Mara Baldwin

Freeman Summer grant program

Summer 2005

With an increase in transracial families being formed in the United States as a result of international adoption, issues surrounding the role of race in family and parentage are increasingly debated and creating controversy. How parents choose to integrate the birth-culture of their child is directly related to their understanding of the role of race, within their family’s identity. Racial self-awareness of parents is directly related to parental awareness surrounding the delicacy of racial and cultural identity in their children’s social position and lifestyle. Approaches of how parents integrate and establish the importance of culture and ethnicity within their families is gauged by the proportion of family identity that each of the family’s cultures have in proportion to one another. Adopted children need to be encouraged to talk about their racial difference in order to understand what role they want it to play in their own lifestyles. Adoptive families are often not prepared enough to foster dialogue about race and how to deal with emotional implications of these conversations. More support for transracial adoptive parents must be offered and made easily accessible. More research must be done on how different approaches to talking and thinking about race in transracial families have a positive or negative affect on the children being raised within them.

*****

Research was conducted between the summer months of June and August of 2005. Fifteen families participated in interviewing in and around the Boston area. Thirty families participated in written surveys from around the United States, though primarily in the New England area. Families were contacted through a variety of sources and types of advertising. Fliers were postered throughout the Boston area in downtown metropolis areas and in public places in Cambridge and Somerville, Massachusetts.

Few families responded through the postering outreach. Parents sourced their knowledge of the project through their membership to several email listservs through which small blurbs were mailed via the world-wide web. Emails were sent through the listservs associated with adoption agencies in the Boston area as well as the Center for Family Connections, a family therapy clinic in Cambridge for adoptive families, P-Flag, an association active in GLBT family politics and the Open Door Society of New England, a group committed to adoption outreach and education for prospective and post-adoptive families. The Open Door Society was most directly helpful and useful in finding interested families because the families who are members are generally active in adoption policy, politics, and their personal adoptive-family lifestyle.

All families involved contacted me first and expressed interest in participating, so all families can be assumed to be involved in their children’s adoptive awareness (as opposed to being disinterested). Because of this reason, all families, for the most part, have succeeded in the raising of their children with some sort of support and investment in the birth culture of their child. No families are negligent of the importance of their family’s transracial identity, although the ways it is talked about within families or the ways it is integrated into family life are spectral.

Most families were white heterosexual couples between the ages of 35 and 45 at the time of their first adoption. Because of government-dictated regulations surrounding international adoption on both ends of the exchange, couples participating in the interviews were generally upper-middle class and American citizens. All families involved were from the Boston area, and although two were from within the city of Boston, all others lived in the suburbs between 10 and 45 minutes outside of the city by car or train. In all cases, both parents worked either in an office or out of the home. These economic and social classifications seem to generally hold true for most adoptive parents in the United States primarily because of the high cost of adoption and stipulated requirements set by the governments of the international countries being adopted from. One couple interviewed was a same-sex lesbian couple, married by law in the state of Massachusetts, but besides difference in sexuality, shared the economic stability and European ancestry characteristic of all the other parents interviewed. All families were two-parent structured, and about half of all families involved in the project (through both interview and survey) had birth children in addition to their adopted sons or daughters.

Despite efforts to involve both parents in interview and written survey, involvement was, for the most part, entirely with mothers and children. In two interview sessions the father sat in the same room, but in only one of two scenarios did the father participate in the conversation. Both fathers, notably, were in attendance at the request of their spouses. In written surveys, two paper copies were sent to each home and an email was sent to both mother and father with an attached copy of the survey. All returned surveys were filled out by the mother of the family, although one was signed by both parents and said to have been filled out collaboratively. During the interviews with the lesbian couple, both mothers and their adopted daughter were in attendance and actively involved in conversation. Although the husbands of heterosexual families did not participate as much in interview, their participation in their children’s lives and interest in family life cannot be determined to be similarly absent. Many of the mothers interviewed who took the written survey talked about their husbands’ participation in parenting and in nearly all cases, the father was thought of as equally represented in all decisions surrounding the adoption and child-raising process.

A wide range of primary and secondary texts were read in preparation for interviews in order to begin forming an understanding of the short history of international adoption in the United States. These texts included autobiographies, informational books on the adoption process and policy within the United States, children’s books for adoptive families and their adopted sons and daughters, and historical overlooks of international adoption, especially in China. Nearly no research has been done to determine concrete guidelines for parents on how to approach raising a transracial family.

International adoption has only existed as a recognized practice since the Cold War. Consequently, little sustained research has been conducted on the emotional and identity-related implications on the personal and family level of individuals touched in one way or another by international adoption, much less on the social and racial issues which support and criticize it. An influx of autobiographical texts written by Asian-American adoptees within the past ten years, for the most part adopted from Korea, begins to uncover some of the personal issues being grappled with by children raised out of the context of transracial international adoption in the United States. This generation of new adults is the first to express and give light to the needs and inner-workings of the Asian-American adoption experience. Their experiences as developed adults can be looked to for suggestions of better techniques of raising an adopted child in a transracial family.

A wide range of secondary texts have been written by the families of adopted children about experiences and tips for other parents; a sort of ‘learn from the experts’ style of parenting manual. These books are interesting because of the variance of parenting techniques said to work or be ‘the best way.’ Ultimately, all authors tend to agree on certain fundamental methods for addressing race but vary on how questions are answered, addressed, and resolved.

The original proposal of the summer project was an investigation of the effects of adoption on Asian-American adoptees through the use of photography. Through conversations with families, it became apparent that few teenagers were equipped with the personal awareness to identify the roles of their birth-culture in their American lifestyles besides what was obviously apparent or directly related to the efforts being made (or not made) by their parents. What proved to be most interesting were what parents (primarily white mothers) were aware or concerned about and how different families were taught or committed to teaching their children about race and diversity and personal identity. The attentiveness and generosity of parents in talking about their children was interesting in itself. The American adoptive parents I spoke to tended to be acutely aware of their difference from other more traditional families, but while some were extremely vocal about it with and in front of their children, others were decidedly not.

The project focus changed to investigate how and why American parents are deciding to adopt from outside of their country and race and how they retain the birth-culture of their child or children in their lives and even more significantly, in the lifestyle and everyday dynamic of their entire family. Research and interviews were specifically interested in how parents are fostering dialogue about racial identity with their adopted children and the redefinition of the traditional of what it mean to be a family.

*****

I’m sitting in a nice home on a nice couch with Pam Sebor Cable and her daughter Mei-Mei. We’re talking about their daughter/sister Sonia. "Sonia loves being Chinese," she starts. Mei-Mei rolls back in her mothers lap. "My husband and I have enrolled her in a Chinese preschool and she is taking dance classes downtown." I ask her what would happen if she stopped liking being Chinese. "Of course, we would let her stop taking classes to do soccer or whatever she wants. We’re just waiting for her to make a decision. She is, after all, only 3 ˝ still." A week later I am sitting in a similar living room in Newton with Sonja Barton-Loar and her husband Steve, parents of Korean-born Peter and Anna. They have a different take on the subject. "Our kids are going to Korean school every Saturday until they are done with it. They and we know that it’s important. It really isn’t even a question."

How do parents decide how to integrate the birth-culture of their child into their family lifestyle? What system of values and racial sensitivity are involved in these decisions? All families involved in this project were committed to or at least understood that there was some importance in acknowledging the birth-culture of their child, but the ways in which they encouraged cultural identity formation varied in intensity and justification. These differences to some extent can be attributed to different social contexts of the communities families live in and also varied from child to child within the family, as parents honed in on their values relating to the cultural education of their children more succinctly with each child. Primarily, however, parents were different in their parenting techniques in direct relationship to the amount of preparation and follow-up made available to them by their adoption clinic and other adoption resources in their communities.

In written survey, parents answered a variety of questions pertaining to their experiences with international adoption from Asian countries and the integration of birth-culture into their family lifestyle. Of the parents involved, most parents listed their reasons for adopting primarily as strong hopes to be parents. Adoption serves as a feasible and desirable option for couples who are infertile due to older age or reproductive incapacity. Over half of the couples interviewed admitted to having gone through infertility treatments before deciding on adoption. A small number of parents both in survey and in interview explained that their decision to adopt had been their preferred choice for one reason or another of putting together a family.

All families were drawn to international adoption from Asian countries because of its relative stability in comparison to adoption from elsewhere. Most families spoke of their anxieties at the beginning of the process of the risks that exist in international and domestic adoption with drug and alcohol abuse by birth-mothers, mental retardation, chronic and incurable disease, and child abuse sustained in orphanages and foster homes. All parents spoke of how certain risks are more likely to be encountered in adopting from specific countries and how their comfort-levels with these risks factored strongly into their choice of what country to adopt from. China was generally chosen as a country with less drug-related birth deficiencies and defects. Vietnam was chosen by one couple for its reputable quick paper and visa processing. Korea was chosen by several parents because of its foster-care program (all children are put into small foster families until they are adopted as opposed to orphanages).

Nearly all parents had considered domestic adoption and had decided on international adoption as a more preferable alternative. One parent wrote, "We were uncomfortable with the situation of adoption in the US. We had Chinese friends and the children seemed beautiful and healthy. [My husband] wanted a girl and in China that was a given. Our neighborhood has a large Asian population." While for many parents, the decision to adopt from abroad was finely calculated to their comfort levels, many families expressed their decision to have mostly been influenced by luck, haphazard or chance. A mother wrote, "We originally looked into domestic adoption. Then we saw a film at our adoption education course which showed an adult adoptee from Korea who searched for her birth parents and we were moved by her story. It is ironic because originally, we were pretty fearful of having any possible contact with the birth parents (also a factor in our decision to adopt internationally) but for some reason we were drawn to this woman and then we spoke with another couple in the course who were considering adopting from Kazakhstan." All families described the choice of where to adopt from as a major step in the adoption process. Over half of all families involved in the written survey and interview process had attended the Open Door Society annual adoption conference held outside of Boston in late-spring. Many had also gone to workshops held by both the Open Door Society as well as ones held by their chosen adoption clinic. These workshops and informational sessions were generally seen as important requirements for parents in making informed decisions about the families they were in the process of creating.

Some parents were influenced in their pre-adoptive decision-making by personal politics or the global politics of current events. A huge influx of international adoptions occurred out of the countries of Korea and Vietnam immediately after the Cold and Vietnam wars. One mother wrote in her survey, "as the Vietnam War was still raging in 1974 [my husband and I] became very concerned about all the orphans." Korea and Vietnam were the Asian countries most-often adopted from until the early 90’s because they were the only ones consistently open to American families and adoption clinics. In 1991, adoption exchange with China was made easier as a response to the huge amount of unwanted female babies in overcrowded Chinese orphanages attributed to the one-child policy enforced by the Chinese government. As a result, China seems to generally be chosen as a country to adopt from by families wanting daughters, whereas families seeking sons looked elsewhere. In response being questioned about political and cultural interests in the decision of their child’s birth country one parent wrote simply, "we wanted our children to come from a democratic and free society."

Many parents spoke of their decision to adopt from a certain country related to how they thought they could delegate their children’s birth culture to their children. In interview one mother said that her brother’s marriage to a Thai spouse made the connection to Asian culture easier and more easily approachable than it would have been before. Another adoptive mother wrote that after her parents traveled to Thailand the year before she adopted, she felt her family was more open to the idea of adopting from that country having established a personal connection, and that that single trip factored considerably into their decision to adopt from Thailand. Parents within physical or emotional proximity to Asian friends, family or culture related that these people in their lives made the transition into becoming a white parent of an Asian-American family more comfortable and natural.

Despite all attempts at and forms of planning, parents usually admitted to many personal doubts, parental mistakes, cultural assumptions made along the way. Even the best intentions were met with unexpected issues, as one mother wrote, "…we decided international adoption provided an opportunity for a child to enjoy the benefits of a family AND living in America. We expected that once we integrated the children, life would roll merrily along as before… we were seriously unprepared for our reality." What considerations should adoptive parents be prepared to take into consideration in deciding how to integrate their child’s birth culture in their child’s and family identity? How can parents become better prepared for being aware of their child’s needs for personal racial understanding and clarity?

In the survey, parents were asked to describe the concerns and considerations they had prior to adoption in regards to becoming parents of transracial families. Some parents expressed no concern over being a different race then their children, although most admitted to some original anxieties over their ability to raise children who looked different from themselves. As one mother wrote, "I think my biggest concern was whether or not I would be able to keep our son’s birth heritage alive for him. Not speaking Korean or even knowing that much about the country made me a little apprehensive." Some parents involved in the project spoke of how at times it felt strange to think about being a parent to a child who so obviously was not their own. Other parents talked about how it was equally strange to not acknowledge the difference of race between them and their children, feeling it was confusing and dishonest to not embrace the two racial and cultural halves of their family.

Parents all seemed to share the idea that they had been unprepared for the breadth of responses from their families and peers they have endured over the course of their children’s upbringing. Every parent had different stories to share about how their new families were accepted or rejected in their larger families or local communities. Within extended families, apprehension over the formation of transracial families tended to be rooted in older generations. One mother wrote, ""I was concerned about how my extended family would react. There are prejudices in both my husbands and my families that have been taught and passed down through the generations. My husband and I have "learned" these prejudices as well and this worried me." Parents in the process of adoption were concerned about the acceptance of their children because of their wish to give their adopted children an extended family beyond a mother and father.

Those parents who encountered racism in their families usually felt that it was something that could not be changed. A parent related her negative experiences with racism within her extended family as draining and exhausting: "My mother once referred to my daughter as a ‘china doll.’ My in-laws often laugh about my daughters’ small nose because her sunglasses often cannot stay up. It is endless." Despite these stories of racial intolerance, generally grandparents who were apprehensive of an adoption in their family were ultimately accepting of their grandchildren and able to transcend racial and biological definitions of family. Another mother write of her family, "Paternal grandparents were not so sure… maternal grandparents were open to ALMOST all ethnicities," but later went on to explain that both sets of grandparents were open to change and "came to love" their adopted grandchildren as the mother understood they would a biological grandchild. In one case, the grandparents were a major encouraging factor in the adoption of a grandchild after the mother and father had been undergoing frustrating and unsuccessful artificial insemination and in-vitro fertilization therapy for years.

Parents also expressed concern over the racial prejudice and the receptiveness of their families within their communities. Although acceptance from extended family was talked about with importance, parents generally spoke more often about the communities they lived in and how the way they were perceived in public spaces as a family changed after adopting a child of a different race. Most parents considered the environments they were living in before settling on what culture to adopt from. Adoption clinics and support groups encourage prospective adoptive parents to establish connections with individuals and communities of their child’s birth culture, or if possible, to move into more diverse communities where their children will have peers in their neighborhood and in school who look like them or who share their adoption experience. A mother of two young adopted daughters expressed her expressed her concerns about her children getting older and entering the public school system by writing, "We [live in] a very "white" community and do not have plans to move in the near future. This concerns me as well. I have heard that one of the most important things you can do for your multi-racial family is move into a neighborhood which has a higher percentage of both children and adults of the same ethnicity of your children. This is not an option for us, at least not at this point in time." A small group of families were surprised at the receptiveness of their communities, and often found themselves welcomed into the lives of neighbors who were from the same culture of their children. Parents describing a lack of racism in their communities generally ascribed such liberal and open-mindedness to the diverse racial makeup of their neighborhoods and the acceptance of racial difference that came with it.

One mother in interview described the insensitivity around adoption as "inevitable." Grade schools are commonly places where issues of race often come up because of the unintentional bluntness of the ways children talk or ask questions. Several parents related stories of their Asian children being made fun of because of the shapes of their eyes, smallness of stature, having dark hair or dark eyes or because of their ‘yellow-looking’ skin. One mother wrote, "It surrounds us every day. A total stranger referred to my kids once as ‘mixed.’ Another called them ‘commies.’ There are often comments about what they will be good at in life based on the many prejudices about Asian people such as music, gymnastics, math, etc." Generally, parents who have experienced racism say that it has only made their families more prepared for how to respond if it were to occur again and in some cases has been the seed for important conversations between parents and children about racial difference and the emotions related to their adoption.

Parents expressed that a major role of their goals as parents is to prepare their children to be strong in the face of adversity, including off-color comments or actions regarding race. A parent of a recent college student expressed, "My concern then and still is that because my daughter is a minority in this country that she will be discriminated against." Other interviewed parents talked about how they have prepared their children to be strong-minded enough to be able to combat racism they may encounter, but ultimately consider their children lucky because of the diversity of the United States and the privileges they are entitled to as American citizens.

One concern of many parents in the raising of their children with American values is that their children would lose out on many cultural aspects of their birth-countries. Stacey Ellender, mother of two Chinese daughters, spoke about her experiences trying to raise her children as Asian-American citizens: "I think that the moment my kids entered this country as a part of this family they lost permission from everyone to be Chinese. But then again, they also are not going to be completely American either." Many parents expressed anxieties about whether or not their children were missing out on the subtle cultural customs of their birth-countries and whether they would be accepted by Asian communities if they chose to enter them. On mother wrote, "The part I find hardest to bear is the Korean Americans that shun them at functions when they see that they are with their Caucasian parents." In recent years controversy over trans-racial domestic adoption of white parents raising black children has heightened because of one big question: Can white parents raise a black child to be a black grownup? This question is woven into the fabric of international adoptive families as well. Can white parents raise their children to be Asian adults?

All the families interviewed in person and who filled out the survey had been or still are involved with some sort of post-adoption service provided by an adoption agency, adoption resource center, or unaffiliated support group of parents and families. All families chose to enforce and encourage some sort of cultural education for their children, but some parents made a concerned effort to make their children’s Asian identity part of their family dynamic, while others were more comfortable keeping the two cultures separate and distinguishable from one another. In most cases, cultural education began at parents own volition before their adoptions had even become official: "I began reading about Korea, taping shows about the culture, and attending the events put on by our adoption agency. Our son’s Godmother is from Korea and I’ve even learned how to cook a couple of Korean dishes (which our son loves!). It has been and will continue to be an education I look forward to." In order to encourage personal and cultural identity with their birth countries parents use tools such as books and magazines, games and toys, dance and art classes, language schools, adoption support groups and counseling, internet searches and online chatrooms, summer cultural camps, mentoring programs, nannies and tutors, pen pals, celebration of cultural events and holidays, sports and special interests, movies and television programming, international maps and art/furniture at home, trips to American Asian centers (‘Chinatown’, etc.), as well as trips to birth-countries.

The balance of Asian and American identity is mastered differently from family to family but generally parents express that their role as parents is to set their children up to be in a place where they can make that decision for themselves. Family comes first, race second. As one mother wrote, "We want very much for our daughter to be proud of who she is. That is, our daughter first, an American second, and an immigrant from China third," or another parent, "[our daughter] needed to learn to be a good Spoolstra before she learned to be a good Thai." Cultural education of parents is critical in order to provide an example for their children of how to examine the role of culture in their lives and assess to what extent they wish their ethnicity to play into their identity.

Resources provided to families in cultural education and post-adoptive emotional support are critical in forming families that are willing and able to talk about issues that arise. All families involved in this survey sought participation because they have found that the discussion of racial and ethnic issues in their own family dialogue has informed and enriched their understandings of their place in the world. The surge of interest in international and transracial adoption in America calls for more researchers and social scientists to assess and help concretely determine the best ways for parents to prepare themselves to be able to supply their children with what they need to balance the two hemispheres of their racial/cultural identity.

One mother who participated in the survey voiced an opinion which I feel gives light to the global significance of international and transracial adoption. After becoming discouraged with the lack of resources for her child’s cultural education, she and her spouse began their own business selling books and toys from around the world. She writes, "Basically we believe that every child should be encouraged to embrace their racial heritage through knowledge and exposure… also we believe that the world will be better as more people learn about cultures other than their own." International and transracial adoption has the power to bring families together and transcend the boundaries of traditional definitions of what it means to be a family. She goes on to write, "Unfortunately…The average person will gravitate to whatever their culture is and stay clear of books about other cultures or frankly in most cases steer clear of any culture and go for more generic types of books and toys… I ask myself ‘What are we on this earth for? Are we here to think only of ourselves?’" Through this project it has become apparent that the adoption experience is creating complex families who are beginning to establish a new and much-needed vocabulary for global and transracial acceptance.