With 130,000 children adopted each year in the USA, researchers find growing numbers involve kids whose race is different from their parents’. The latest data show that about 40% of adoptions in America involve such families; among children from other countries adopted by American parents, 84% are transracial or transethnic, says Adam Pertman, executive director of the nonprofit Evan B. Donaldson Adoption Institute, a research, policy and education organization. He shared the statistics as part of a panel on multiracial identities Friday at the nonprofit Council on Contemporary Families, a group of family researchers, mental health practitioners and clinicians meeting here. “When you form a family with kids of a different race or ethnicity, you become a multiracial, multiethnic family,” says Pertman, the father of two adopted teens. The most common type of adoption in the United States is from foster care, comprising 68% of adoptions, compared with 17% for infants adopted domestically and 15% from international adoption, Pertman said. “The whole gamut of family issues is being influenced in a profound way by adoption,” he says. “There are Chinese cultural festivals in synagogues and there are African American kids with Irish last names at St. Patrick’s Day parades.” Others discussed other aspects of adoption. Research by Gina Samuels, an associate professor in the School of Social Service Administration at the University of Chicago, has focused on identity development among transracial adoptees. Samuels, a multiracial adoptee who has worked in child welfare, has found that the goal of being “colorblind” that white parents often espouse may not be the best approach for white parents to take with their kids of other races. “Colorblindness actually creates discordance,” she says, because parents set their child up to believe that race doesn’t matter — until the kids find that often race is an issue in the real world and they haven’t been prepared for it. Her study of multiracial adoptees, “Being raised by white people: Navigating racial difference among multiracial adopted adults,” was published in 2009 in the Journal of Family and Marriage. She found that “colorblind” parenting may actually be more harmful than helpful to kids. “Adapting and understanding of equality doesn’t require sameness, so for family members to be able to relate to one another we don’t have to be the same,” Samuels says. “We can be racially different and we can see the world and experience the world differently.” Discuss… Source
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Another Day, Another Study: Multiracial Adoption, “Colorblindness”, And Being Raised By White People
