The Social Construction of Attachment, Attachment Disorders and Attachment Parenting in International Adoption Discourse and Parent Education

This article examines how ideas about forming emotional attachments with internationally adopted children are communicated to parents via adoption agencies, parenting courses, magazines, books and websites. In adoptive parent education, attachment is often presented as an elusive goal that requires concerted effort to achieve, without which the child may suffer from an attachment disorder with lifelong psychological and behavioural consequences. The result is the promotion of intensive parenting practices derived from, but also exceeding, those advocated by the 'attachment parenting' philosophy, practices that are often demanding, inflexible and proscriptive, yet only tenuously connected to their supposed evidence base in psychology. Copyrigh

Talking About Culture With Internationally Adoptive Parents: An Anthropological Perspective

Parents who adopt internationally are commonly implored to expose their children to their “birth cultures.” While this celebration of origins is praiseworthy, the approach to “culture” that it typically involves is arguably problematic. This article discusses what anthropologists mean by culture and how this differs from the way culture is treated in international adoption. It then considers what medical anthropologists have learned through decades of evolving discussions about how to teach “cultural competency” to health care providers and suggests that the insights from these debates can be applied to encourage a more nuanced approach to “cultural competency” among adoptive parents