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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]So my neighbors just adopted a 7 years-old girl from Russia. They're a loving family with 4 biological children and everything this girl could possibly hope for. But as happy as I am for them, I can't help but be disturbed by one thing: they changed the girl's name when they adopted her. And not a small change... her name was Oksanna and they changed it to Brittany.

I've asked my neighbor why they did that and he told me that this was part of the steps they were taking to "Americanize" the girl in order to facilitate her integration. He even told me that "a few months from now nobody will realize that she is from Russia".

What the hell?! Is this what international adoption really is about? Remolding a child's cultural roots?[/quote]

International adoption professionals used to say that the kids needed to be Americanized as fast as possible -- but that was decades ago.  It became clear that this Americanization effort, with no discussion of/appreciation for cultural roots/adoption, had a horrible impact on these kids.  The trend today may be to overcompensate in the other direction (I say this as a parent of a child we adopted internationally), but I do think these parents have made a mistake.  Sure, the girl may have no good memories of Russia right now, but that is likely to change over time because most internationally adopted kids do go through shifts in their identity/how they see themselves - and she may well be angry one day that her parents tried to erase the one thing that she brought with her from Russia.  FWIW, we kept our son's birth first name as a middle name - if we could do it over again, we might well have kept the first name as is, but we acknowledge the name and it is indeed part of his full legal name here in the US.[/quote]

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