Monday, January 12, 2015 will be exactly five years since Haiti was hit by one of the worst earthquakes ever. On Sunday 11 January, NCRV will broadcast a documentary about the hastily set up air bridge between the Netherlands and Haiti, with which more than 100 adopted children were rescued from the rubble and brought to the Netherlands.

After the earthquake of 7.0 on the Rigter scale that kills a quarter of a million people and makes 1.5 million homeless, contact with the children's homes where more than 100 adopted children live at that time is impossible, one of the houses is even partially collapsed. It takes a while before it becomes clear that the children survived the quake. More than half of the children have already met their adoptive parents-to-be from the Netherlands. In the Netherlands, the brave plan arises to take the children away. An air bridge between Haiti and the Netherlands can bring the children to safety. A tough and exciting mission, in the chaotic conditions in which the country finds itself. But how do you organize such a thing?

Macky Hupkes, director of the Dutch Adoption Foundation knows how to charter a plane. The World Children's Association is joining this initiative. The children are picked up by Dutch marines by bus and transferred to Port-au-Prince airport by navigating through the devastated country. The atmosphere at the airport is tense, 'get the fuck out of here!', one of the soldiers shouts. When the plane takes off, the discharge comes. More than a hundred children start to cry. Macky Hupkes texts to the Netherlands: 'Close the doors, the most beautiful crying concert ever'.

In NCRV 2Doc The kids are OK, those directly involved tell their story. How did the adoption organizations get the governments of the Netherlands and Haiti to authorize this action? Was it ethically right to get the children to the Netherlands more quickly? How did the parents experience the news of the earthquake when they had already embraced the child they were about to adopt? And what about the children now?

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FOCUS - While India, bruised by the second wave, has exceeded 300,000 deaths from Covid-19, an increase in the number of orphans, exposed to all types of trafficking and exploitation, worries NGOs.

The baby was barely crying. The news shook India bruised by its second wave of covid-19: in Pune, in the south of the country, a child of a few months was found near the body of his mother, who died of the disease several days earlier, tells The Times of India . The neighbors had not dared to approach for fear of being contaminated.

In the chaos of the epidemic, what becomes of the children of the 300,000 deceased from covid-19? The authorities counted on Wednesday, May 27, 577 new children who lost both parents to the coronavirus and were placed in orphanages during the month of April. But that's without counting all those who vanish in nature. Illegal adoptions, prostitution, forced labor: in India, 50,000 children go missing each year. It was before the pandemic.

The situation is chaotic, people are afraid. They dare not approach a potentially sick child

Akancha Shrivastava

The following notice was recently published by the Hungarian Central Authority concerning adoptions from Hungary. The US DOS website does not currently contain information on adoption from Hungary. If you are a prospective adoptive family currently working with an agency and hoping to adopt a young child (under 8) from Hungary, you may wish to forward this notice to your agency"

Information for the prospective adoptive parents about the number of the applications the Hungarian Central Authority can accept in 2009:

"The Hungarian Parliament ratified the Hague Convention of 29 May 1993 on Protection of Children and Co-operation in respect of Intercountry Adoption in 2005.

The Hungarian Central Authority has been dealing with intercountry adoptions since October 2005 and according to the three years long experience, the number of the children, their age and health status as well as the high number of the applicants being registered in the international registry the Central Authority determines how many applications they will accept in 2009.

The Central Authority is responsible for the applicants. We informed the accredited bodies several times the last months that there is almost no chance of adopting healthy children younger than 6 years old and in spite of this fact, we received applications wishing a healthy child under 6 even in the last days. There are more than 100 prospective adoptive parents in our registry who want to adopt a healthy child or a child with small, correctable problem under six. So far in 2008 we could only help three international adoptions of children with these characteristics. (There were some other young children, but they had older siblings.) There are plenty of applicants waiting in Hungary and the children under 6 can be adopted in Hungary as well.

DEORIA: Three children from the shelter home in UP’s Deoria, where

inmates were allegedly abused and trafficked, were adopted and sent to

Spain and France in February this year. A special investigation team (SIT)

of the UP police made these disclosure in the chargesheet submitted to

the Allahabad HC last week.

Summary

Background and issue

The group of children released for adoption is essentially our country's or other countries' child welfare children. Many have been exposed to neglect and many have major health challenges. This places great demands on the capacity and caring ability of adoptive parents, not only while the children are minors, but also in a life course perspective. In order to be able to make a good and sound assessment of adoption applicants , it is necessary to have up-to-date knowledge of which factors are important for the applicants' ability to take care of an adopted child's care needs and howthe various factors may affect the ability to care over time. The Directorate for Children, Adolescents and Families (Bufdir) has therefore asked the National Institute of Public Health to make an assessment of the criteria currently used in assessing applicants for adoption. The assessment of the criteria shall be made in the light of a literature review with a systematic search of which characteristics of adoptive parents are important for the adoptive children's health and development. The report is a presentation of the results of this literature review.

Method

We conducted a literature review with a systematic literature search based on a number of inclusion and exclusion criteria described in more detail in the report. The report presents and discusses the results from 146 identified studies that included study variables about both adoptive parents / adoptive family and adopted children where (1) the variables about the adopted children were outcome variables, (2) where parental stress was outcome variable, and (3) where the studies maintained sufficient scientific quality.

KUALA LUMPUR, May 28 — Friends of university undergraduate Rain Lee have been pointing out that he does not look like his parents since he was young.

While his father is tanned, his mother is much fairer than him.

Lee, 20, said in secondary school, a teacher actually asked his mother point-blank whether he was her real child.

“Things boiled over when my father signed my university admission form.

The person in charge at the counter said my father should put himself as my guardian instead of father. All because his skin colour is different from mine.”

Unmarked graves containing the remains of 215 Indigenous children have been discovered on the grounds of a former residential school in the interior of southern British Columbia.

The grim discovery at the former school near the town of Kamloops was announced late on Thursday by the Tk’emlups te Secwépemc people after the site was examined by a team using ground-penetrating radar.

“We had a knowing in our community that we were able to verify. To our knowledge, these missing children are undocumented deaths,” said Rosanne Casimir, chief of the Tk’emlúps te Secwépemc, in a statement.

Canada confronts its dark history of abuse in residential schools

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An environment in which family members support one another and express their feelings can reduce the effects of social deprivation on cognitive ability and development among adopted children, suggests a small study by researchers at the National Institutes of Health.

In contrast, rule-driven households where family members are in conflict may increase an adopted child's chances for cognitive, behavioural and emotional difficulties. The study was conducted by Margaret F Keil, PhD, and colleagues in the Section on Endocrinology and Genetics at NIH's Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (NICHD). It appears in Pediatric Research.

Researchers enrolled children who had spent at least eight months in Eastern European orphanages before their adoption by American families. The children ranged from 14 to 40 months of age and were evaluated with physical, psychological and developmental tests twice during the following two years. Families also responded to questionnaires on the children's development and on various aspects of their home lives. The study included 10 adopted children and 19 similar children born to American families.

Overall, the adopted children had significant deficits in growth, cognitive ability and development in comparison to the American-born children. However, differences were smaller among children from families scoring higher in cohesion, where family members provided help and support for each other, and expressiveness- families whose members are encouraged to express their feelings. Children had greater deficits if their families scored higher in conflict- an open expression of anger and aggression- and in control-- a family life run according to set rules and procedures.

The authors concluded that family cohesion and expressiveness could moderate the effects of pre-adoption adversity, while family conflict and adherence to rules could increase the risk for behavioural problems. The authors added that larger studies are needed to verify their findings.

In commemoration of the 2021 World Children’s Day (WCD), the National Human Rights Commission (NHRC), has urged governments at all levels, to adopt and enforce the rights of the child in all the 36 states of the federation.

Executive Secretary of the Commission, Tony Ojukwu who made the call in Abuja while marking this year’s WCD, noted that children deserve special attention and protection in order for them to fruitfully pass through the various stages of survival and development.

He said, “ it has become imperative for states who are yet to adopt the Child’s Rights Law to do so to avoid further violations of the rights of these vulnerable children”.

The Chief Human Rights Officer in Nigeria observed that “ the issue of out-of-school children, child labour, poor antenatal and postnatal care, child wandering, child abandonment, child denial of necessaries, Almajiri children syndrome, kidnapping, malnutrition, etc. still rear their ugly heads and therefore pose a serious challenge to the proper development of the child especially in states where the Child’s rights law is not in place”.

According to him, “ the impact of COVID-19 pandemic brought to the fore the level of vulnerability of children in most parts of the world including Nigeria where a lot of children could not continue with their education as a result of poverty and deprivation because their parents or guardians could not afford an online system of education”.

(CNN)I adopted my daughter from foster care. It took a specialized village to help her succeed.

The day our daughter toddled around a corner of her foster mother's house in a peach pantsuit and flashed my husband and me a mischievous grin, we knew we were her parents.

We also knew we had made the right choice in adopting her from our state foster care system. What we didn't know was how much we'd rely on medical professionals, educators and mentors over the next 13 years to raise her.

She'd had a rough start in life. Relinquished at birth to the state, she spent her first 18 months in a foster home with three other children her age. The repercussions of too-little eye contact and too-little cuddling in that critical first year of life didn't surface until she entered first grade, when she suffered from separation anxiety so severe that we finally pulled her out of the classroom and found her a pediatric psychologist and alternative schooling.

Longing for love