The “Meet the Children” page at www.AdoptUSkids.org looks a lot like the one for ordering new window shades from Smith & Noble: simple questions to help a shopper limit his or her search range. It’s the questions that give pause: “What gender child would you consider? What is the age of the youngest child you can adopt? What is the age of the oldest child you can adopt? What race child are you interested in? (Check all that apply.)”

When he saw it, Barbara Holtan’s adult son Seth was appalled. “Mom, it’s like they’re shopping for cars,” said Seth, now 29. He was adopted when he was seven.

Holtan was distressed by Seth’s reaction. But as the executive director of the Adoption Exchange Association, which runs the website under a five-year, $22 million federal contract, she is also determined to find homes for as many children as possible. Holtan believes that by helping would-be parents narrow their search to those kids they feel most capable of parenting well, more adoption matches will be made.

Trying to Expand Options
More than 130,000 boys and girls nationwide are legal orphans, which means their parents have lost the legal right to raise them, usually because of abuse or neglect. Most are school-aged, many are teenagers, and many are part of sibling groups that ideally should be placed together in a home. Many have physical, emotional or educational needs; 60 percent are minorities.

At AdoptUSKids.org, people can read profiles and see pictures of 2,685 children. The goal is to increase that to 6,000 children by October. In April, there were 181,632 visitors to the site, who looked at more than 8 million pages. Profiles stress the children’s strengths, but they also often list emotional, physical and mental problems. Dozens of other organizations and all states have a website featuring children available for adoption.

Adoption experts call this type of marketing of children a necessary evil in today’s society.

“When the day comes that our country decides children are genuinely important and gives enough resources for raising and nurturing them adequately…I will stand on my soap box and declare ‘Stop this marketing of children,’ ” says Adam Pertman, executive director of the Evan B. Donaldson Adoption Institute.

“But we haven’t reached that day, and we only give lip service to children’s needs, so people trying to help the children day in and day out have to do what they can to help them. And marketing children on websites… does indeed help them find families,” said Pertman, author of the book, Adoption Nation: How the Adoption Revolution is Transforming America.

Expanded Reach, Instant Information
Publicizing the availability of children for adoption is nothing new. In the late 1800s and early 1900s, orphan trains ran from New York City out West. At train depots and church gatherings, children would be held up and offered to willing families. More recently, newspaper profiles and radio spots have put the spotlight on individual children or siblings available for adoption within a particular area.

But now, child profiles can now be accessed by anyone in the world with access to the Internet.

In October 1995, the National Adoption Center was the first agency to feature children available for adoption through pictures and profiles on the Internet. In 2000, it received a federal grant to develop the web site. Families who first read about the children on the National Adoption Center website went on to adopt about 1,800 foster children from between October 2000 and October 2002, according to a survey of parents.

The Center no longer runs a nationwide photo listing service, but it does have profiles of children available for adoption in Atlanta, Chicago, Los Angeles, New York City and Washington, D.C. at its website, www.adopt.org. These children have been featured in television news segments called “Wednesday’s Child” in their cities.

Gloria Hochman, the center’s director of communication and marketing, believes the Internet is effective because it can offer instant information. “In the beginning, it was the one place people could go and get information and ask questions without fear of someone judging them,” she said.

How Kids Feel
Some young people say they don’t mind being singled out for publicity purposes as part of the adoption search process. But they want more of a voice in the process.

“They never asked us what kind of family we wanted,” said 21-year-old Kim Joseph, who was adopted when she was 18, along with a younger sister, in Indiana. “When you read the profiles, it seems like the negatives outnumber the positives. They need to put more good in.”

Jesse, a North Carolina teen-ager, said he liked the attention that came with adoption recruitment efforts. His picture was on the front of a brochure, along with quotes from him. “I felt like I was a star or something,” he said. “They made me feel really good, said things about me that I didn’t see in myself, like that I was ‘intelligent and an avid reader.’”

Not all teens are comfortable with being marketed for adoption. Natalie Kozakiewicz wrote about her feelings in the July/August 2002 issue Foster Care Youth United magazine. “I felt like the family was trying to buy us,” she wrote about one couple. Kozakiewicz and her sister eventually decided to remain in foster care until they leave the system as young adults.

Though adoptions from foster care have increased since 1996, the number of children waiting and wanting to be adopted remains high. The most recent federal statistics show that as of September, 1999 the number of children available for adoption was more than two-and-a-half times the number of children adopted in the preceding year.

Respect
Diane Delafield, the founding director of Campaigns for Kids, a nonprofit adoption and foster parent-recruiting firm, says marketing efforts must be respectful of children. “I’ve read in some profiles that a child has been suicidal or a bed-wetter. I don’t think a child’s neighbor or friend should be able to obtain that kind of information,” says Delafield.

Delafield said Campaigns for Kids works to prepare children who are the subject of marketing efforts, to help them see themselves as advocates for the thousands of children needing adoptive homes.

Details about emotional troubles and disabilities can come later one-on-one between the potential parents and the child’s caseworker, says Delafield. But other adoption advocates believe the profiles need to be upfront about children’s challenges. Otherwise agencies may be flooded with calls from potential parents ill-equipped to care for a troubled child.

A Profile Writer Who’s Been There
Maggie Cotton is a former foster child who has written the child profiles for the Northwest Adoption Exchange for the past dozen or so years. At the site, as at many of the best adoption websites, children are described in honest but compassionate language. The pictures are vivid and candid.

Here’s an excerpt from one of Cotton’s profiles:

“Megan is a lovely child with a delightful singing voice who loves to perform in front of an audience. …Megan has been participating in Little League softball and soccer, and enjoys swimming, staking, riding her bike and playing on the trampoline. For a child who was severely neglected and deprived during early childhood, she has come a long way.”

Cotton says she avoids including diagnoses like attention deficit disorder or post-traumatic stress disorder. “The word – diagnosis – implies forever or for a long time,” said Cotton. “You can’t overestimate what having a permanent family can do for a child’s temperament,” Cotton said.

Privacy Worries
In Alberta, Canada, controversy erupted early this year over a new government-run adoption website. Critics said the site violated children’s privacy and risked attracting pedophiles. In one case, three foster children were featured on the website before being told they were available for adoption. They learned about it from classmates at school.

Their information was removed, and the province’s privacy commissioner temporarily shut down the site while detailed information about children’s previous traumatic experiences and medical and emotional health was removed.

Adoption advocates say they know of cases in the U.S. in which children were thrust into the public spotlight before being informed they were available for adoption. But they say they don’t know of any cases where a child’s safety was compromised. No town or city information is listed for any child, and the child’s last name is never included.

An Effort to Improve
In Indiana, state child welfare officials convened focus groups of parents who have adopted, parents seeking to adopt and teens adopted as older children in December 2001 to talk about recruiting adoptive parents for children in foster care. The results were to be used to improve adoption services in the state.

The teens who had been through the process made a number of suggestions. Among them:

• Youth need to be more involved in seeking out adoptive homes for themselves.
• Youth should be kept better informed about the recruitment effort.
• Children should be interviewed for their own profiles.
• Children should also be asked what kind of adoptive family they wanted.
• Marketing efforts should concentrate more on the potential of waiting children, and less on past problems.
• Profiles should include quality color pictures, with both pictures and profiles updated every few months.

A few of the suggestions have been incorporated in Indiana, such as listing fewer negative characteristics about each child in his or her profile. But profiles run only a few sentences, the children themselves aren’t interviewed, and their preferences are usually not included.

Pictures, Voices Capture Attention
Those involved say that the success of marketing efforts often hinges on the quality of a photograph, or the sound of a child’s voice – something personal that creates a feeling of connection to a child.

Delafield has experienced that feeling first hand. As a 50-year-old divorced and remarried woman, she wasn’t considering motherhood when she heard Jesse speak during recording for a Campaigns for Kids radio program. “I just want somebody to love me. That’s all,” said Jesse.

Something about Jesse touched Delafield. She and her husband became his foster parents, then adopted him almost four years ago. Now she can hardly imagine life without Jesse. As for Jesse, his report cards are studded with A’s, and he has starred in several school plays, and wants to study theater in college.

Resources:
These Web sites provide information and support for adoption:

• The Evan B. Donaldson Adoption Institute
• National Adoption Center
• Northwest Adoption Exchange
• Aid to Adoption of Special Kids-Arizona
• North American Council on Adoptable Children
• The federal government’s AdoptUSKids website
• CampaignsforKids.com: Campaigns for Kids, a North-Carolina-based nonprofit marketing organization for foster care and adoption
  
• Foster Care Youth United is a publication of Youth Communications that features the voices of teens in the foster care system.

Talk Back

If you’ve got comments or questions about this story, we’d like to hear them. Send your response to Susan Phillips.

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Kathleen Schuckel is a freelancer writer in Indianapolis, IN.