Special needs adoption from a Jewish perspective.

Special needs adoption from a Jewish perspective.

Sunday, March 17, 2013

One special one

Is there "one special child" waiting there for you?

No.  There are many thousands of individual children, each of them totally real and unique, each special, each needy (though probably not waiting.... as they don't know that there is anything out there worth waiting for).    Does the fact that there are many of them in any way diminish the "specialness" of each one?  Does the overwhelming extent of the total need diminish from the specific needs of each particular child?

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This video is about 8 months old, but I just became aware of it yesterday.  It is long (1.5 hours) but worthwhile.


The totality of the problem IS overwhelming.  It is rooted in history, in poverty, and in prejudice.  It is present in developing countries, in advanced countries, and in our own hearts.  A few of the children featured in the video above have found homes since it was aired.  We celebrate that, even while recognizing that they are but a drop in the bucket.   Yes, their adoption and rescue made a world of difference for those individuals, but it did not change the system that led to their suffering in the first place.

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How do we make actual change happen?  Clearly adoption of children who are trapped in bad systems is a part of it, but it cannot be the entirety of the solution.  There are many other parts:

1. Seeing the humanity of people with disabilities in our own communities.  Working to integrate them more fully into the life of our communities.
2. Creating a community where adoption of high-needs children is less overwhelming.
3. Maintaining communication with orphanages and mental institutions, so that they can better learn how to help children with disabilities reach their potential.
4. Maintaining connection to the children's birth countries, both for the benefit of the child, and so that parents and others in those countries can see children with disabilities who are happy and functional, not "useless eaters" who are to be hidden away in remote institutions.

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All too often, families in the special-needs adoption community remain inwards-looking.  They take care of their own families, and they seek out similar families for affirmation and bonding.  But it seems as though these mega-families are trying to solve the whole problem themselves, by adopting multiple children over and over again.  My vision through Matir Asurim is to connect to the wider community in the ways indicated above, so that instead of 1% of the population adopting several children each, we might instead see 10% or more adopting one child each, so that adoption becomes normalized.

I think that Judaism, with its emphasis on community, is well-suited for this manner of addressing the problem.  We are less concerned with "individual salvation" as with being a "holy nation".  This is what Tikkun Olam is about.  Not about that "one special one" but about society as a whole.

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I think part of the picture is family size.  Communities that tend to support adoption also tend to have larger families.  There are several reasons for this.

1. People who want only one or two children are more likely to be concerned with those children being "perfect".  This is especially common for families with only children, who are showered with every advantage even before conception.
2. Likewise, people with only one or two children see each addition as overwhelming. Indeed, the change from zero to one is profound, and from one to two nearly so.  It is easy for these parents to imagine the burden of further additions as linear.  I know people look at me and my five children and think I am some kind of supermom.  Not so!  The challenges of larger families are different than those of smaller families, but not really harder.  I recall being no more competent a parent of one, two or three children than I am now a parent of 5.
3. Larger families give parents a perspective on the uniqueness of each child. I remember when I had my first, thinking that "this is what child-rearing is about".  She was the entire universe of children for me.  Then I had my second, and everything became binary: Social/Loner, Right brain/Left brain etc.  With more children, these false dichotomies dissolve.  Each child is his/her own configuration of traits, strengths and challenges. As such, the idea of a child with more pronounced disabilities seems to fall more within the landscape of my child-concept than when that concept was defined by just one or two data points.  In math, we say that 2 points define a line, 3 points define a plane, and 4 points define a space.  The more data points we have, the greater the dimentionality of what we are able to imagine.

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So, is there "one special one"? Or many thousands of "special ones"?  What does "special" mean? What will we make it mean?




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