Adoption Beyond Borders

Now Available in Paperback, Adoption Beyond Borders endorses international adoption as a viable path to child welfare by exploring key topics including:
- Effects of institutionalization on children's developing brains, cognitive abilities, and socioemotional functioning
- Challenges of navigating issues of identity when adopting across national, cultural, and racial lines
- Strong emotional bonds that form even without genetic relatedness
- How adoptive families can address the special needs of children who experienced early neglect and deprivation, thereby providing a supportive environment in which to flourish
- Features the author's first-hand accounts of her own adoption journey as she visited a Kazakhstani orphanage daily for nearly a year, and illustrates the complexities and implications of the research evidence

First Hardcover Edition published in 2016.

"This is one of the very best, most important books written on the plight of unparented children worldwide and the role international adoption can and should play for such children...This book is balanced, entirely fair in airing all important positions. But it is hard-hitting, insisting on what the
evidence tells us about the important facts and how those facts should drive policy." --Adoption Quarterly

"Inspired by her own challenging experience as a parent adopting a child from Kazakhstan, academic psychologist Rebecca Compton has authored a clear, well-documented argument that a child's long term health, development and socioemotional well being are largely determined by the presence of devoted,
contingent caregivers and a stable family during early life. Addressing criticisms with evidence rather than supposition, she reaches the indisputable conclusion that international adoption remains the best hope for many unparented children worldwide." --Dana E. Johnson, MD, PhD, Professor of
Pediatrics, University of Minnesota

"This is a deeply intelligent book that should be a must read for adoptive parents, policy makers, academics, child welfare professionals, and all who care about children. It is beautifully written, insightful and wonderfully wise. Compton destroys many of the stereotypes that dominate discourse on
international adoption, and provides an understanding of the reality based on an in-depth assessment of the social science." --Elizabeth Bartholet, JD, Morris Wasserstein Professor of Law and Faculty Director of the Child Advocacy Program, Harvard Law School

"Adoption Beyond Borders is written in clear English without jargon. It mixes the author's personal story with a wealth of data and there are many pages of notes and references at the end. It paints a very positive view of international adoption and dispels many myths about why it is a problem or is
an inherently secondary form of parenting. It will be useful both to read[ers] thinking about adopting themselves, those who are interested in adoption policies at state and international levels." --Metapsychology Onine Reviews