Parents Talk About Transracial Adoption
“Going into an adoption with a rescue narrative may create a dynamic where the children are supposed to be grateful for having been rescued from terrible parents or situations,” she says. “It creates an imbalance of power where the child is at a steep disadvantage.” |
Adopting a child can be a beautiful experience. When the adoption is transracial, extra care is required to support everyone involved. To learn more, we spoke to parents and experts about transracial adoption.
Parents considering becoming foster parents or adopting from foster care can best approach this important decision by finding out what experts and experienced foster and adoptive parents say about it. Black children and other children of color are overrepresented in foster care, and the majority of foster parents are White. Adopting from foster care often means transracial adoption. In this article, you will meet Deb, the White mother of a Black tween whom she adopted from foster care. You will also meet Dr. Amanda Baden, an expert in the psychology of transracial adoption who is also a transracial adoptee. Children with Special Needs Deb and her wife, Susan, began talking about becoming foster parents when their two biological daughters were tweens. After the required training to be a licensed foster family, Deb joined a foster-adopt support group where she met experienced foster parents. “They were brutally honest about how hard it is,” Deb says, “but I still felt like this is what we were supposed to do." When a friend from the support group began fostering Landon, a newborn with prenatal substance exposure, Deb offered to babysit. Only a licensed foster family can provide respite care, which Deb and Susan were. Deb first held Landon when he was a week old. She, Susan, and their daughters babysat him regularly until he was about 10 months old. At that time they agreed to take him full time because of unrelated difficulties in his foster family. His adoption was finalized eight months later. Landon, now 9 years old, is in his mom’s words “a very busy, bright, beautiful, wonderful boy.” He is affected by fetal alcohol spectrum disorder (FASD) caused by alcohol exposure in utero. This condition, along with the prenatal and birth traumas he experienced, have contributed to significant challenges for Landon and his family. “He needs a special level of parenting,” Deb says. “We call it parenting PhD. We can’t parent him like we parented our girls.” Race ChallengesThe other big difference between raising Landon and his older sisters, now in their 20s, is the racism he faces. Deb says she worries that what happened to Trayvon Martin or Tamir Rice will happen to Landon. “I have to tell him, ‘No you can’t play with a Nerf gun outside of our yard. You can’t have a BB gun.’ In stores, I tell him ‘stay close to me; keep your hands where people can see them.’’’ “Those were things I didn’t have to teach my White children,” Deb says. “Black children have to carry that into the world, and it weighs them down.” Deb has tried to use her White privilege to protect him by introducing Landon to every member of the police department and every store owner in the business district of their town. “When they see him they all know, ‘Oh that’s Deb’s kid.’” But she knows that only lasts so long. The biggest thing parents need to think about before adopting a child of another race is what their daily lives look like now. “Your Black child should not be the only Black friend you have,” Deb says. She and Susan joined a mostly Black church, take Landon to Black barbers, and attend camps and gatherings of other mixed-race and Black families. They have worked hard to get his special education needs met in their mostly White suburban Pittsburgh school district, but they work equally hard to embrace his cultural background and needs. This includes contact with his biological mother. “We have a wonderful relationship with her,” Deb says. “She understands to a minimal extent his disability, but we don’t want to burden her. We want their relationship to be positive, so blaming doesn’t help.” A social worker helped Deb and Susan make contact when Landon was 3 years old. “We wanted nothing but what is in his best interest. Landon knowing where he came from is best.” Mental Health Support Deb says the mental health of the foster or adoptive parents deserves more attention. “The mental health of the parents is as important as the mental health of the children,” she says. “Parents need to have support, resources, outlets, time alone, time with their spouse, and time with friends who will listen and be authentic.” She recommends seeing a therapist and educating extended family about the child’s needs. “Once I got my parents and siblings on board, it became much easier,” she says. She also recommends connecting with organizations and groups for foster parents and families. “Finding your community and getting involved with them helps so much,” she says. “Just being with people who get it!” Parents will need support to face the long-term challenges the family confronts together. These challenges stem from the many traumas foster children may experience, such as a chaotic prenatal environment, being taken away from their biological parent, spending time in neonatal intensive care, or going through substance withdrawal. The Dangers of the Rescue Narrative Dr. Amanda Baden’s work sheds light on those challenges. A professor of counseling and educational psychology at Montclair State University, Dr. Baden studies transracial adoption. An adoptee from Hong Kong herself, she says one of the biggest problems in transracial adoption is what she calls the rescue narrative, where parents think they have solved all of a child’s problems by adopting them. “People think trauma is like being in the Vietnam War. They can’t understand how an infant would be traumatized by going into a nice family. People don’t see that adoption trauma exists.” She also cautions parents against seeing their child as permanently damaged. “Going into an adoption with a rescue narrative may create a dynamic where the children are supposed to be grateful for having been rescued from terrible parents or situations,” she says. “It creates an imbalance of power where the child is at a steep disadvantage.” The trauma adoptees carry can lead to problematic behavior, but parents who see themselves as the child’s saviors take that as a personal affront instead of a sign that the child needs support. Build Cultural ConnectionsDr. Baden says foster and adoptive parents should ask themselves some hard questions before taking in a child of a different race. “For kids raised transracially in White communities, if their families don’t have integrated lives, they will set up this dynamic where the adoptee feels real conflict around their racial background. They don’t fit into their culture or the White culture.” “If you don’t have any friends of the race you’re thinking about adopting, you shouldn’t adopt them,” she says. Having deep social connections with members of that race is necessary for understanding and meeting an adopted child’s needs. Open Adoption Helps“There’s this narrative of parents giving up the child so they can have a better life,” Dr. Baden says. “But it’s a lot more complicated and kids really can understand that.” Instead of feeling ashamed of parents who were poor or drug addicted, children get that their birth parents couldn’t raise them. Regular contact reassures the child that things can turn out alright in the end. “We know that open adoption helps,” Dr. Baden says. “Kids do better when they have access to their history and they understand it more.” Next Steps The advice above can guide you if you are considering transracial adoption. Some of the resources below will also be of help. One of the resources is from the Pact Adoption Agency in Oakland, California. The agency is dedicated to serving adopted children of color by providing not only adoptive placement but lifelong education, support, and community for adoptees and their families on matters of adoption and race. Sources Arrington, Dominique, “Rethinking Adoption Out of Foster Care,” 2017 Compton, Rebecca, “Is Transracial Adoption Harmful to Kids? Research Debunks a Common Misconception,” 2016 Creating a Family, “What Is It Really Like to Raise a Child with FASD,” 2020 Foster Coalition, “Foster Parents: Who Are They?” 2015 Kim, Hyunil, Wildeman, Christopher, Jonson-Reid, Melissa, Drake, Brett, “Lifetime Prevalence of Investigating Child Maltreatment Among U.S. Children,” 2017 Pact an Adoption Alliance, “Pact’s Resource Library,” [n.d.] St-Esprit, Meg, “How Two Families Are Navigating Open Adoption After Foster Care,” 2019 |