Grotevant Discusses Modern Adoption in Series of Australian Presentations

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On a recent trip to Sydney, Australia, adoption researcher Hal Grotevant, Rudd Family Foundation Chair in Psychology, gave a series of presentations and consulted with university and private sector practice colleagues about new directions in adoption in the United States and in New South Wales.

Grotevant addressed a large gathering of practitioners involved in providing out-of-home care and adoption through the major non-governmental organization, Barnardos Australia. His presentation titled, “Adoptive Kinship Networks: Maintaining Connections from Childhood to Adulthood,“ discussed the implicationsof his team’s longitudinal research with adoptive families that looked at new adoption practices in Australia that mandate open adoptions for children adopted from the child welfare system.

He also consulted with Barnardos colleagues on a series of challenging cases in their practice. Grotevant was also the featured speaker at a Sydney Ideas Event, hosted by the University of Sydney and open to the public. There he engaged in an extended public conversation with Amy Conley Wright, director of the university’s Institute for Open Adoption Studies, a recently-funded unit within the School of Education and Social Work. This event attracted a wide range of interested participants including pro- and anti-adoption advocates, people with personal connections to adoption and foster care, researchers and interested community members. 

In Grotevant’s final contribution, he gave the keynote address at the university’s Research to Practice Forum: Relationships for Life. The day-long forum attracted researchers, government officials including from the New South Wales Minister for Families, Communities, and Disabilities, and staff of organizations involved in adoption and out-of-home care of children. The forum highlighted new practices in working with families providing adoption and foster care and working with people whose children have been removed from their care because of maltreatment.

Throughout all of these presentations, Grotevant relates, the importance of culturally sensitive practice was emphasized, and efforts were made to acknowledge Australia’s difficult adoption history, particularly the era of forced adoptions of aboriginal children, “the lost generations” forcibly removed from their communities and placed with non-native families. He says participants in these events were interested to learn of the Rudd Program’s efforts to make UMass Amherst an “adoption-friendly campus” by providing research training, courseworkand community-building activities.