adoption
sastyk | May 17, 2011A recent email I received was pretty typical - I won't quote it here because the person meant well, but the sum up was this - they laud my decision to adopt, argue that I should have done it earlier, and point out that adoption is the solution to the population crisis. People who want children should just adopt, rather than giving birth. In the spirit of my discussion of the new suggestion that the world will hit 10 billion, I thought this was a good subject to take up.
Now as usual, I'm not going to recite my discussion of why I have four biological kids - and I'm not going to argue that…
sastyk | May 4, 2011As Arizona ramps up its attempt to win national "America's stupidest laws" competition (hotly contested, admittedly) by prioritizing heterosexual married couples over gay people and singles for adoption, there's a lovely story about two gay fathers and their 12 children adopted from foster care:
These are all your kids? Oh, my gosh. Their poor mother. Where is she? I have to congratulate her."
"I am their mother - and their father," Steven said. Then, reaching out to shake her hand, he introduced himself, and then Roger, and each of the kids as they loaded into two cars and buckled in.
The…
sastyk | April 7, 2011I'm getting a lot of questions via email and comments about our experience entering into the foster parenting world, and I did want to talk about this. Some people are critical, and think we're nuts (quite possibly), some people want to watch because they want to try this too (cool), some people have been there themselves in some portion of the system - as a worker, parent or child and have a lot to teach us. I wanted to put up a post that tells more about where we are and what we're doing - and also includes an important caveat about what I will and won't be writing about.
What I Will And…
sastyk | March 24, 2011Life has been proceeding more or less apace, and it feels like a long time since I've sat down and contemplated anything, much less my Anyway Project goals. At the same time, all this business is a series of steps on the way to actually many of the things done. I hope that's true of all of you!
As you'll remember, the goal of the Anyway project is to integrate our preparations for a harder future with our daily life now, to turn them many parts into a whole. As I wrote previously:
The larger idea of the Anyway Project is to make our lives work more smoothly. Most of us stand with feet in…
sastyk | February 28, 2011I've had a number of emails recently, as I've written here, at The Chatelaine's Keys (Yes, I know the site is down - there was a billing mixup that required a fax to fix - we don't have one at home and we got a foot and a half of snow on Friday, too much to bother struggling out for. The blog will be back soon, now that Eric is at work where faxes are more prevalent than out here on the farm.) and on facebook about the process of preparing to foster and eventually hopefully adopt more children that asked what this had to do with peak energy and climate change.
I'm a little reluctant to…
sastyk | December 24, 2010I've had a lot of requests to say more than I did in my Anyway Project Update about our decision to adopt more children, and a lot of requests to write about the project as we go along. So I will say something here, although with the caveat that the process is very new for us, we are just beginning, and we have not yet been approved as foster/adoptive parents. Many of my assumptions are just that - assumptions. At the same time, I will write about the process when and if children join our family, but I hope my readers will be understanding about the fact that because any children we take…
emjohnson | July 17, 2009How genes for altruism can benefit strangers as well as kin
The generosity of adoption has long been considered a unique human hallmark.
Image: Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors
For decades it was conventional dogma that humans were the only species that used tools. "Man the Toolmaker" was our celebrated designation. The hominin fossil Homo habilis (or "handy" man) was even defined within our genera primarily because the skeleton was associated with stone implements. However, when Jane Goodall discovered chimpanzees using modified sticks at Gombe to "fish" for termites, Louis Leakey famously…
razib | April 9, 2009Via Dienekes, Differential parental investment in families with both adopted and genetic children:
Stepchildren are abused, neglected and murdered at higher rates than those who live with two genetically related parents. Daly and Wilson used kin selection theory to explain this finding and labeled the phenomenon "discriminative parental solicitude." I examined discriminative parental solicitude in American households composed of both genetic and unrelated adopted children. In these families, kin selection predicts parents should favor their genetic children over adoptees. Rather than looking…