Since I started writing for a living, I've been through intense periods of writing mostly about a single subject. There were a few years of international business, followed by time writing only on businesses in New York City. There were years spent on entrepreneurs, and years spent on the world's biggest companies.

For the last nearly 18 months, I have focused much of my energy on adoption, mostly adoption from Russia. On this blog and another, I've had the chance to explore the changes that have made Russian adoption now very different from what I first experienced in 1999.

But this year, I began to turn more of my attention toward the environment. I got accepted into a university's environmental studies program. I started working on elementary school environmental education and on expanding an organic farm's community-supported agriculture plan. And the more I worked on environmental issues, the more compressed my time became for writing about adoption.

So I've made a decision to step back from adoption blogging now and spend more time on the environment. To me, answering the call of nature (if I can call it that), is just one more step in the commitment I made to give my kids a future different from the one they were born to.

The co-founders of this site have graciously accepted my resignation, but they are keeping the mailbox open for me to write the occasional guest blog. This is my last post as a full-timer for Adoption Under One Roof, but I leave knowing that there will always be many stories for you to read and many opportunities for you to re-shape the discussion on adoption, at home and abroad. I hope you will take advantage of them.

Last week, Angela pointed out that Karensadoptionlinks.com had revived its list of the adoption agencies that operate in Russia, by region. I think it's a useful list, but maybe not for the reason its creators had intended.

Few prospective adoptive parents go into a Russian adoption saying something like, "I want to adopt from Novosibirsk, which agencies operate there?" Russia is simply too vast and I found, when adopting my younger son from Sakhalin Island, even Russians can have a sketchy idea of its geography. The exception to this seems to be prospective parents with a fear of flying. While Russia does meet the minimum safety requirements of the International Civil Aviation Organization, its accident record (compiled here by the Flight Safety Foundation, an arm of the company that pioneered pilot simulator training) can cause trepidation. I've known parents who have chosen their agency because it handled adoptions within driving or train distance of Moscow and St. Petersburg.

But what I think is really helpful about Karen's list is that it shows which agencies are trying to operate in Russia without being fully accredited. Over the last few years, Russia has been moving to discourage adoptions that are not handled by an accredited agency, although it has not formally ruled out independent adoptions. Russia has set up a two-step licensing process, which is lengthy and expensive. An adoption agency must first register as a non-governmental organization, which is a fancy way of saying a group that has no ties to any outside government. Once an agency has NGO status, and it has been in business in its home country for five years, it can apply for accreditation. How long that might take for a first-time agency is unclear, because no new agency has yet gotten through it. I can tell you, however, that it has taken more than a year for previously accredited agencies to win re-accreditation under Russia's new rules. 

Now I know that the time frames for adopting from countries like China and South Korea has gotten very long in the last few years. But do you really want to step into an adoption from Russia knowing that the agency you have selected has not completed all the steps it might need to see you to the end of your adoption? Do you want to wait while that paperwork is completed? 

The U.S. Embassy in Moscow used to post a list of agencies that had NGO status and a separate list of accredited agencies; its Web site now only has the latter. So you might want to check out the agencies you are considering on Karen's list.

On May 5, the University of Minnesota released a study on the mental health of adolescents who had been adopted as infants. Researchers at the university, which has consistently been one of the best sources for information on the life outcomes of internationally adopted child, compiled a very large study group: 540 non-adopted teens, 514 who had been adopted from abroad and 178 teens adopted from within the U.S. Their goal was to see whether there was any basis for continuing concern about adoptees being at heightened risk for mental health problems, particularly among children who had been adopted internationally.

The study was published as "The Mental Health of U.S. Adolescents Adopted in Infancy" in the May issue of the Archives of Pediatrics and Adolescent Medicine. It found that most adopted teens in America are psychologically healthy and, to quote the journal's abstract on the study, "adoptees scored only moderately higher than nonadoptees on quantitative measures of mental health".

But you wouldn't have gotten the impression of "moderately" from reading the mainstream press. This is the headline and deck on the story that ran in the Los Angeles Times:

Adopted youths more likely to have mental disorders

They're twice as likely as nonadopted peers to have ADHD or oppositional defiant disorder, according to a study of adolescents adopted as babies.

But what's really interesting to me is that the story originated at The Chicago Tribune, and here's the head and deck from that paper:

Study: Adolescents adopted as infants are more likely to have psychiatric disorders

They face a greater risk for attention deficit-hyperactivity disorder and oppositional defiant disorder, researchers say

So how much greater are the mental health risks to adoptees, really? Margaret Keyes, the study's director, told the reporters that her study should not alarm adoptive parents.

Being born male -- adopted or not -- also is a risk factor for disruptive behavior disorders, she said, "but no one is overly concerned when they give birth to a son."

Image credit: Microsoft ClipArt

This morning, the Korean news agency Yonhap posted an interview that contains some of the most candid comments about international adoption that I have ever seen from an agency official.

The speaker is a daughter of Harry and Bertha Holt, the American couple who opened Korea to international adoption more than 50 years ago, and created the modern model for inter-country adoptions by Americans. Molly Holt began helping her parents with adoptions in 1956, when she was 19, and now lives near Seoul at a home that Holt runs for 250 homeless disabled people.

The backdrop for this interview is the fact that, in March, Iowan Steven Sueppel murdered his wife and the four Korean children they had adopted through Holt International Adoption Agency. Sueppel, who later committed suicide, had been charged with embezzling more than $500,000 from his former employer . In the interview, Holt asserts that finding a family is still best for an orphan, but concedes that not all adoptions work out as planned.

We tried to find all the best families for our precious children, but sometimes they didn't have good families. They divorced, or they abused children. But it's amazing sometimes how wonderful the children turned out even in sad circumstances. Sometimes there were wonderful families and children ran away.

Holt told Yonhap that she is committed to continuing to help create "happy families". You can read her interview to Yonhap here.

Image credit: Old Grey Sea Wolf at Morguefile.com

When Vietnam retaliated last week against a scathing report about its adoption processes by closing to American families, the news was all over the blogosphere in a nanosecond. But something happened yesterday in the Asian adoption world of far greater importance, and it hardly got a blink: A report that Korean domestic adoptions last year exceeded inter-country adoptions for the first time ever.

According to a story in The Korea Times, 1,388 orphans the Republic of Korea--what we colloquially call South Korea--were adopted by Korean families in 2007. Just 1,264 others were adopted by foreign families. If you prefer things in percentages, it was 52.3% domestic and 47.7% inter-country. It is a stunning change in the nation that has set the tone for international adoptions for more than half a century.

Fifty-two years ago, an American couple began a revolution in adoption by bringing home eight children from a country that had been ripped apart--literally--by war. Harry and Bertha Holt were their names, which live on in the agency they founded, Holt International. To make their adoptions happen, the Holts had to get the U.S. Congress to pass a special law permitting international adoptions--and they did it. But when it passed, Korean war orphans, and children shunned by their society because they were born to Korean mothers and foreign soldier fathers, could start new lives in other corners of the world.

Fifty-two years ago, Korea was a devastated country with few prospects for the kind of jobs that can keep a family together. It was a country in which the purity of family bloodlines mattered so much that, if unrelated children were taken in at all, it was in utmost secrecy. Not the kind of country in which domestic adoptions could flourish.

A few years ago, Korean government officials estimated that, in the last half century, 150,000 Korean children were adopted into families around the world, more than 99,000 of them by American families. It has created a huge Diaspora, some with good adoption experiences, some not. But as Seoul was releasing those statistics, government officials were lending weight to changes that would support more domestic adoptions: Adoption authorities would have to work harder to find parents in the country before turning their attention to parents abroad. And, as Koreans changed their country into one of the world's most dynamic economies, they have also changed their mindset toward adopting children from outside their family trees. It has been a healthy and necessary step. Domestic adoptions in Korea still aren't enough to keep pace with the country's orphan population, but that they are there at all is really quite amazing.

Korea created a framework for the adoptions that would follow from Colombia, Brazil, Guatemala, Russia, Ethiopia and so many, many more countries. Some of these countries have already entered what I will call the second stage of adoption, supporting new parents from within their own borders. Many more will undoubtedly follow. But until every orphan has a loving home, it will never be enough.