While all societies make provision for the rearing of children whose own parents are unavailable to care for them, cultures and legal systems treat an adopted child in different ways ranging from equivalent status to legitimate biological children to guardianship.
Inheritance of rank varies across jurisdictions and time periods, in pre-modern Japan, a child could inherit the parent's aristocratic title or samurai rank, whereas in the United Kingdom (which only introduced legal adoption in 1926), only a biological child could inherit an aristocratic title, even if raising or providing for parentless children was a common practice.
The child's surname is not changed to that of the adopting parent(s), who are publicly recognised as "guardians", making it close to other nations' systems for foster care.
Other common rules governing adoption in Islamic culture address inheritance, marriage regulations, and the fact that adoptive parents are considered trustees of another individual's child rather than the child's new parents.
[1] In addition, Islamic countries such as Iraq and Malaysia have prohibitions against a child of Muslim parents being adopted by non-Muslim individuals.
By contrast, most of the Pacific cultures, for example in Sikaiana in the Solomon Islands, prefer that children move between different households.
Fosterage is viewed as a way to create and maintain close personal relations, and parents traditionally do not refuse to let others take their children.
Its basic functions are comparable to the ones of other traditional adoption practices, notably in Africa; a child can be "given" with the agreement or on the initiative of the family council for a variety of reasons, and they can even be asked for and given before birth.