December 20, 2006
China Tightens Adoption Rules for Foreigners
By PAM BELLUCK and JIM YARDLEY
China plans to tighten rules on foreign adoptions, barring people who are single, obese, older than 50 or who fail to meet certain benchmarks in financial, physical or psychological health from adopting Chinese children, according to adoption agencies in the United States.
The restrictions are in response to an enormous spike in applications by foreigners, which has far exceeded the number of available babies, said leaders of American adoption agencies who were briefed by Chinese officials earlier this month.
The new regulations, which have not yet been formally announced by the government-run China Center of Adoption Affairs, or C.C.A.A., are expected to take effect on May 1, 2007, and have raised concern and anxiety among prospective adoptive parents in this country.
China has in recent years been the No. 1 source of foreign-born children adopted by Americans — in the fiscal year 2006, the State Department granted 6,493 visas to Chinese orphans — and its regulations on who can adopt have been less restrictive than those in some other countries, adoption agencies said.
Now, however, the agencies said, the Chinese government has formulated guidelines intended to recruit adoptive families with qualities that Chinese officials believe will provide the greatest chance that children will be raised by healthy, economically stable parents.
“They need somehow to cut down on the number of families that are submitting” adoption requests, said Jackie Harrah, executive director of Harrah’s Adoption International Mission in Spring, Tex.
“Their feeling is that while singles can be good parents,” Ms. Harrah said, “it is better for a child to be raised in a two-parent family, it’s better for a parent to be educated, it’s better for a parent not to be obese because they have a chance of living longer. What C.C.A.A. really wanted was the cream of the crop.”
Several agencies said they had been flooded with confused, anxious or disappointed calls and e-mail messages from people wanting to adopt or those going through the application process. Most of those who had already initiated adoption applications were told that if they got all their paperwork in by May 1, they were likely to be approved.
But international adoption agencies have already begun turning away applicants who did not meet the new criteria.
The guidelines include a requirement that applicants have a body-mass index of less than 40, no criminal record, a high school diploma and be free of certain health problems like AIDS and cancer. Couples must have been married for at least two years and have had no more than two divorces between them. If either spouse was previously divorced, the couple cannot apply until they have been married for at least five years.
In addition, adoptive parents must have a net worth of at least $80,000 and income of at least $10,000 per person in the household, including the prospective adoptive child.
Parents can be as old as 55 if adopting a child with special needs.
Timothy Sutfin, executive director of New Beginnings Family and Children’s Services, an international adoption agency in Mineola, N.Y., said the new guidelines put China in the middle of the spectrum of countries — not as restrictive as South Korea, but stricter than places like Guatemala or Vietnam.
Keith Wallace, the chief executive of Families Thru International Adoption, based in Evansville, Ind., said that adopting an American child could also be restrictive, with standards for the health, economic situation and marital status of the family.
Despite the new rules, adoption agencies said they did not believe that the numbers of Chinese children adopted by Americans would decrease. Since 1991, Americans have adopted 55,000 Chinese children. Adoptions cost about $15,000, according to agency Web sites.
Since one agency, Great Wall China Adoption in Austin, Tex., posted the new rules on its Web site last week, “we’ve had about 400 e-mails and phone calls a day,” said Heather Terry, director of regional offices for the agency. “Some families were just turned down today. One was a couple where the husband had social anxiety disorder and takes Zoloft,” a violation of the new guidelines that bar people who are taking medication for anxiety or depression.
One person who is disqualified is Tony Velong of Temple Terrace, Fla. Mr. Velong and his wife, Tracey, had previously adopted two girls from China and were considering applying for a third. But they are too old: he is 59 and she is 51.
“I’m sure anybody who is healthy and eligible to adopt a child and couldn’t because of the age rule would be disappointed at least,” said Mr. Velong, who was 55 when the first child was adopted.
There is no question he is physically fit: he is the police chief of Temple Terrace.
“I’m still working the street,” Mr. Velong said, “and you have to be in good shape. In reality, today’s 60 was yesterday’s 40, and I don’t think that’s fully understood.”
A major reason that Chinese babies, most of them girls, are available for adoption is China’s two-decade-old population control measure known as the “one child policy.”
The C.C.A.A., which was known to be developing the new guidelines for months, refused a request in recent weeks for an interview on adoption policy, and yesterday a call to the Chinese Embassy in Washington was not returned. An unidentified official cited by The Associated Press confirmed that the government was adopting new guidelines but declined to discuss specifics.
Some of the guidelines are a culmination of what had been a previous tightening of criteria, agencies said. For the past few years, for example, to whittle down the applicant pool, China has limited the number of single parents allowed to adopt to 8 percent of the total, partly on the theory that if a single parent dies, the child has no other parent to turn to, agencies said.
The ease of China’s earlier standards was probably one reason for the deluge in applications, agencies said. But China is also popular because its system is well organized and efficient and because Chinese orphans are generally well cared for and have a good chance of being healthy when adopted.
Wednesday, December 20, 2006
Friday, December 08, 2006
December 8, 2006
Troubled Children
Off to College on Their Own, Shadowed by Mental Illness
By LYNETTE CLEMETSON
Her mother called it a negotiable proposition. But to Jean Lynch-Thomason, a 17-year-old with bipolar disorder who started college this fall, her mom’s notion to fly from their home in Nashville to her campus in Olympia, Wash., every few weeks to monitor Jean’s illness felt needlessly intrusive.
“I am so totally aware of the control you have over me right now,” Jean said, sitting in her parents’ living room one evening last June, before coolly reminding her mother of her upcoming 18th birthday. “In a few months the power dynamic is going to be different.”
For Chris Ference, 19, who is also bipolar, the fast-approaching autonomy of his freshman year held somewhat less appeal. His parents had always directed every aspect of his mental health care. Last summer, over Friday night pizza at his home in Cranberry Township, Pa., he told them that assuming control felt more daunting than liberating.
“If it was up to me, I would just have it so you could make those decisions for me up until I was like, 22,” he said. “I mean, you’ve raised me well up to now. You know me better than anyone.”
The transition from high school to college, from adolescence to legal adulthood, can be tricky for any teenager, but for the increasing number of young people who arrive on campus with diagnoses of serious mental disorders — and for their parents — the passage can be particularly fraught.
Standard struggles with class schedules, roommates, and sexual and social freedom are complicated by decisions about if or when to use campus counseling services, whether or not to take medication and whether to disclose an illness to friends or professors.
Keeping a psychiatric disorder under control in an environment often fueled by all-night cram sessions, junk food and heavy drinking is a challenge for even the most motivated students. In addition, the normal separation that goes along with college requires new roles and boundaries with parents, the people who best know the history and contours of their illness.
Like Jean and Chris, young adults approach the move to a new life differently, some with defiant independence, some with avoidance. Each approach, say psychiatrists, counselors, dormitory assistants and other campus leaders, comes with its own risk. The students who are most dependent on their parents may be dangerously unprepared for the inevitable stresses of college life. On the other hand, students who are adamant about doing everything on their own may be afraid to reach out for help when they stumble.
For parents, the anxious pride at seeing children go off to college is often tinged with fear that their child might fall apart, spiraling into depression or becoming suicidal. Are they going to therapy as they promised? Are they taking the right dose of medication at the right time? Should they as parents inform the school that their child has an illness? Is a fight with a roommate part of a normal transition to college life or a sign of impending trouble? Does an emotional e-mail message written at 3 a.m. represent a transitory moment of turmoil or a reason to get on an airplane?
Once teenagers legally become adults, which in most states happens at age 18, they, not their parents, assume control over decisions about therapy and medication. If trouble arises, parents may or may not hear about it because college counselors are bound by confidentiality when dealing with adult students.
The Trauma of Separation
For Jean, as for many teenagers coping with mental disorders, just getting through high school was an ordeal. After experimenting with home schooling, a high pressure prep school and an outdoor learning academy geared to nature activities, Jean, a bright student with inconsistent grades but high SAT scores, decided to forgo her senior year and find a college that would take her without a high school diploma.
She was accepted at Evergreen State College in Olympia, Wash., a nontraditional college of roughly 4,400 students that issues written evaluations in place of letter grades.
Evergreen’s environmental focus — the campus has its own organic farm, composting program and a contest for commuters who bike, walk or carpool to campus — felt like a good fit for Jean, who is passionately committed to the environment and social justice.
A consciously quirky teenager who sews her own clothes (to avoid crass consumerism, she says) and who prefers bus trips to flying (to avoid contributing to the pollution caused by air travel), Jean is disarmingly straightforward and self-aware.
She said she stopped taking medications when she was 14 because the side effects left her feeling “out of whack and emotionally inauthentic.”
She is determined to stay off medications during college, and she devoted considerable advance thought to possible triggers for her illness, like the long rainy winters of the Pacific Northwest.
“I don’t feel vulnerable about this transition because this is very much my decision,” she said. “This is a very autonomous move, very much me structuring my own life. I feel like I am putting myself in a situation with really clear intentions.”
Jean’s parents, Amy Lynch, 52, and Phil Thomason, 53, were hesitant when Jean, the younger of their two daughters, refused to take medications after eighth grade. Her childhood and early adolescence had been a whirlwind of depression, rage and experiments with different medications and treatments.
But when Jean was about 14, Ms. Lynch and Mr. Thomason said, she began to seem more stable. Her developing coping skills, combined with reports about negative side effects of psychotropic drugs in children, persuaded them to acquiesce to her demands to ride out the swings of her illness drug free.
They said they believed Evergreen would be a good college for Jean. Still, the move — to someplace so far from home — made them anxious. In the months before Jean left, Ms. Lynch said she wanted her to go back on medication to smooth the adjustment to college life, a suggestion that Jean adamantly rejected.
Ms. Lynch worried that Jean took for granted the tacit stability of being at home.
When Jean’s depression sets in, she tends to close herself off from people. At home, Ms. Lynch said, “I can look at Jean and know in five minutes what’s going on with her and how to respond to it.”
At such a distance it will be difficult to catch the signs.
“I feel like we’re doing a high-wire act,” she said, “and I am not sure we have a strong enough net.”
Rummaging through the accumulated possessions of adolescence in her bedroom over the summer, Jean singled out the items that she could not leave without: her sewing machine, her coffee maker, the social justice posters that covered her wall.
With her mother out of earshot, she acknowledged that she understood her parents’ angst. “I get that this is intense for everyone,” she said. “I do.”
Hesitant to Leave the Nest
The uncertain months between high school and college were also anxious ones for Chris Ference and his parents.
Still groggy from an early morning drive to campus, his husky 6-foot-2 frame jammed into an auditorium chair in the student union, Chris shifted uncomfortably as a freshman orientation coordinator welcomed new students and their parents to the Behrend College, a Pennsylvania State University satellite campus in Erie, Pa.
“Today really is the first day of your freshman year of college,” the cheery administrator told the group on a June morning more than two months before the start of fall term.
Chris had initially been reluctant to go away to college. Though eager to leave the rigid structure and peer pressure of high school, where he told few friends about his illness, he preferred the idea of living at home during college and commuting to an engineering program in nearby Pittsburgh.
Troubled Children
Off to College on Their Own, Shadowed by Mental Illness
By LYNETTE CLEMETSON
Her mother called it a negotiable proposition. But to Jean Lynch-Thomason, a 17-year-old with bipolar disorder who started college this fall, her mom’s notion to fly from their home in Nashville to her campus in Olympia, Wash., every few weeks to monitor Jean’s illness felt needlessly intrusive.
“I am so totally aware of the control you have over me right now,” Jean said, sitting in her parents’ living room one evening last June, before coolly reminding her mother of her upcoming 18th birthday. “In a few months the power dynamic is going to be different.”
For Chris Ference, 19, who is also bipolar, the fast-approaching autonomy of his freshman year held somewhat less appeal. His parents had always directed every aspect of his mental health care. Last summer, over Friday night pizza at his home in Cranberry Township, Pa., he told them that assuming control felt more daunting than liberating.
“If it was up to me, I would just have it so you could make those decisions for me up until I was like, 22,” he said. “I mean, you’ve raised me well up to now. You know me better than anyone.”
The transition from high school to college, from adolescence to legal adulthood, can be tricky for any teenager, but for the increasing number of young people who arrive on campus with diagnoses of serious mental disorders — and for their parents — the passage can be particularly fraught.
Standard struggles with class schedules, roommates, and sexual and social freedom are complicated by decisions about if or when to use campus counseling services, whether or not to take medication and whether to disclose an illness to friends or professors.
Keeping a psychiatric disorder under control in an environment often fueled by all-night cram sessions, junk food and heavy drinking is a challenge for even the most motivated students. In addition, the normal separation that goes along with college requires new roles and boundaries with parents, the people who best know the history and contours of their illness.
Like Jean and Chris, young adults approach the move to a new life differently, some with defiant independence, some with avoidance. Each approach, say psychiatrists, counselors, dormitory assistants and other campus leaders, comes with its own risk. The students who are most dependent on their parents may be dangerously unprepared for the inevitable stresses of college life. On the other hand, students who are adamant about doing everything on their own may be afraid to reach out for help when they stumble.
For parents, the anxious pride at seeing children go off to college is often tinged with fear that their child might fall apart, spiraling into depression or becoming suicidal. Are they going to therapy as they promised? Are they taking the right dose of medication at the right time? Should they as parents inform the school that their child has an illness? Is a fight with a roommate part of a normal transition to college life or a sign of impending trouble? Does an emotional e-mail message written at 3 a.m. represent a transitory moment of turmoil or a reason to get on an airplane?
Once teenagers legally become adults, which in most states happens at age 18, they, not their parents, assume control over decisions about therapy and medication. If trouble arises, parents may or may not hear about it because college counselors are bound by confidentiality when dealing with adult students.
The Trauma of Separation
For Jean, as for many teenagers coping with mental disorders, just getting through high school was an ordeal. After experimenting with home schooling, a high pressure prep school and an outdoor learning academy geared to nature activities, Jean, a bright student with inconsistent grades but high SAT scores, decided to forgo her senior year and find a college that would take her without a high school diploma.
She was accepted at Evergreen State College in Olympia, Wash., a nontraditional college of roughly 4,400 students that issues written evaluations in place of letter grades.
Evergreen’s environmental focus — the campus has its own organic farm, composting program and a contest for commuters who bike, walk or carpool to campus — felt like a good fit for Jean, who is passionately committed to the environment and social justice.
A consciously quirky teenager who sews her own clothes (to avoid crass consumerism, she says) and who prefers bus trips to flying (to avoid contributing to the pollution caused by air travel), Jean is disarmingly straightforward and self-aware.
She said she stopped taking medications when she was 14 because the side effects left her feeling “out of whack and emotionally inauthentic.”
She is determined to stay off medications during college, and she devoted considerable advance thought to possible triggers for her illness, like the long rainy winters of the Pacific Northwest.
“I don’t feel vulnerable about this transition because this is very much my decision,” she said. “This is a very autonomous move, very much me structuring my own life. I feel like I am putting myself in a situation with really clear intentions.”
Jean’s parents, Amy Lynch, 52, and Phil Thomason, 53, were hesitant when Jean, the younger of their two daughters, refused to take medications after eighth grade. Her childhood and early adolescence had been a whirlwind of depression, rage and experiments with different medications and treatments.
But when Jean was about 14, Ms. Lynch and Mr. Thomason said, she began to seem more stable. Her developing coping skills, combined with reports about negative side effects of psychotropic drugs in children, persuaded them to acquiesce to her demands to ride out the swings of her illness drug free.
They said they believed Evergreen would be a good college for Jean. Still, the move — to someplace so far from home — made them anxious. In the months before Jean left, Ms. Lynch said she wanted her to go back on medication to smooth the adjustment to college life, a suggestion that Jean adamantly rejected.
Ms. Lynch worried that Jean took for granted the tacit stability of being at home.
When Jean’s depression sets in, she tends to close herself off from people. At home, Ms. Lynch said, “I can look at Jean and know in five minutes what’s going on with her and how to respond to it.”
At such a distance it will be difficult to catch the signs.
“I feel like we’re doing a high-wire act,” she said, “and I am not sure we have a strong enough net.”
Rummaging through the accumulated possessions of adolescence in her bedroom over the summer, Jean singled out the items that she could not leave without: her sewing machine, her coffee maker, the social justice posters that covered her wall.
With her mother out of earshot, she acknowledged that she understood her parents’ angst. “I get that this is intense for everyone,” she said. “I do.”
Hesitant to Leave the Nest
The uncertain months between high school and college were also anxious ones for Chris Ference and his parents.
Still groggy from an early morning drive to campus, his husky 6-foot-2 frame jammed into an auditorium chair in the student union, Chris shifted uncomfortably as a freshman orientation coordinator welcomed new students and their parents to the Behrend College, a Pennsylvania State University satellite campus in Erie, Pa.
“Today really is the first day of your freshman year of college,” the cheery administrator told the group on a June morning more than two months before the start of fall term.
Chris had initially been reluctant to go away to college. Though eager to leave the rigid structure and peer pressure of high school, where he told few friends about his illness, he preferred the idea of living at home during college and commuting to an engineering program in nearby Pittsburgh.
Wednesday, December 06, 2006
December 6, 2006
New York Bans Most Trans Fats in Restaurants
By THOMAS J. LUECK and KIM SEVERSON
The New York City Board of Health voted yesterday to adopt the nation’s first major municipal ban on the use of all but tiny amounts of artificial trans fats in restaurant cooking, a move that would radically transform the way food is prepared in thousands of restaurants, from McDonald’s to fashionable bistros to Chinese take-outs.
Some experts said the measure, which is widely opposed by the restaurant industry, would be a model for other cities. Chicago is considering a similar prohibition that would affect restaurants with more than $20 million in annual sales.
“New York City has set a national standard,” said Harold Goldstein, executive director of the California Center for Public Health Advocacy, who predicted that other communities would follow suit.
Trans fats are the chemically modified food ingredients that raise levels of a particularly unhealthy form of cholesterol and have been squarely linked to heart disease. Long used as a substitute for saturated fats in baked goods, fried foods, salad dressings, margarine and other foods, trans fats also have a longer shelf life than other alternatives.
While the trans fat regulation captured the most attention, the Board of Health approved a separate measure — also the first of its kind in the country — requiring some restaurants, mostly fast food outlets, to prominently display the caloric content of each menu item on menu boards or near cash registers.
Health officials said displaying calorie counts was meant to address what is widely regarded as a nationwide epidemic of obesity.
The city’s prohibition on trans fats, which would be phased in starting in July, was a victory for Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg, an outspoken health advocate, and his activist health commissioner, Dr. Thomas R. Frieden.
After the city’s aggressive campaign to ban smoking in restaurants and in public places that goes back more than a decade, the regulation governing trans fats has again thrust New York to the forefront of a significant public health issue.
Experts say eliminating trans fats need not change the taste of foods, but chefs and restaurant owners say it is hard to replicate the taste and texture of some items without them.
Both the trans fat and calorie regulations would be enforced by the health department’s restaurant inspectors. Inspectors would check the packaging of ingredients used in restaurant kitchens for the amount of trans fats they contain, but prepared food would not be routinely tested. Violators would face fines of at least $200.
Both measures have come under fire as impractical and unwanted intrusions by the government into free enterprise and civil liberties.
“This is a misguided attempt at social engineering by a group of physicians who don’t understand the restaurant industry,” said Dan Flesher, a National Restaurant Association spokesman. He said one or both measures could be challenged legally.
Mayor Bloomberg said the city is “not going to take away anybody’s ability to go out and have the kind of food they want, in the quantities they want.”
“We are just trying to make food safer,” he added.
Still, some restaurant workers said the trans fat ban would represent a challenge.
“This will be better for people’s health, but we’d like to know where to go from here,” said O’Neil Whyte, a baker at Sweet Chef Southern Styles Bakery in Harlem. “Things without trans fat are harder to get and more expensive.”
With artificial trans fat increasingly seen as a health risk, many city restaurants had begun seeking alternative ingredients long before the new regulations were proposed.
Most packaged food manufacturers began removing them on a large scale in 2004, in anticipation of federal rules that trans fat content be disclosed in nutritional labeling. The rule took effect in January.
Some restaurant chains are following suit. Wendy’s has switched to a soy-corn blend cooking oil in its 6,300 restaurants in the United States and Canada, and KFC says it will eliminate trans fat in its food by April.
New York Bans Most Trans Fats in Restaurants
By THOMAS J. LUECK and KIM SEVERSON
The New York City Board of Health voted yesterday to adopt the nation’s first major municipal ban on the use of all but tiny amounts of artificial trans fats in restaurant cooking, a move that would radically transform the way food is prepared in thousands of restaurants, from McDonald’s to fashionable bistros to Chinese take-outs.
Some experts said the measure, which is widely opposed by the restaurant industry, would be a model for other cities. Chicago is considering a similar prohibition that would affect restaurants with more than $20 million in annual sales.
“New York City has set a national standard,” said Harold Goldstein, executive director of the California Center for Public Health Advocacy, who predicted that other communities would follow suit.
Trans fats are the chemically modified food ingredients that raise levels of a particularly unhealthy form of cholesterol and have been squarely linked to heart disease. Long used as a substitute for saturated fats in baked goods, fried foods, salad dressings, margarine and other foods, trans fats also have a longer shelf life than other alternatives.
While the trans fat regulation captured the most attention, the Board of Health approved a separate measure — also the first of its kind in the country — requiring some restaurants, mostly fast food outlets, to prominently display the caloric content of each menu item on menu boards or near cash registers.
Health officials said displaying calorie counts was meant to address what is widely regarded as a nationwide epidemic of obesity.
The city’s prohibition on trans fats, which would be phased in starting in July, was a victory for Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg, an outspoken health advocate, and his activist health commissioner, Dr. Thomas R. Frieden.
After the city’s aggressive campaign to ban smoking in restaurants and in public places that goes back more than a decade, the regulation governing trans fats has again thrust New York to the forefront of a significant public health issue.
Experts say eliminating trans fats need not change the taste of foods, but chefs and restaurant owners say it is hard to replicate the taste and texture of some items without them.
Both the trans fat and calorie regulations would be enforced by the health department’s restaurant inspectors. Inspectors would check the packaging of ingredients used in restaurant kitchens for the amount of trans fats they contain, but prepared food would not be routinely tested. Violators would face fines of at least $200.
Both measures have come under fire as impractical and unwanted intrusions by the government into free enterprise and civil liberties.
“This is a misguided attempt at social engineering by a group of physicians who don’t understand the restaurant industry,” said Dan Flesher, a National Restaurant Association spokesman. He said one or both measures could be challenged legally.
Mayor Bloomberg said the city is “not going to take away anybody’s ability to go out and have the kind of food they want, in the quantities they want.”
“We are just trying to make food safer,” he added.
Still, some restaurant workers said the trans fat ban would represent a challenge.
“This will be better for people’s health, but we’d like to know where to go from here,” said O’Neil Whyte, a baker at Sweet Chef Southern Styles Bakery in Harlem. “Things without trans fat are harder to get and more expensive.”
With artificial trans fat increasingly seen as a health risk, many city restaurants had begun seeking alternative ingredients long before the new regulations were proposed.
Most packaged food manufacturers began removing them on a large scale in 2004, in anticipation of federal rules that trans fat content be disclosed in nutritional labeling. The rule took effect in January.
Some restaurant chains are following suit. Wendy’s has switched to a soy-corn blend cooking oil in its 6,300 restaurants in the United States and Canada, and KFC says it will eliminate trans fat in its food by April.
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