transracial adoption

nursesrh · May 2012

For those of you who transracially adopted, how much exposure does your child get with their culture of origin? Did you seek diverse neighborhoods, church experiences, family friends of that child's culture?

silliestbunny · May 2012

DD is Korean American... and she's still quite young so we've not invested much time in culture and exposure. We do plan on finding some balance in exposure and hope that both girls will take Korean language lessons early on.

My situation is odd... she's a bit of a fish out of water... there are groups that support Int'l adoption Korean children (play groups, camps, etc) but we don't really fit there since she is American born...

At the Christian Alliance for Orphans Summit, I spoke to a Korean adoptee that says that it was tough on her not to feel connected to the Korean culture. As she met other Koreans, there was an expectation to understand culture.... and she always felt left out. She emphasized on starting early; her parents exposed her as a teen-ager at by that point she was not interested and slightly embarassed.

There are several great organizations that offer good guidance. I'll try and find their names and post again.

Lastly, we took a class on Transracial adoption. One of the exercises that we did was very telling... The instructor gave us all a box of beads. She had us remove the color bead associated with a certain race once she named the person in our life. For example, she said "doctor", and you need to identify what race your doctor was. In the end, our beads were primarily Caucasian. I made us aware of how "white" our world is... and it has encouraged us think about it as we choose other professionals in our life. What you don't want is a child to believe that the only Hispanics in her life are working at the local gas station... or whatever. Have examples of successful people of all races in their lives. I think this is good regardless of adopting transracially or not. We were surprised with how white our world was.... we have friends of other races and we live in a large metro area.... but in the end, most business we engage in is with Caucasian professionals.

srmmm09 · May 2012

That's really great advice, Bunny!

MagickalNarwhal · May 2012

We only agreed to accept placements where we were already connected in some meaningful way to the culture. Our son's only tiny, but he already has pretty broad and deep access to meaningful cultural connections (one of the many reasons that a very open adoption was so important to us, for one!).

I knew that as a new mom in a not-super-diverse social circle, I would not be likely to have the time and physical/emotional energy to seek out different cultural experiences on the level that I thought I'd like to provide in a transracial adoption. That is why we declined to be considered for most transracial placements.

I already worked at a culturally-specific social and family services agency, and have several good friends and many acquaintences from there. His birth parents are very involved, as are his birthmoms extended family on both sides, in a way that I'm grateful for, and they have already reached out in really sweet meaningful ways that are culturally connected. Even though I did have culturally appropriate social circle, we STILL hesitated to accept a transracial placement but I'm really glad we did and so far, so good