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In my last post, Are Portrayals of Birthmothers on Television Realistic?, I talked about the unrealistic portrayal of birthmothers on various television shows. In this post, I will focus on the portrayal of adoptive parents.
I know many adoptive parents, and none of them are like most of the adoptive parents I have seen on television. Let’s start with Mary Alice, the narrator on Desperate Housewives who killed her son’s birthmother, chopped up her body, stuffed it in a trunk, and buried the body under a swimming pool. Nope, I do not know any adoptive mothers like that.
I have seen numerous storylines about the infertile woman who completely flips out and steals another woman’s baby. The story generally picks up when the child is a teenager and discovers her picture on a milk carton (or other similar way of finding out the information). Yes, I was (and still am) infertile, and I did feel like I was losing my mind at times in my grief, but I never, ever considered stealing another woman’s baby.
I thought Friends did a pretty good job in portraying Chandler and Monica as hopeful adoptive parents. Monica had wanted a baby since the show started, and it was heartbreaking to watch her learn that she and Chandler would likely never conceive a child together. I cheered along with her when she was matched with an expecting mother on Thanksgiving Day. (However, I know of no adoption agencies that would be working on that holiday.) I was annoyed with how quickly they were matched. Of course, this was the last season of the series, so they had to move the story along, but I know very few adoptive parents who were matched that quickly.
On Party of Five, Sarah’s adoptive parents split up and pretty much blew her off. This set in motion Sarah’s quest to find her birth parents, which launched a spin-off series. I cannot imagine going through all I did to adopt my son, only to leave him out in the cold if my marriage fell apart later.
I have not seen many good representations of adoptive parents on television, which is a real shame. It is a good thing that there are plenty of us active on blogs and message boards to get the word out that we are not like how we are represented on TV. I do not want you hopeful adoptive parents to think that you have to become somewhat insane in order to adopt!
Related Topic:
Adoption: Separating Reality from Fantasy
Photo credit: Lynda Bernhardt
One of the worse portrayals of adoptive parents was on King of Queens
I already hate that show, but their account of Chinese adoption was soooooooo inaccurate.
You can’t get matched for a 4 day old child and pick them up right away in China, there’s the 3 month rule to consider, and they’d check to make sure a person’s marriage is stable first.
Plus tehre were tons of other things that annoyed me, it really was a dumb episode, they should have done more research.
C, I agree with that one!! And of course they then did the “just adopt and you’ll BAM get pg” thing too which is VERY annoying!
I think the media portrayal of adoptive parents tends to be that they are either saints or monsters. And of course the way the media handles reunion stories (which seemingly never acknowledge the a parents as parents) make me go ACK!
I don’t watch that show, but I am glad I missed that episode. That “just adopt to get pregnant” myth really irks me, too.
- Faith
Is there any kind of statistic as to how often that really happens? Adoptive parents adopt then get pregnant?? General society talks like it happens often but from the adoptive parents I know it happens very little…
Just curious!
~ Coley