The Market (again)

Hello Blogville friends! It looks like I lost my math skills briefly and published this blog on Jan 7th instead of January 14th (to keep up with my every second Tuesday post schedule). So, in case you haven't read it yet, here is The Market. 

Welcome to 2025, and welcome back, it is so nice to see you. This morning I am drinking a camomile tea, for its stress reducing properties. As an adult adopted person I feel it is important to open up a dialogue about adoption topics (and sometimes other topics too) that impact on so many of us. 


Today might be a tough read. I want to start a dialogue about recruitment of adoptive families for children. At my age, I can still remember a couple of Canadian adoption recruitment strategies from my childhood that stood out to me, even as a young child. If there had been shopping channels back then, a television show called Family Finder would have reminded me of one, except people would have been shopping for children. If I had known the term back then, I think this show made me feel more like a ‘commodity’ than a human being. I vividly remember my brother watching this show and asking our parents to ‘please, please, please’ get him a brother. He would actually pick out boys he saw on this show and suggest my parents call to enquire about adopting him. To this day, I really cannot understand why my parents continued to let us watch that show. I do remember feeling grateful that I was already adopted and that I didn’t have to go on the show to find a family.


There was also a newspaper column (written by Helen Allen) that appeared in the Toronto Telegram and the Toronto Star (1964-1982) and was dedicated to the recruitment of adoptive families for “hard-to-place”children. The column was called, “Today’s Child” and it was initially launched in an effort to reduce the social “stigma” of adopting “non-white” children. I vaguely remember seeing photos of children in a newspaper but I do not imagine I saw these Toronto papers much while growing up in my Northern Ontario community. So I did some research. 


In the Journal of Childhood Studies (Vol. 46 No. 4), Daniella Bento, Taryn Hepburn, and Dale Spencer authored an article called: “Compensating for Stigma: Representations of Hard-to-Adopt Children in “Today’s Child”. They were studying how stigma and values were attached to children featured in the column and the compensatory strategies required to manage the stigma and make adoption in general, and particularly adoption of non-white children, socially acceptable. I would encourage you to read the full article to really get a sense of how this type of advertising adoption of ‘hard-to’adopt’ children devalued them. 


I learned that initially, Children’s Aid Societies worried about the harm of ‘advertising’ children and only four agencies initially participated in this very public recruitment plan. However, when 18 of the first 23 children featured children were adopted, agencies across Ontario began signing up to feature their children. 


But a newspaper picture and article really could not showcase the living and breathing actual child; not like showcasing the children live and in person on television. So, a television program called Family Finder, was created on CFTO. I think it is important to note that where children understood and could consent to being on the show, this was done. For some children, their worker consented on their behalf. It seems like the television show was successful in encouraging people to consider older children, sibling sets, interracial adoptions, and adopting children with special needs. It appears that adoptive parents were more open to considering parenting these children because they had gotten to ‘know’ them through the media.


Was it that prospective adoptive parents could see the child’s personality, rather than focus on their missing limb? Was it showcasing how a large sibling group got along and were determined to stay together? Was it just that television and newspapers were able to reach so many more families than the Children’s Aid Societies could? At any rate, Helen Allen became known as an adoption advocate and the “fairy godmother of adoption”.


Though no longer available in those very public forums due to confidentiality, adoption recruitment strategies continue today. For example, according to their website, the Dave Thomas Foundation for Adoption hires recruiters; these are adoption professionals whose goals are to recruit families for older children in foster care. The website notes that children are up to three times more likely to find an adoptive family through this program. You may have noticed the donation boxes in Wendy’s Restaurants to support the Foundation’s work. As you may, or may not be aware, Dave Thomas was adopted as an infant, which likely led to his passion to have children moved out of foster care into adoptive families as quickly as possible. 


In Ontario, there is a recruitment strategy called the Adoption Resource Exchange (ARE) where approved adoptive applicants can review photos and profiles of children and youth who are currently available for adoption  in Ontario. There is a semi-annual in-person conference where workers and prospective adoptive parents can meet and discuss children or youth and their potential for a match. This is a private event in terms of attendees being connected with a Children’s Aid Society, or a Private Adoption Practitioner. Keeping up with technology, there is also a platform where prospective adoptive parents can view pictures, profiles, and even videos in some cases, of children available for adoption in Ontario. Again, it is not a public forum, and prospective adoptive parents must be granted access to the confidential website. I feel the need to point out that the approval process for adoptive applicants can best be described as an arduous journey, immediately followed by a difficult selection, or matching, process that frequently ends in disappointment. Simply put, it is not an easy process for anyone.


In my career as an adoption worker, I too, prepared profiles of children and youth to assist in the recruitment of adoptive parents. I even drove a photographer around from foster home to foster home to take ‘candid’ pictures of children and youth for recruitment purposes. I reviewed the profiles of adoptive applicants that were hoping to be chosen for a child, youth, or sibling set. Why? Well, this is how we match children and prospective adoptive parents. I felt that choosing an approved adoptive family for a child, youth or sibling set was a huge responsibility. As long as I live I will wonder how the children I helped to match with their adoptive parents are doing. I am lucky enough to keep in contact with some of the families I helped to match, which allows me to breathe a sigh of relief. As for the others, I hope they know I did my very best with the information I had at the time they were matched with their adoptive family, and that they are happy and healthy. 


When I worked directly with birth parents it allowed me to let them help choose the parents that they wanted to raise their child, when they could not. I felt better about those matches. I felt that it would be helpful when or if birth parent(s) and their child met one day, that the child would know their birth parent(s) chose who would raise them. When birth parents could not be personally involved in the selection process, I tried to fully represent their wishes when matching their child with prospective adoptive families. 


So what have we learned? Well, as an adult adopted person, I learned that recruitment strategies are necessary tools to match children and families.
It was hard to accept that, had all of these recruitment options been available when I was made a Crown Ward and freed for adoption, I might have been on the ‘shopping channel’, or my photo and a profile of who I was might have been showcased in newspapers. Some little kid might have pointed at the television set and asked their parents for a sister. Honestly, I do not really know how I feel about recruitment strategies, except to acknowledge that they are often necessary to match children with adoptive parents. 


In my case, my adoptive parents had simply been ‘next in line’ for a baby girl, and were willing to take a child who needed surgery immediately upon being placed with them. In fact, I recently learned that my foster mother and my adoptive mother had literally raced to see who could get a surgery date for me first. How’s that for a recruitment/placement strategy?


Thank you so much for visiting with me today. I so enjoy your company and I hope you enjoy my stories, or reading my thoughts. As always, feel free to comment here or send me an e-mail at [email protected]. Or you can follow me on Goodreads and be the first to get new blog post notifications. See you next time.