The question of how to best conduct post-placement interventions for transnationally adoptive families at risk of dissolution (legal annulment) is an emerging issue in the United States. The current popular trend for adoptive families to pursue biomedical post-placement interventions, despite a lack of proof that such interventions actually work to keep the adoptive family intact, suggests the need for a more phenomenological approach to understanding both adoptive parents’ and transnational adoptees’ post-placement experiences. This study examines the empirical experiences of adoptive families at risk of dissolution in the United States who attempt to define and navigate the path toward family stability after adopting. From the coding of this data set emerge some routes through and by which emotions circulate between adoptive parents and transnational adoptees through the family body and the family social. Particularly, it investigates one post-placement “affective economy” at work in which adoptive parents attempt, through the expression of particular forms of parental love, to align adoptees as subjects of the private, nuclear American family, while adoptees more often attempt to create space for more heterogeneous forms of family, ones that include birth parents and other kin-like relations in their countries of origin. Ultimately, it illuminates some vastly different and sometimes contradictory ways that adoptive parents and adoptees can interpret family through emotional lenses, ones that can prevent a smooth post-placement transition for adoption actors. An understanding of these differences and how they shape, and are shaped by, the post-placement affective economy within families at risk of dissolution may aid in locating indicators for adoption dissolution, and possibly, designing more effective post-placement interventions for families struggling in the aftermath of adoption. It may also help scholars begin to think about the construction and impact of affective economies in the realm of adoption more generally.

Circulation is often essentialized as a prescribed, limited, and closed form of movement, ‘fixed’ in origins and destination, in intent and outcome. However, circulation may also be understood as a form of flexible movement, non-fixity or multiple stabilities (the act of living life in multiple physical and social locations). This special issue of the journal Childhood examines a plurality of circulations as metaphors and catalysts for unsettling children and childhood as fixed ontological categories. On one hand, contributors’ attention to a phenomenology of circulations, children, and childhood identifies ‘fixed’ expected or projected developmental trajectories assumed by such adult actors as state workers, child welfare experts, lawyers, law enforcement and biomedical professionals, or adoption professionals to underpin a ‘normal childhood’ (such as that which might be grounded in a nuclear family, with an assumed fixed and stable locus of belonging). On the other hand, it identifies and literally subjectifies children who deviate from this model or ideal. Using spatial metaphors to deconstruct childhood as a fixed category ultimately yields important models for thinking about how children and childhood literally and figuratively perform as markers for both stasis and fluidity in our daily lives.

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This article examines trends in emotion socialization in Russian children's homes (detdoma) between 1996 and 2002, with a focus on attachment socialization. It examines the shift between different emotion socialization practices such as 'toughening attachment' (purposively nonresponsive childcare in institutions) and 'trading children for childhood' (the framing of inter-country adoption as the exchange of Russian children to Western adoptive parents for the children's chance at economic success and emotional development). It argues that two central features shaped detdoma workers' attachment socialization of children in the 1990s: the perceived need to 1) socialize children's attachment in an attempt to establish economic and emotional security for children in uncertain times after the fall of the Soviet Union; and 2) shape children's understandings of attachment within transnational contexts as child migration to the West increased over the course of the decade. Investigating attachment socialization within Russian children's homes immediately after the fall of the Soviet Union demonstrates the role of cultural norms, economic transition, and political ideologies in shaping emotion socialization over time. It also highlights how economic and political transition impact taken-for-granted assumptions within child development literature about what constitutes attachment and child love, family or kinship, and domesticity -particularly, parent-child interaction models of emotion socialization.