ABSTRACT
The previous chapter described and examined all of the bruises, warts, and ugliness we discovered in the families who were experiencing problems. Some of the vignettes portrayed deceit, ignorance, and lack of trust between parents and children, between the adopted and birth children, and among adopted siblings. We reported anger, disgust, lack of communication, and indifference by persons in each of these categories. We have to assume that the reader has been affected by those accounts and wonders about the wisdom and practicality of transracial adoption. The collective portrait that we draw in this chapter is not meant to disavow the facts described by the “problem families/’ but it is intended to depict the dominant themes, the life patterns, the emotions, and the interactions among the majority—indeed, among at least four out of five of all the families in the study. This picture was developed after reading all of the parents’ and children’s interviews and examining the tables derived from the descriptive statistics.
