL work for step parent adoption – go ahead and see how it fails at each statement. I would hesitate to apply it to most international adoptions either, and certainly not to all domestic adoptions.
I’m not a fan of PAL as I find it dishonest and tries to sugar-coat something that comes with a whole lot of loss and pain, and seeks to elevate one side over the other instead of simply recognising both sides are important.
Linking the two parts of this article together does not work for me at all.
