West Meets East

Rating:
Summary: Interesting Read for Parents and Others
Review: From both personal experience and quantitative research, these authors do an excellent job of defining and exploring the phenomenon of Americans adopting Chinese babies.

For adoptive parents, it serves as a chance to hear about what other parents feel about raising their children bi-culturally. For those otherwise interested in adoption from China, the book also offers an overview of the adoption process and descriptions of the excitement and strain it places on families.

Highly readable and accessible.

As an adoptive parent, I plan to save this book for my daughter to read when she becomes older (late teens or adult) as a reminder of social contexts and beliefs of adoptive families prevalent during the time of her adoption.

Rating:
Summary: Portrait of Adoptive Parents Good but Incomplete
Review: This book is an interesting overview of parents' widely varying approaches to raising children adopted from China. However, the authors seem to assume that virtually all adoptive parents are white and that real biculturalism is impossible. On the West Coast, at least, that's not true. Many Asian American parents have adopted children from China, and quite a few children are attending bilingual/bicultural schools. It's too bad Asian American views on bicultural socialization have been largely left out of the picture.