Elton's Baby?

« Blame? | Victorian School »

Elton's Baby?

by LissaT ^Pro @ Monday, Sep. 14, 2009 – 09:06:23 pm

I don't have any problem with cross cultural international adoption - several of my cousins became my cousins by that route, and it has been pretty successful, so I'm rather in favour of it.

Equally I know quite a number of people who grew up quite happily with parents - or more often just the father - of an age with most of their friends' grandparents.

I don't personally know anyone brought up by a same sex couple, but, subject the the usual checks which would be made on any prospective adoptive parents, I can't see anything particularly against it.

I know nothing of celebrity adoptions beyond having read 'Mommie Dearest', so I shall pass no judgement as I doubt whether - celebrity or not - there are many people as ill-suited to parenthood as Joan Crawford, and presumably modern vetting techniques would weed such a person out before she ever got her hands on a child.

In short, in theory I have nothing against Elton John adopting any orphan going. Those who have the power to make that specific decision think otherwise and I am not saying that they are wrong.

What I wonder is why people with love to give and money to burn don't instead find a suitable poor family in the country where the child lives and sponsor that whole family plus the orphan(s) providing a decent house, a good education, health care etc., and visiting regularly so that when Uncle Elton (Uncle Reg?) - or, come to that, Auntie Madonna - calls it is like Christmas three or four times a year? Not to mention the family holidays taken with him and David in various paradises around the world! OK, it isn't the same as adoption and having the child with him always, but in ten or a dozen years time it could actually be a much better option than for a man of pensionable age having to deal with teenage moods and tantrums on a daily basis.
Options:
Tags:
- news
- life

11 Comments to Elton's Baby?

Hide subcomments

- Bushka ^Pro
- Bushka
- Monday, Sep. 14, 2009 @ 09:24:50 pm
Bravo Lissa! I have been agitating for your option for decades! Your last paragraph is MOST appropriate....especially when people seem to have so much money to burn....I CANNOT buy into rationale that such people have entirely selfless reasons; true selflessness lie in placing the child first...
No doubt...others may reason differently...but I shall still question the 'motifs'
- - LissaT ^Pro
  - Monday, Sep. 14, 2009 @ 09:38:22 pm
  I have to admit I have never had much time for Elton John - the man or the music - but what I saw on the news suggested that this really was a sudden and genuine impulse of love.
  - - Bushka ^Pro
    - Bushka
    - Monday, Sep. 14, 2009 @ 09:53:38 pm
    Might well be...but...my contention still remains...
    - Reply to comment
    - Permalink
- skip2468
- Monday, Sep. 14, 2009 @ 09:33:22 pm
Maybe we should accept reluctantly or otherwise, all that comes along as just another change in our society - good or bad!
- - LissaT ^Pro
  - Monday, Sep. 14, 2009 @ 09:41:57 pm
  Yes it would be nice if every child was brought up by its two loving natural parents who were (one of each sex) married to each other, but the love is the important thing.
  - Reply to comment
  - Permalink
- Pam (Visitor)
- Monday, Sep. 14, 2009 @ 10:00:58 pm
Your suggestion of sponsorship of a whole family that enabled the child and several others to all benefit from the generosity of someone as famous as Elton John - or anyone else with money to spare - is one that those opposed to inter- country adoption have long advocated. All children inter-country adopted loose their country, and in many cases their language, their religion and their culture. Whilst that may be the only option if their survival would be at grave risk if they remained within their home country chosing intercountry adoption when 'domestic' adoption or fostering would be possible is not a child centred approach. In many situations the child would not need either adoption or fostering if even a small grant were made regularly to his or her parent(s) as even in these credit crunch times 'spare cash' in England could easily sustain a large family in many third world economies.

Sadly the child focussed approach claimed is all too often masking a need to own the child. This applies to both domestic as well as inter country adoption and few people have the true generosity of spirit and heart - and some of those are known to us - to adopt solely to give and without needing personal gratification. This is the cause of much distress for many in future years as sooner or later it becomes clear than no one owns any child - and that applies to born to as well as adopted children.
- - LissaT ^Pro
  - Monday, Sep. 14, 2009 @ 11:05:19 pm
  I thought you would be in with a response.
  
  Of course, as you know as well as I do, our cousins were all in situations where their futures in their birth countries were far from rosy. But just how bad do things have to be before leaving their language, their religion and their culture becomes the best option? At one end of the scale poverty in a peaceful but poor country is probably not a good enough reason when money spent to support the child within that country would go a long way to solving the problems. At the other end of the scale a disabled or sick child belonging to a despised and oppressed minority in a country devastated by civil war needs any reasonable haven as fast as possible. Who makes the decisions about all the imponderables in between these extremes? And what criteria do they use? It is very, very difficult.
  
  The other question is just how important are language and culture? As a child I knew a good many girls with Polish fathers who knew only a few words of Polish and complained like mad about being expected to join in cultural activities at the Anglo-Polish club, and my father knows hardly any Flemish. On the other hand I knew a number of British born girls with Indian parents (one or both) who made a big thing of Indian dance, music and food, but mostly were pretty much monoglot English, though, as they were without exception doctors' daughters, it could be something to do with English being the lingua franca of educated Indians spoken by their parents and grandparents long before they left the sub-continent.
  - Reply to comment
  - Permalink
- Pam (Visitor)
- Wednesday, Sep. 16, 2009 @ 06:25:51 pm
I suspect language and culture matter only as much as one chooses when one is being raised within one's own birth family - either by birth parents or close relatives as what is lived always appears to be the norm - everyone else is odd, not me! The issue really only arises with people adopted outwith their birth family who gain a completely different culture and language -which is fine until they wish to re-connect with the birth family. This reconnecting presents challenges when language and background are, at least on the face of it, the same or similar but the distress experienced by an adopted person who cannot tell her birth mother she loves her as they do not share any language is very deep and real. Likewise not knowing how to behave at an important ceremony,such as a wedding or funeral, of birth family members because that type of ceremony has never been experienced before can be very painful and leave people feeling a deep sense of loss.

It was extremely well summed up at the Edinburgh International Adoption Conference in 1989 - so well that I have never forgotten it - by a young Swedish man adopted from Korea. He said "In Sweden I feel Korean; in Korea I feel Swedish!"
- - LissaT ^Pro
  - Thursday, Sep. 17, 2009 @ 03:52:34 pm
  I see all that: then the next question is what constitutes an orphan? Obviously a child given up by the birth parents for economic reasons is not an orphan and needs a way back to the birth family, but, for example, how German would a kinder transport infant have felt after the war when all their family had been wiped out by the nazis? (Though if the family was religiously Jewish one would hope the child had been placed with a Jewish family to retain some link with their blood-kin.)
  
  By the way, do consider this: in your work you see the people who want to find their birth families and have probably made efforts to find them. It is just possible that you over-emphasise the extent of the need to find their origins, though not the depth of the need in those who need it. I have three cousins on the Turner side who consider their adoptive family as the best thing that could have happened to them and have no interest at all in their birth families although all were given the option (one of them long before it became a legal right) to discover them. One of them - D. - is quite interested in genealogy, but it is all the adopted family she has researched. One person on the "Who Do You THink You Are" programme obviously also felt as D. does.
  - Reply to comment
  - Permalink
- Pam (Visitor)
- Thursday, Sep. 17, 2009 @ 11:35:25 pm
I think that you may be extrapalating too much from a limited sample known to you - and then not all known to you. Whilst you quote the lack of interest of your adopted Turner cousins in their birth families you do not mention the Hustons where three out of four have made contact, two sustaining that contact over decades and only one who has not done so being quite distraught at times that the circumstances of her adoption make it impossible to identify her birth family. Statistics from the Registrar General reviewed by actuaries now demonstrate that over 80% of women adopted outwith their birth family seek information about or contact with their birth family at some stage and, whilst lower, the figure for men now exceeds 60%.

You seem to imply that there either is a need or not, and the lack of need is indicative of integration into the adoptive family. This is not supported by research which indicates a far more fluid response, reflective of many changing factors in a whole lifespan. Many searching adopted people are those most content and connected to their adoptive family whilst many adopted people estranged from their adoptive family also fail to make a relationship with birth relatives or to dare to try to do so. It really is not an either/or situation.

Interestingly the man you mention from 'Who do you think you are?' was Nicky Campbell who is absolutely a Campbell and whose programme focused upon his research into his Campbell 'ancestry' but he has nevertheless traced his birth family and has an ongoing close relationship with his birth sister Esther Cameron.

You mention the children of the Kindertransport. Sadly few were adopted into British Jewish families and whilst some families sought to maintain Jewish links for their adopted sons and daughters others determined to eradicate all Jewish connections - for example Susi Bechhofer (see link)
KINDERTRANSPORT: SUSI BECHHOFER www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/saturdaylive

Identity is a complex thing; and whilst adopted people are the laboratory rats of the nature/nurture debate the issues are much, much wider. BTW don't forget my work is with adults affected by adoption - the whole spectrum, not just those seeking contact with birth relatives.
- - LissaT ^Pro
  - Friday, Sep. 18, 2009 @ 03:00:48 am
  Pam, all I wrote was a light little bit in which I said that on the surface I was not against people such as Elton John adopting orphans. I also said "Those who have the power to make that specific decision think otherwise and I am not saying that they are wrong." and suggested that, what ever seems good to Elton John in relation to this one little boy, there were alternative and better ways of supporting children in other countries.
  
  So, don't get on your high horse - I'm not arguing with you. I asked questions - rhetorical ones rather than any expecting a definitive answer which in any case would need to be far more detailed and specific than anything appropriate to a blog, and my examples were examples only. There is never any one size fits all solution because human beings are so variable in their needs. All we can do is the best as we see it at the time. Rescuing children from extreme poverty, danger or just institutionalisation by taking them from from their original cultures will, I agree, bring for a majority its own problems even if it seemed - and possibly was - the best solution at the time. (And yes, I have only told you a part of the history of the cousins on the Turner side: one, for example, learned that his birth parents were married, well-off professionals who decided that a child would not fit in with their lifestyle, and rejected any idea of attempting contact because of the degree to which they had rejected him: obviously a different sort of damage.)
  
  All I am saying in answer to your arguments is that it is no more a universal truth that no child should ever be removed from his/her cultural origins than it is a universal truth that all children would be better off with middle-class married white parents, just as in the original blog I suggested that someone's bid for parenthood should not be rejected out of hand because he is ageing, gay and famous, and I was talking more about public perception than that of those with the authority to make such decisions.
  
  My perennial argument in so many things - look at the individual case and try to avoid any jerking of the knee - with which I am sure you agree.
  - Reply to comment
  - Permalink