#on adoption

[jedi-order-apologist]

@head-cannoncentral replied to your post “I think a lot of people don't get that the Jedi don't kidnap children;...”

Something I read in the jedi Path is that the Force being present in children *is* the consent please disregard if that book has been rendered non cannon

Yeah the Jedi Path is NOT canon, and I strongly disagree with its insinuation (among other things) that the Jedi will just take children against parents’ wills because “the Force being present indicates consent and we’re legally allowed to anyway”. That’s not something that’s supported by the source material, even within Legends (which is the continuity that Jedi Path draws from). There’s certainly accusations thrown at the Jedi of being kidnappers, but afaik there’s no actual instance of them taking a child after the parents indicated an unwillingness to give them up. In fact, we have the opposite: in TCW, the Jedi stopped going to a planet because the locals didn’t want to give them any children.

And in TPM, Qui-Gon makes a point of making sure Shmi and Anakin are both okay with and know what they’re agreeing to. He doesn’t whisk Anakin off without consent.

And while I haven’t read everything from Legends, I get the feeling that if there was an actual example of the Jedi taking a child without consent, I’d have gotten it thrown at me already (the only example that I’ve seen thrown around is some web story thing but even in that case the Jedi took the child in after a disaster where the parents were reasonably, if incorrectly, presumed dead). Instead, we have an instance in one of the comics where the Jedi return a child after the parents change their minds (and for some reason hire a bounty hunter to get the kid instead of just asking). In Dark Rendezvous we have a child who the mother begged the Jedi to take him, and the Jedi were hesitant in doing so because the mother was drunk at the time. In Wild Space, Bail Organa dismisses the accusation of Jedi being baby-thieves as the belief of “a fool or a troublemaker”. So even if there are Legends works that lean towards the interpretation put forth by the Jedi Path book, there’s definitely enough within that continuity to contradict it, too, especially in conjunction with the “higher” canon of the films and TCW also disagreeing with that interpretation.

[jedi-order-apologist]

I think a lot of people don't get that the Jedi don't kidnap children; they ADOPT them. This is distinctly different. The parents are not forced to give them up, and the children in the order are raised well and very much cared for.

Exactly! I think most people just aren't thinking about it in terms of adoption, but that's what it is. For all of the criticism of the Jedi taking in children, it's either inconsistent with the source material (such as claiming that the parents have no say in the matter, when we're shown evidence otherwise), or is equally applicable to real-world adoptions (such as passing the adoptive family's values onto the children) and therefore not inherently harmful.

That's why I ask people who make these criticisms if they also have those issues with real-world adoptions, so that they can explain to me if and how they distinguish how the Jedi take in and raise children from healthy adoption - because I've yet to see a convincing argument for why the Jedi adopting their children would be inherently harmful any more than adoption in the real world would be. There can be harmful adoptive families, of course, but adoption is not, in and of itself, evidence of harmful practices or a harmful environment for children.

[jedi-order-apologist]

How did the Jedi find force-sensitive children?

I believe under the current continuity, there are Jedi called “Seekers” whose job it is to travel around the galaxy looking for Force-sensitive children, recording their names and locations on a holocron (though of course Jedi without that specific Seeker role will also happen upon Force-sensitive children from time-to-time, as in TPM). Alternatively, the families or communities of those children, if they recognize what their child has the potential for, can contact the Jedi and ask them to come see and test the child. I believe that’s what happened with Ahsoka, for instance.

[jedi-order-apologist]

I'm curious what your thoughts are on Jedi recruitment. That seems like the one area where I feel like the prequel Jedi kind of miss the mark. We don't see really any adult students, Mace voices the opinion that Anakin is too old at 9, and George even talks about how if they had gotten Anakin younger it would have turned out differently. I feel like there's a weird implication there that mindfullness can only be instilled in children younger than 8 years old,

I suppose I see it more as adoption rather than recruitment. And while I can see why one could argue that the Jedi should be more open to adopt in older children (after all, Luke managed to learn), I think they had reason to believe that it was safer for someone to go untrained than for them to be trained on top of a shaky foundation. Early childhood is really critical for development, so unhealthy habits learned in that period are going to be very difficult to unlearn, and when that can affect how you engage with something as powerful as the Force, well, of course the Jedi are going to be cautious about teaching someone like that to use the Force.

I’d also point out that the Jedi didn’t just take a look at how old Anakin was and then reject him because of an arbitrary cut-off point - they tested him, and as part of that testing, prompted him to examine his feelings. Which he refused to do, and instead got defensive. That’s what the Council made their decision based off of - not “oh, he’s nine, that’s too old,” but rather “he’s too set in his habits and doesn’t respond well to our methods, he’s too old.” This is also the case with Luke in ESB - Yoda tests him first, and it’s after Luke repeatedly reacts with impatience that Yoda decides that Luke is too old to begin training. So the way I read “too old” is less about strictly age and more about how far you’re settled in a mindset that’s incompatible with Jedi training.

[jedi-order-apologist]

So, one thing I was always interested in is as someone who grew up in a very, very large family was the creches and how the Jedi raise their younglings. Because it always reminded me of how most of my childhood was just me, five cousins, two neighbors, one kid who we kept after our aunts divorced but like still fam, and two siings all just crammed together for most of our lives until preteen/teen years. It kind of seemed that the Jedi dynamic reflected a large family/community dynamic 1/2

And I thought it was interesting when comparing how the Jedi who grew up with this dynamic, living on top of and with each other because telepathic babies, versus Anakin who grew up an only child who I always felt learned his initial repressed emotions from having to self protect from the misery of Tatooine. I wondered a lot if the differences in this had a lot to do with his trouble with the jedi as well. Like when you marry into or become close to a big family but the emotional honesty is 1/3

Not sure if last. Ask went through. So anakin never fully integrates the social skill needed, which is NOT a reflection on Shmi at all. Also I feel like the Clobes community and brotherhood service based culture they developed for themselves allowed them to bond more easily with the Jedi because of shared values and I wonder how much they adopted from them as an influence.  Sorry rambles. Thoughts? Either 3/3 or 4/4 depending on if last went through

Yeah, looks like Tumblr ate one of your asks (I despair of this ever being a functional website) :/

Anyway, yes! The Jedi are a culture and a community and a large family in one. Not being related by blood doesn’t change that. Even without the Force connecting them on a greater level, being raised together like that makes them family, and that’s one of the reasons why I don’t agree with those who think it’s a flaw of their culture to adopt in children.

Anakin’s adjustment to the Jedi is woefully underexplored in official media; even both old and new EU material afaik only pick up with him after he’s had a few years at minimum with the Jedi. So it’s hard to say definitively how much trouble culture clash specifically caused for him (though I have no doubt it had an impact). But it is clear from TPM that Anakin was defensive and in denial about his emotions even as the Jedi Council prompted him to examine them, and that he must have learned in his years on Tatooine - which as you said, isn’t Shmi’s fault. Nor his own. They were in a horrible situation, stripped of their agency, and it’s only too believable that that would make it very difficult for Anakin to gain a stable foundation enough to deal with emotional pain. And anything that the Jedi did to help with that would’ve been undermined by Manipulative-Bastard-in-Chief Palpatine having regular access to groom and destabilize him.

As for the clones, I definitely agree - I think both the Jedi and the clones found it very easy to bond with each other (more so than with others that they might’ve encountered), not just because of bonds being more easily formed between people going through stressful situations together (which they would be by fighting side-by-side), but also because of their similar duty-focused cultures. And we do see in TCW the Jedi very easily take on a teaching role with their troops, so I definitely think the clones would be influenced by Jedi values and incorporate them into their evolving culture, even more than just by them spending so much time with one another.

[jedi-order-apologist]

From what I've noticed people who accuse Jedi of stealing children are (mostly) who believe children are only better nurtured with parents, which I find insulting to adoption cases. We know Jedi didn't steal. Jedi gave the children a safe environment to develop their abilities without being squashed by folks who didn't understand it. Parents not equipped to deal with something they don't get are just as harmful to the child. Jedi wouldn't have survived for 1k years if people were opposed to it.

According to the fandom:

Jedi adopting Force-sensitive children = bad. Apparently.

Mandalorians adopting everyone, but especially Din Djarin adopting the child = good, great even.

Bail and Breha adopting Leia = good.

Owen and Beru adopting Luke = good.

(Though there are a surprising number of people who get up in arms about separating the twins as being the worst thing (despite that being a very reasonable choice in the situation), but of course they blame that on, you guessed it, the Jedi, as some sort of anti-attachment thing?? instead of, you know, as stated directly in the film, a way to protect them from the Emperor)

They only seem opposed to adoption when it’s the Jedi who adopt. Or perhaps a less charitable interpretation is that they only accept adoption when the parents are dead/evil? Or maybe it’s just a result of them not seeing the Jedi as a family or culture. Whatever the reason, there’s definitely an unwillingness to see the benefits of Jedi raising children, which is unfortunate, because as you’ve said, it’s a safe environment for people with these extraordinary abilities, a culture where they can be understood, and if it was really as terrible as the Jedi-critical crowd believed, the institution wouldn’t have stood the test of time for so long (I think it was even longer than 1000 years, iirc Obi-Wan said the Jedi were around for 1000 generations).