Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #620580 in Books
• Published on: 2000-11-17
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 304 pages

From Library Journal
The book's jacket calls this an "intense look at child welfare policies on abuse and neglect." Precisely. Bartholet's subject is too weighty for casual reading and cannot be easily digested, but it does not falter in its criticisms of American child welfare policy. Examining legislation from all parts of the United States, Bartholet questions why "family preservation ideology still reigns supreme when children rather than adult women are involved." The reader is left with a multitude of questions and concerns about the way U.S. adoption policy is currently working, questions that are catalysts for invoking the changes that Bartholet espouses. Clear and consistent, this is recommended for public and academic libraries.ASheila Devaney, North Carolina State Univ. Libs., Raleigh
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Kirkus Reviews
A disturbing look at how the lives of Americas modern-day orphans are sacrificed for the often unrealistic goal of keeping troubled families together. Bartholet (Family Bonds: Adoption and the Politics of Parenting, 1993), an expert on family law and an adoptive mother herself, traces the historical, political, and cultural reasons why battered and neglected children are far more likely to spend years in foster limbo, or be sent back to abusive homes, than to be adopted by loving families. The author charges that despite recent legislation that bars race as a factor, everyone from private foundation administrators to judges, lawyers, and bureaucrats continues to be guided by the notion that children should be cared for by relatives, or adopted by families who look like them. Back in 1972, the National Association of Black Social Workers denounced transracial adoption as a form of racial genocide. Though race-matching policies have gone underground since then, Bartholet believes they resurface in criteria like kinship and cultural competence. Because other relatives may not be up to the task of parenting, and because there are not enough minority families to adopt all the children who need them, the author asserts that race-matching essentially condemns many youngsters to lasting physical, cognitive, and emotional damage. Whereas wife beaters are treated like criminals, child abusers, often plagued by poverty and substance abuse, tend to be seen as victims themselves. Bartholet expresses sympathy for their plight but demands that social workers stop using precious child-welfare resources to prop up deeply disturbed families. What matters, she insists, is that the children get into homes where they can thrive. She also suggests, somewhat unrealistically, that the state could take a proactive role in reducing child abuse by instituting universal visitation of all families before and after birth. The author makes her case intelligently, fearlessly, and exhaustively. Curiously, since her subject matter is so wrenching, Bartholets writing lacks emotional power. Nobodys Children ultimately appeals not to the heart, but to the head. -- Copyright ©1999, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

About the Author
Elizabeth Bartholet, author of Family Bonds (Beacon / 2803-7 / $17.00 pb), has been a professor at Harvard Law School since 1977. She writes, lectures, and consults widely on issues involving child welfare, adoption, and reproductive technology. The mother of three boys, two of them adopted from Peru, she lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Customer Reviews

This Book Changed My Life
I am a mother of two birth children and one adopted child, adopted from foster care at age 13. I stumbled across this book in a bookstore one rainy day when I had hit the emotional low-point in my own adoption journey. I read it while I was struggling with the endless and maddening redtape and delays entailed in getting our foster child out of "the system" forever. "Nobody's Children" speaks to hundreds of thousands of Americans whose hearts and beliefs nudge them to contemplate domestic adoption, yet who encounter cultural and procedural barriers that discourage most from considering adoption from the foster care system. This is a carefully-researched and footnoted work by a distinguished former civil rights attorney--whose career included work at the NAACP Legal Defense and Education Fund and now Harvard Law School, where she teaches today. The author is herself both an adoptive and biological parent. Her book gave me new hope. I was inspired by it to work to help bring about the cultural shifts and procedural reforms described in this book, changes that will be required if our nation is truly serious about ending the tragedy (and travesty) of kids languishing in long-term foster care. Ignore reviews by some who utterly mischaracterize Bartholet's arguments. She, like Patrick Murphy before her, fully acknowledge that the vast majority of poor and minority families raise their children well and lovingly, and that far more social resources should be directed toward addiction treatment and supporting stressed-out birth mothers so they can keep their babies. Defenseless, innocent children are not, however, the chattel (private property) of their birth parents. All of us, as a civilized people, must speak out against policies and practices that severely limit a child's chance to be adopted after being subjected to acts of torture or repeated abuse and neglect. To fix "the system" and its horrors, more Americans need to open their homes to the children trapped in it. How to persuade people to consider adopting from foster care? Bartholet suggests a first step: imagine a system that promotes adoption as the best, instead of a second best, way to build a family. A book for dreamers and "doers" both.

A good book to read
This book is great, because it talks about what foster care is about in the eyes of the author. I to have had my share of the juvenile courts issue. My children were removed from me on Dec. 16, 1990 by a police office not a social worker. I was charged on hearsay issues. I have always loved my children, but my mother had stolen my children because I was poor and unmarried. Now I have formed a class action against the abuse of the system.

Typically self-serving
Nothing more than another whining infertile wishing to strip all biological parents of their constitutional rights to parent their children without government interference, in hopes of increasing the already flooded pool of children awaiting adoption.

Ms. Bartholet does an excellent job of pointing out the serious flaws in the child welfare system in this country. Instead of calling for reform of what doesn't work, she contends the whole system should be thrown out. What she seems to be trying to say is that parents are replaceable and interchangeable, and children don't greive the loss of biological or cultural attachments. Her shift from removing children from abusive or neglectful parents to removing them from those she considers sub-standard is frighteningly Orwellian. While her suggestions would certainly make the pool of adoptable children more appealing for infertile couples and singles who will settle for nothing less than the healthy white infant/toddler, it does nothing for children living with parents they love, and love them, in spite of their failings.

Love and parenting are issues far to complicated to follow her suggestion that anything less than perfection demands all ties be severed.