The story of the origins in Italian books for adopted children

The purpose of this qualitative study is to identify the main representations of the\r\nprocess of the international adoption through a comparative analysis of the Italian fairy\r\ntales and stories used to talk about their adoption to adopted children, from 4 to 10 years\r\nold.\r\nThe sample of the study includes 50 Italian fairy tales and stories, written since\r\n1995 up to now, that tell the adopted children something about their origin and their\r\nadoption.\r\nThe verbatim of the tales and the stories were analyzed through content analysis,\r\nusing a computer assisted text analysis program (T-Lab).\r\nThe main results show the very different images of the various protagonists -\r\nadoptive parents, adopted child, birth mother, birth country, “bridge” caregivers\r\n(operators of institutes, or houses for children or foster families in the birth country…),\r\nsocial and legal operators both in the birth country and in the adoptive one… The two\r\nmoments of the "beginning" of the story and of its "happy ending" result topical,\r\ntogether with the crucial description of the “first meeting” and the attribution of\r\nresponsibility to someone for the child’s abandonment.\r\nThe representational quality of the narrative productions created by adoptive\r\nparents or used with them in the post adoption groups is very important because it is one\r\nof the tools that communicate the image of adoption to adopted children. It can vary\r\nfrom a polarized image - all the positive pertains to the adoptive world and all the\r\nnegative to the world of the origins - or a better integrated image, with positive aspects\r\nboth in the adoptive and in the birth worlds.