This content has been archived. It may no longer be relevant
You want a baby or child so much. You dream about it all the time. You have come to believe there really is a child out there in the world meant just for you. You have finally come to terms with the fact that your child doesn’t have to be created by you and genetically part of you. You are ready to move on.
Perhaps you have gone through the turmoil and pain of infertility and have exhausted all avenues for a pregnancy. Perhaps you have been surprised at encountering secondary infertility. You may already have one or more children by birth but have suddenly hit a brick wall and haven’t been able to get pregnant again. Or maybe you already have children, but are someone who is moved by the plight of all of the children, either here in the United States or in other countries, who wake up every day without the love and protection of a family of their own. Naturally, the plight of Haitian children is at the front of our consciousness at the moment, although the majority of them are not available for adoption and the process of documenting who they are and where their relatives are is going to be a daunting one for authorities.
So, if your interest in adoption has been sustained for a while, you have most likely started to do some investigation. You go to the Internet, and begin to look at pictures of huge-eyed children who are just calling out to you. Your heart is bursting with love and with free-flying feelings that you are now meant to give a home to one or more of these children, and maybe you believe that God is telling you to go ahead.
As an adoptive parent for many decades, of a multi-racial, multi-cultural family, founder and director of a licensed adoption agency for 28.5 years, and personal coach who works with adoptive families, I could share with you the stories of hundreds, perhaps thousands of people I know. Interest in adopting a child of another race or background has roots in varied personal beliefs and experiences. We are not all alike, so people may come to this desire and decision in a variety of ways. The typical client with whom I have dealt over the years may launch the journey to adoption with an intention to parent a child who is much like the one he or she would have had by birth. Some of these people may then change their thinking if they learn that such a child may not be readily available or “easy to adopt”. They may grow in their understanding of the children who truly need homes and in their own capabilities to offer a good life to those children. Others may wish to provide the love and a home a parentless child needs because they want to put something back into a world in which they have already received numerous blessings.
Over the years, starting right around the time my late first husband and I decided to expand our family through adoption nearly 40 years ago, there has been a lot of controversy around whether or not it is a good thing or a bad thing for people to break racial and cultural barriers through adoption. The adoption of black children by white parents was called genocide by a few groups and their alleged spokespeople, and some thought the children were better off in institutions than in white families.
Nowadays this debate is strong all over the world. Some organizations support doing everything possible to convince countries to keep their kids, their most precious natural resource, and to avoid allowing them to be adopted internationally, or to create obstacles so that this is not likely to occur very much. I do strongly advocate making it possible for parents everywhere to raise their own children. It is a terribly sad reality, though, that poverty is most often the reason that parents in other countries relinquish their offspring. However, the intention of keeping kids in their homelands may not be totally realistic in countries with huge economic struggles and issues of survival that are many- layered.
One can’t help thinking then, that this recent focus on keeping kids within their own culture and in their countries of origin is one that meets the needs of adults, rather than of children growing up without love and commitment and with little but the absolute basics for survival (and sometimes not even that much). In our country, for a long, long time, reunification of families was the focus in the child welfare system. No matter how many years it took for dysfunctional and often drug addicted parents to get their lives together, the rights of biology seemed to take precedence over the needs of the children. They remained in the less-than-perfect foster care system, regardless of how many years it took the birth parents to turn their lives around. The majority never did. Nowadays, thank goodness, in the U.S. for the most part, courts and child welfare systems are more child-centric. They are more tuned in to making crucial decisions based on the ultimate best interests of the children. The rights of the birth families are and should still be considered, and hopefully with less racial and cultural bias than has existed in our society, but at last, we have begun to think more seriously about the children and their right to security and love.
Yet there are some pretty serious things that prospective adoptive parents must take into account if they are contemplating adopting a child of another race or background. Here are a few of the many thiings to mull over:
- Let go of the “rescue fantasy”, regardless of whether the child is coming from an excellent foster home, or from a war-torn or poverty-stricken land.
Children need to grow up knowing that we love them for themselves and are not some sort of do-gooder project for their parents. Anyone who has raised kids to the teen years understands that gratitude is not one of the strong suits of adolescents and having such expectations will significantly hinder a healthy, open parent-child relationship.
2. Think about the permanent changes to the composition of your family and if you and your extended family really understand the implications.
We must accept and embrace the fact that our adoptive families will be literally changing for generations to come and we are consciously altering the gene pool that will carry on and represent our family name. To me, this is a positive thing, but not everyone views it this way. We must recognize that we will become part of whatever background the child is, as well as the child’s becoming part of whatever backgrounds we are from. We must make a commitment to learn about and respect the culture from which our children come and not just by paying lip service. Some families think that by serving kim-chee or tamales, they have made a substantial effort. We must be ready to impart to our kids what we learn and to show our love of, interest in and respect for their cultures.
- Carefully consider what you have to offer to a child of another race or culture.
We will never fully comprehend what it means to be a minority if we are not, but we will feel this about as closely as possible, if and when our children of minority backgrounds are subjected to discrimination and hurt. That is why it is so important to think this all through before we undertake such an adoption. Do we have the knowledge, sensitivity and experience to help our minority children survive and function in a world that may not be as kind to them as we would like? Do we have enough healthy and strong role models of the child’s background and of other minority backgrounds in our lives, who will be there for our child or children and help them grow up to be happy, successful adults? I can’t begin to tell you how many times white prospective adoptive parents have said, “But we live in a tiny town. We don’t really know any black people, or latinos, or any other minorities. How do we go about meeting them?” It is at that point that I ask them how old they are. Have they had minority friends at other times during their lives, when they lived elsewhere or when they were in school? Have they kept up the friendships at all? I explain that one can’t create friendships in a contrived manner. Becoming a mixed family requires a commitment to a different lifestyle, and perhaps to moving to a more diverse community, joining a diverse religious congregation and making changes that will benefit the entire family.
- Are you prepared to accept your child as a minority individual, not just as a cute baby or young child, but as a teen and adult?
Many kids who are adopted into families that look different than they do, seek out friends with whom they don’t stand out as much. This happens even when the kids love their adoptive families and are comfortable with them. If you do not live in a community with diversity, sometimes your kids will go to great lengths to seek out people who more closely resemble them but who may or may not be healthy role models, or who may have backgrounds or values that contradict those in which your family believes and has tried to teach. I have found that adopted minority kids raised in multi-cultural families often tend to be able to move comfortably among different racial groups. The question is, are you, the parents, comfortable with the fact that your cute little adopted baby may grow up to want to date or marry out of your racial group and may more closely identify with his or her own racial or cultural group? Or, if you live in a non-diverse area, how will you prepare your child for the fact that there will be families in your town who might not want your son or daughter dating theirs? What will you do to help your child?
5. When in your own life have you felt like a minority or felt you have been discriminated against in some way?
Can you use the feelings that you remember and the learning you have incorporated as strengths to assist you in raising the child or children? If you have lived a life in which you had not had such painful, but growth-producing opportunities, how will you begin to understand what your child of a race or background other than your own is going through?
