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By Lynette Nyman
October, 2000
Part of the MPR project One Family, Two Countries
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RealAudio 3.0 |
Researchers at the University of Minnesota are planning to survey the parents of nearly 4,000 children in the state, who were adopted from overseas between 1990 and 1998. The researchers hope the International Adoption Project will lead to a better understanding of the health, behavior, and other issues affecting children adopted from abroad. In particular, they want to find out how children who arrived from orphanages with lagging health and development are doing in their new homes.
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DIANNE SCHMIESING AND VICTOR ZUPANC are the parents of three-year-old Luisa. On this day at their Minneapolis home, she's wearing a pink tutu and a big smile. She was two months old when they adopted her from a "birth home" in Colombia.
"I can't imagine having done it any other way," Victor says. "We've brought so much into our lives that we wouldn't have otherwise."
It's been so rewarding that they're waiting for a second child. Adoptions from Colombia generally go very well, because orphans receive excellent care. By contrast, the majority of children adopted from countries such as Russia receive much less care in orphanages.
Besides being at a greater risk for contracting infectious diseases, institutionalized children usually lag in physical and mental development. Researchers with the International Adoption Project want solid data that may help them, adoption agencies, and families prepare to serve the needs of all children adopted from overseas.
Professor Megan Gunnar, the principal investigator of the study, says learning from clinic visits is not enough.
"Clinical information is always fraught with the question of, 'Who goes to the clinic? Does this represent all of the kids? Are they all like this? Or is only the ones that come to the clinic that are like this?' And we began to realize there was no way we could provide a picture and help these families based on the information currently available," Gunnar says.
The project has a million-dollar grant from the National Institutes of Health. Some of the money is being used to develop a mailing list of adoptive parents.
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"It's a continual learning process as to how best to serve these children," he says. "And what some of their issues may be, what some of their needs are so parents can assess for themselves whether they can meet the needs of these children."
This fall, Luisa started bilingual preschool where she speaks English and Spanish. When her dad, Victor, fills in his survey, one thing he's likely to mention is his worry over how well Luisa will handle prejudice.
"These things will come up not only because her skin is a different color, but that her skin is a different color than ours," he says. "She'll be asked many times things like who's your real mom. And that stuff is something we have to deal with, we're going to have to deal with and it's not something we've ever experienced in our lives."
Dianne already has her answer for curious people.
"You may know what they're asking, what they really want to know, but if somebody says, 'Who's her real mom?', well, I'm her real mom," she says.
International Adoption Project researchers are fine-tuning their survey and expect to have it in the mail to families early next year.
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