By Elaine Sihera (30 March 2009)

The Save the Children Fund has added its weighty voice to the debate as to whether Madonna should adopt another child and has spoken out against her, citing the fact that children should be cared for by 'extended families in their own home community'. Yes, that is true, and lot of things should happen in our world to make it a fairer place for many orphans, poor kids and kids without any kind of future, but they do not happen because we don't live in an ideal world.

Moreover, one fails to see how an adoption could be criticised which would help one little motherless girl to have the kind of life 99% of us in the world dream about. No one can put the world's ills to right by themself, but if we all did just one thing to help a child, the dramatic difference would be immediately noticeable rather than doing only what is regarded as perfect or desirable.

It takes all kinds of action to change situations like those in Africa where the need is greatest, not just one ideal approach. In this case, Save the Children has got it very wrong because of one primary factor they have overlooked in their wisdom: the emotional health of the child Madonna has already adopted, David Banda.

David is a black child who will be spending his early formative life in an all-white family. His emotional health in forming his own identity is very important and that can only be helped by having a brother or sister who REFLECTS him, his heritage, his culture and his origins. When there is no reflection of us in our community, it sets up conflicts of identity, especially where our parents are clearly different, and can often cause internal dissonance until it is resolved, most often shown in either a rejection of the self (a desire to be white, for example) or a rejection of the parent(s).

Our daughter had a crisis of identity when she was between 12 and 13 years old. Though she had very loving parents (a black mother and a Sikh father), she was one of very few mixed race children at her grammar school which had a 98% white intake. The result of that, being virtually invisible in her school and feeling undervalued, was that she wanted to be white. It didn't matter what confidence, love or appreciation we gave her, the peer group she mixed with were all white and she felt unreflected and an outsider. She wanted so much to belong that being white, in her eyes, was the only way she could do it. She became introspective, uncommunicative and withdrawn for a few anxious months. Her confused state reflected itself in her writing which gradually revealed her problem. "Why did I have to be born black when all my friends are white?", she once wrote, and it was gutwrenching. How do you fix that need?

It was a terribly tragic time for our family as we were unsure how to deal with this low self-image. Yet we were very successful, confident professionals and role models to her. We managed to bring her through those doubts and she resolved her identity and self-esteem in her own way by the time she was 14. However people underestimate the effects on children of being minorities in majority communities, the perceived lack of value, significance and self-reflection that haunt their routine lives, especially when all they see are white peers reflected in books, the media, as heroes and as the ones who matter.

That new addition to Madonna's family will do far more for David's sense of self and value than anything else Madonna could offer him. Both he and the new child will be reinforced by one another, just as his white sisters reinforce each other. Save the Children might want children to be supported in an ideal way, but this is not an ideal world. This is a cruel world where too many of our kids are suffering. One less child to suffer has got to be our aim, not the perfect manner in which it is done. As long as a child is not being exploited anything else to help them has got to be encouraged.

Madonna is doing the right thing for the wellbeing of her whole family, while protecting her new son, and I wish her well in her aim.

ABOUT ELAINE SIHERA

Elaine Sihera is a writer and consultant in diversity management. Author of "Managing the Diversity Maze", and publisher of the Elaine's Den website (www.elainesden.org).