My question to you relates to your comment[s] above about foster care [in the previous question]. Would you please elaborate on what you mean by a shift in focus regarding foster care? I should also add that my husband was raised in a foster home for 8 years (ages 6 through 14). He says he always wished that his foster family had adopted him. They were very good to him, and his relationship with his biological family was very difficult, frought with substance abuse problems and other serious issues. When he left his foster family to move back in with his family of origin, he lasted one year there before running away. He was then homeless as a teenager, and went through hell. He has been on his own since he was 15. That’s my husband’s experience, and it’s one of the main reasons we decided to become licensed as fost-adopt parents.
By “shift in focus” I meant to say that I think there is a spectrum of ways of looking at child care in a given society. On the one end, you have emphasis on the nuclear family, removal of that family from society in terms of a collective mindset, a view of the child as a supreme individual, etc. On the other end you have a communal view of family, interconnectedness of people with their true lived community, a view of the child as being part of a bigger tableau.
Adoption, and the indentured servitude that preceded it, along with its use against the poor and indigenous, is the extreme of the first end of the spectrum. Foster care, especially if it comes from a place of not wanting to “own” children, and a willingness to take care of another’s child in order to help them and not oneself, maps onto the majority of the planet’s view of concepts of “orphan” and “orphanage” and community, and is at the other end of the spectrum.
I’m not sure that it’s possible to shift the view from one end to the other; I think there are aspects of Anglo-Saxon culture that are fundamental to its makeup. But this shift in focus would go far to fundamentally change such societies for the better, and they would prevent children in foster care for having to “dream” of the “real” family that supposedly waits for them.