This poster reflects on three issues seen in the research literature.
Western culture thinks of biology as inalienable.
You can't have an ex-mother. Research on children's development of the concept of family, while claiming to be inclusive of all sorts of families, breathes not a word about either foster or adoptive families. Attachment research has little to say that is relevant to foster care and the kinds of frequent and extended separations that foster children routinely undergo. So much of kinship and family in American culture is defined as being nature itself, required by nature, or directly determined by nature that it is quite difficult, often impossible, in fact, for Americans to see this as a set of cultural constructs and not the biological facts themselves. Anthropological and sociological research show that this concept is culturally bound.