ABSTRACT
When prospective parents apply to adoption agencies, they may imagine an ‘ideal’ child. As children fall short of this preconceived ideal, it becomes increasingly difficult for an agency to place them. This chapter considers the logic of two opposing approaches to minimizing this problem. One approach is to try and ensure that the agency has as much control as possible over matching and prospective parents have as little choice as possible. If potential parents have little control and few choices in the matching process, then they can be more easily persuaded to accept a less than ‘ideal’ child. This approach has been taken in the UK. The second and opposite approach, found in some agencies in Japan, is to put as much decision-making power as possible in the hands of prospective parents. Giving potential parents the power to choose includes letting them meet children without making a commitment to them. This allows prospective parents to move away from thinking of children in an abstract hierarchy of being more or less ‘ideal’. Instead, would-be parents have the opportunity to relate to children in need of adoption as individuals. A child who is viewed as part of a more or less ideal category is defined by limited characteristics (e.g. age, state of health) that are interchangeable with other children. By contrast, if children are viewed as individuals then they cannot be categorized because the qualities, character and potential of each child combine to make each one unique and separate from every other child.
