Transracial Adoptive Families - Coping with Stereotypes

By victor Groza, author Adopting Older Children

It is vital that white parents teach their children the skill set for identifying and responding to stereotypes, oppression, hostility, prejudice and discrimination. While adoption is positive and gives an adoptee the opportunity to have a different life trajectory, much of the skill set necessary to navigate the race-conscious world is not explicitly taught. Parents often ignore or minimize the issue. They think their child will tell them when they experience something. However, many cross-racial adoptees don’t recognize that they are being treated differently because of their race. When they are treated differently, they often don’t tell their parents. Transracial adoptees need to be taught how to recognize and then respond when they encounter stereotypes, oppression, hostility, prejudice and discrimination. It is not necessarily negative; Asian adoptees are often told they must have a gene to be good in science and math (they do not). Even this can have adverse consequences. The family and adoptee should talk ahead of time and when it happens about how they should respond to any of these situations.

Transracial adoptive parents need to live in diverse communities with access to the activities of diverse communities. Some researchers suggest they purposely engage in activities of bi-cultural socialization where their adoptee gets to know the language, foods, customs and celebration of their birth culture. It is about celebrating the difference without insisting on the difference, a very difficult path to walk. One of the most important things parents can do is steadily engage in communication openness. This includes openness about the adoption, about the racial differences, about the forms of love, about the birth families, and about questions about the birth family. They have to be comfortable that their child may want to search for origins — biological or cultural. Search is not a rejection of what they have been given. It is a natural part of adoptee identity development.