ActiveListener

Good to hear her perspective

Revisado: 01-19-23

With the preface that we are white parents that adopted transracially (expressed no racial preferences or exclusions and were matched transracially) through the foster system 10+ years ago, I am continually looking to be a better, more informed parent. When I read the cover and reviews, I suspected I might not like some of what I was about to hear, but truly wanted to get her perspective.

While I am glad I did as it definitely opened my eyes to a few things, the author was also predictable in her presentation of white adoptive parents. The author clearly has a great deal of trauma and unfortunately I think this is not uncommon among adoptees of any racial family mix - adoption is messy and hard in almost any circumstance for all involved and transracial adoption makes it materially more difficult for everyone. However, I am not sure any adoptive parent could please her no matter what they did or how hard they tried. A partial theme of this book is shaming white parents for both their motivations and actions, placing them in a precarious situation. The scandalous and sensationalized tone is accentuated by the narrator, particularly when describing adoptive parents or racial topics - I found myself part way into the book visualizing the narrator using chastising fingers-in-the-air-quotes every few minutes for dramatic effect.

It is worth noting, the perspective is much more focused on agency facilitated international adoption vs. domestic adoption through the foster system. She describes the entire adoption system as a corrupt business multiple times, even though ~50%+ of the roughly 135,000 adoptions each year in the US are through the Government run foster care system (~40% of those are transracial) at a loss actually funded by the tax payers. It glosses over the painfully persistent realities that there is not a neat 1:1 ratio of parents and children of the same race waiting to be simply matched up and that some groups are chronically over or under represented on all sides of the triad with Government judging the risks of an imperfect match possibly being better than no match at all.

Her political views come out in the book on many non adoption issues. She also appears to have a distain for wealth, but I found it humorous that she wants to get hers and advertised multiple times that she and other adoptees should be paid for simply sharing their perspectives.

Again, I am grateful for her perspective and the courage to lay it out there. I am glad I listened to the book and would recommend the book to current and potential parents with thick skins looking to get a sense for how painful the process can be on the adoptee, but don’t expect to feel good at the end of it. I do think it could keep some families reading it from going down the more challenging path of trans racial adoption and rather opt for a same race adoption or no adoption at all. The problem is what really happens to the roughly quarter of a million non-white children in the US foster system in the mean time?

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Good information, bad editing, repetitive

Revisado: 05-19-20

Dr. Pry is very knowledgeable and informative no doubt and this is a good overview of the threat as well as potential solutions. However, he should have hired an editor. There are whole sections repeated time and time again as if they were just copied and pasted. The 10+ hour book could probably be 4-5 hours and cover the exact same content.

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