Points of light: informal adoption in the black community

Children Today,  Sept-Oct, 1990  by Charmaine Yoest

• E-mail
• Print
• Link

After considering whether her identity should be disguised in this article, Nadine returned with her decision:

  "I've always been real open,"
      she said, and the reason why
      is in Ecclesiastes.  It says the end
      of a matter is better than the beginning.
      If anybody reads my
      story, I would just want it to give
      children hope.  I really do believe
      God is going to do something
      with my life.
      "Even my name, Nadine,
      means hope.'"

Charmaine Crouse Yoest is a policy analyst at the Family Research Council.

1. Robert B. Hill, "Informal Adoption Among Black Families," address before the Adoption Research Workshop, sponsored by the Office of Adolescent Pregnancy Programs, United States Department of Health and Human Services, Washington, D.C., June 6,1990.

2. Ann Hulbert, "Children As Parents," The New Republic, September 10, 1984, Vol. 191, No. 11, p.18.

3. "U. S. Children and Their Families: Current Conditions and Recent Trends, 1989," Select Committee on Children, Youth and Families,

4. House of Representatives, 101st Congress, 1st Session, September 1989, p. 15.

5. Adoption Fact Book, National Committee for Adoption, Washington, D.C., 1989, p. 178.

6. Kari Sandven and Michael D. Resnick, "Informal Adoption Among Black Adolescent Mothers," American Journal of Orthopsychiatry, 60 (2), April 1990, p. 217.

6. Elizabeth Herzog and Rose Berstein, "Why So Few Negro Adoptions?" Children, January-February, 1965, p. 24.

7. Sydney Duncan and Zena Oglesby, " Models for Success in Adoptive Planning for Black Infants," workshop presentation before the 15th North American Training Conference on Adoptable Children, sponsored by the North American Council on Adoptable Children, Washington, D.C., August 16-19, 1990.

8. Sandven and Resnick, p. 217.

9. Hill, address before the Adoption Research Workshop, p. 3.

10. Robert B. Hill, Informal Adoption Among Black Families, National Urban League, Research Department, 1977, p. 43.

11. Hill, Adoption Research Workshop, p. 3. James R. King, African Survivals in the Black American Family: Key Factors in Stability," Journal of Afro-American Issues, Vol. 4, No. 1, Winter 1976, p. 30.

13. Carol B. Stack, All Our Kin, New York: Harper and Row, 1974, as quoted in Hill's Informal Adoption Among Black Families, p. 76.

14. Who Will Care When Parents Can't: A Study of Black Children in Foster Care," National Black Child Development Institute, Inc., Washington, D.C., 1989, p. 6.

15. Hill, Informal Adoption Among Black Families, p. 3.

16. Marian Wright Edelman, Families in Peril: An Agenda for Social Change, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA, 1987, p. 10.

17. Sandven and Resnick, p. 217.

18. Sandven and Resnick, p. 216.

19. Hill, Informal Adoption Among Black Families, p. 73.

COPYRIGHT 1990 U.S. Government Printing Office
COPYRIGHT 2004 Gale Group