JAERAN KIM AND BETH HALLOUTSIDE OF HOME, CHILDREN SPEND more of their lives at school than anywhere else. (For this chapter, we are focusing on children in public and private educational settings, and therefore do not include children who are homeschooled.) For six or more hours a day, the average school-age child or adolescent spends their time in an environment that is not necessarily well-equipped to be responsive to transracially and internationally adopted children and their families. Teachers, school administrators, and staff, as well as other children and their families, may have only a cursory understanding of the transracial and international adoption experience. Curriculum generally is developed from the perspective of the dominant society; in the United States, the “norm” is often assumed to be white, intact families where children are living with their biological parents. The paucity of research on the educational outcomes for transracially and internationally adopted children means we do not know the extent to which educators understand or support the transracially adopted child’s educational development (Raleigh & Kao, 2013). To fully support their transracially and internationally adopted children, parents must pay close attention to the children’s educational experiences and act as educators, advocates, and even agitators to ensure that their children’s needs are being met. In this chapter we will review what transracial and intercountry adoptees and their adoptive parents tell us about their experiences with schools; some of the ways racism and adoptism are expressed in schools; how developmental challenges faced by transracially and internationally adopted students can affect their learning experiences; how issues of race and adoption impact students with special needs; and, finally, practical interventions that individual educators can make (and parents can advocate for) in classroom assignments and school environments.
Children learn more than how to read and write in school; they learn who they are outside their immediate family systems, as citizens of the world. Transracially and internationally adopted (TRA/ICA) children entering formal school systems have more developmental and identity tasks to perform than their peers. Like other children, TRA/ICA children and youth undertake the tasks of physical, neurological, emotional, moral, and identity development; however, TRA/ICA children must integrate additional tasks related to their adoption (Brodzinsky, Schechter, & Henig, 1993). Similarly, although all children of color must navigate their racial, ethnic, and cultural identity in the context of white privilege, TRA children often address these identities without the benefit of adult role models of color in their home or extended family. In addition, some TRA/ICA children have one or more physical, intellectual, developmental, learning, or emotional and behavioral disability that affects learning (Kreider & Lofquist, 2014; Vandivere & McKlindon, 2010). Each of these identities mark a TRA/ICA child as “other” and may make him or her subject to differential or discriminatory treatment.
For ease, this chapter will refer to transracial adopted children as TRA and international (also referred to as intercountry) adopted children as ICA. As authors we apply a few conventions of terminology as well based on the following assumptions: (1) the large majority of transracial adoptions are of children of color by white parents, although any adoption of a child by parents of a different race is in fact a transracial adoption; (2) most (but not all) intercountry adoptions are also transracial adoptions and as such have more commonality than not in terms of children’s experience of race and adoption; (3) there are significant differences in experiences between TRA and ICA children that are not transracially adopted (e.g., children adopted internationally by U.S. citizen parents that share the child’s race, ethnicity, and culture), which are more similar in experience to in racial domestic placements than transracial international placements because the child’s experience of adoption does not intersect directly with their experience of race; and (4) when we use the term TRA, we are applying it to both transracially adopted domestically born and internationally born children.
Despite listing these categories as discrete spheres, TRA/ICA children experience what Kimberlee Crenshaw (1989) defines as intersectionality—that is, they must navigate multiple, simultaneous, interconnected identities that the dominant group perceives as violations of spoken or unspoken norms. The TRA/ICA child, through no choice of her own, violates norms of kinship, race, and ability because she (1) is not genetically related to the family she lives with, in a society that privileges biological kinship connections; (2) crosses racial lines, in a society that privileges racial matching within families; and (3) may have a disability, in a society that privileges physical, cognitive, and mental ability. As concrete thinkers, children are confused by these intersections and cannot, without adult help, understand their experience in the context of the larger systems at play (Brodzinsky et al., 1993; Piaget & Inhelder, 1974). These intersections, then, become critical to understanding both the TRA/ICA child’s experience and their successes or struggles within the school system.
Most research on TRA/ICA children in schools has focused on educational outcomes (Dalen, 2002; Raleigh & Kao, 2013; Tirella, Chan & Miller, 2006). For example, a study of 193 internationally adopted children in Norway found that compared with their nonadopted peers, the internationally adopted children had lower educational achievement outcomes (Dalen, 2002). Using longitudinal data, Raleigh and Kao (2013) examined whether differences exist between transracially adopted children and white, same-race adoptive placements. Tirella et al. (2006) found that 61 percent of the eighty-one Eastern European adopted children in their study had an Individualized Education Plan (IEP). Despite the amount of time that children in school spend interacting with teachers and peers, there have been no significant studies on the interaction between the teacher–child relationships or school environment on TRA/ICA racial, ethnic, and cultural identity. Research on the impact of racial and ethnic socialization in the school environment for TRA/ICA children has focused on the role of white adoptive parents, as opposed to teachers or classmates (Crolley-Simic & Vonk, 2008; Lee, 2003; Snyder, 2012; Vonk, 2001).
The authors approach this topic both as adoption professionals and as individuals with personal connections to adoption and real-life experiences of school-related issues faced by TRA/ICA children and youth. JaeRan Kim was adopted as a 3-year-old from South Korea into a white family living in a predominantly white town in Minnesota, attending nondiverse schools. She is now a child welfare professional and researcher who specializes in issues related to adoption and foster care. Beth Hall was raised in a white, same-race adoptive family, as a nonadopted sibling, and later became an adoptive parent to two TRA children. Beth was born and raised in the San Francisco Bay Area, where she also raised her children. She and her children attended both public and private schools, in the context of a racially diverse community where schools nevertheless often are segregated along racial and socioeconomic lines. Beth is a cofounder of Pact, An Adoption Alliance, where she has worked with adopted children of color and their families for more than 20 years. Pact is a nonprofit organization whose mission is to serve adopted children of color. To best serve children’s needs, Pact provides not only adoptive placement but lifelong education, support, and community for adoptees and their families on issues of adoption and race with the goal that every child should feel wanted, honored, and loved—a cherished member of a strong family with proud connections to the rich cultural heritage that is his or her birthright. Pact offers educational workshops in California as well as online webinars for transracial adopters. The “jewel in the crown” of Pact’s educational programs is Pact Family Camp, a weeklong summer retreat where adopted children of color and their families can share their experiences while learning from experts and each other.
Few organizations have a sole mission to serve children of color in adoption, although some individual support groups and adult adoptee groups are either web based or serve regional constituencies (e.g., Land of Gazillion Adoptees, Adoption Mosaic, International Korean Adoptee Association [IKAA]) and several international adoption–focused groups attract many transracial families, such as Families with Children from China (FCC) and Korean Adoptee and Adoptive Parent Network (KAAN). Some placement agencies focus is race centric (Institute for Black Parenting, Institute for Latino Parenting), although their postplacement programming often is focused more on same-race adoptive families than transracial families. Finally, there are several culture camps throughout the country, often with a focus on a particular country of birth for internationally born adoptees (Holt Camps, Colorado Heritage Camps) as well as programs that provide opportunities for birth country travel to both families and adopted youth, called homeland tours.
Both authors have experience educating school staff and administrators on ways that schools can become TRA/ICA sensitive. Each has a child who has been diagnosed with a learning disability and therefore has personally navigated the educational system for a child of color with special needs. This chapter seeks to combine professional and personal experience to provide a window into the firsthand experiences of TRA/ICA children and their parents in the school environment.
WHAT TRANSRACIAL AND INTERCOUNTRY ADOPTEES TELL US ABOUT THEIR EXPERIENCES WITH SCHOOLS
It is important to acknowledge that adoptees themselves—not parents, teachers, or other professionals—are the foremost experts on what it feels like to be an adopted person in a school environment. TRA/ICA adults and children describe their school experiences as riddled with incidents in which they were forced to reveal or explain their adoption history to peers, to teachers, and in assignments.
My son’s teacher called today. He hasn’t been turning in his assignments for 11th grade Humanities. He is an A student but is so far behind on this paper and presentation about how his family came to America, the teacher is worried he will fail the class. He has to interview two family members and then present their answers to his class. How can I get him back on track? I know these family-related topics are sensitive for him as an adopted kid, but he doesn’t want to tell his teacher about his feelings so she just assumes he is being either lazy or defiant when really he just doesn’t want to have to explain his personal history and struggle with identity to a stranger yet again.
Pact client
“Narrative burden” (Ballard, 2013; Leinaweaver, 2008) is the presumption that one’s personal narrative and history is public property, open to the curiosity and interest of strangers. For TRA/ICA adults and children, narrative burden can be focused on adoption, race, or a combination of both. Assignments and curriculum (such as family trees or family histories) that force them to put their personal experiences or feelings into the public sphere before they are ready, or that do not give the student an authentic choice about sharing this aspect of their life, is a form of narrative burden. A TRA/ICA child may “check out” of a classroom expectation or assignment as a way to disengage from confronting their personal history in the school setting. Teachers and parents may see such disengagement as a function of the child’s cognitive, social, or emotional limitations rather than as an emotional response to being forced to explore their adoption in a public context.
In my eighth-grade Geography class when we were learning about countries in Asia, my teacher wrote a bunch of scribbles on the chalkboard to “demonstrate” what Chinese writing looked like and imitated what he thought Chinese language sounded like by speaking some “ching-chong” type utterances. He then said, “Well, this isn’t really Chinese, but you get the idea.” Everyone in the class turned and looked at me, expecting a response, as I shrunk in my seat with embarrassment. Adoption-based “narrative burden” experiences I experienced as a child and adolescent included having to explain why I had an “American” name, why I was adopted and didn’t look like my parents, and people wanting to know what it felt like to be abandoned and/or adopted.
JaeRan Kim
TRA/ICA students experience bias and discrimination from their peers, teachers, and other school staff. In the Donaldson Adoption Institute study of adult adoptees, adult adoptees were surveyed about their racial, ethnic, and adoptive identity. Of the 179 adult Korean adoptees who responded, 75 percent reported experiencing racism from classmates and 39 percent reported racism from teachers (McGinnis, Smith, Ryan, & Howard, 2009). Parents and teachers often assume that TRA/ICA students will report bullying by peers around adoption, race, ethnicity, or cultural issues, but often they do not. TRA/ICA students perceive that both adoption and race should be minimized in an attempt to neutralize the differences between them and their nonadopted family members and community members (Samuels, 2009, 2010). Sara Docan-Morgan (2011) examined how adopted Koreans communicate with their white adoptive families around issues of race and adoption. More than three-fourths of the thirty-four participants in the study reported being raised in predominantly white communities. The participants’ experiences with racism in school included three types of attacks by classmates or peers: attacks by classmates or peers based on their appearance (such as having children pull at the corners of their eyes to mimic the almond shaped eye), attacks on ethnicity (most often by using racial slurs), and physical attacks (often in conjunction with one or both of the other types of racially based actions). The determining factor in whether these adoptees shared these experiences at school with their parents was whether their parents validated and affirmed these experiences in the past, or minimized or discounted them.
Even in more racially diverse environments, students report being questioned by peers and adults regarding their membership in their family because of their visible difference from their parents. These questions can come both from people of color who may share the child’s racial or ethnic group, as well as those who do not, is always the result of a lack of understanding of the child’s transracial family context.
As a transracial adoptive family, whenever we change schools or move into a new community, we are faced with the challenge of explaining who we are and how we are connected. I remember when my son was starting fourth grade at his new school. As usual, it went smoothly for the first several days, because people hadn’t matched us up yet. Of course eventually everyone realized that neither of his parents looked like him, and so the questions began. It was my husband’s day for pick-up. As he and our son James walked next to the chain-link fence that surrounded the school, Dexter, another little boy who was in James’ class and black like James, worked to get James’ attention.
“Hey, James,” Dexter called out, “James, is that your dad?”
James tried to ignore him at first, but Dexter was persistent.
“James, James, is that your dad?”
Letting James respond to his friend, my husband took James’ backpack and continued the trek to the other end of the block. James was walking with his head down, looking like he wanted to sink into the sidewalk itself. By the end of the block it was clear that Dexter was not going to give up. As if in front of a firing squad, James turned and spat out his response:
“No, he isn’t my dad!”
Time stopped. The instant was transformed into something bigger and more potent than any of the three could have planned or imagined. It was one of those split seconds that parents and TRA children fear—a moment of truth. As soon as they were safely alone in the car, my husband turned to James and said:
“James, I just want you to know that I know that you love me.”
James collapsed in the arms of his father and sobbed, wracked with the pain of denying this man he loved and worshipped because of his desire to fit in with a boy he as yet hardly knew. It was about James trying to manage the walk between fitting in with his same-race peers and loyalty to his family—race vs. adoption vs. his own personal identity. Walking along that block, between his black friend and his white father—this is the journey of TRA children, caught between the parents they love and the people in the world with whom they want to feel a connection.
Beth Hall
WHAT TRANSRACIAL AND INTERCOUNTRY ADOPTIVE PARENTS TELL US ABOUT THEIR EXPERIENCES WITH SCHOOLS
Adoptive parents are different; their children have entered their families in a different way than those who gave birth to create a family. Because of this, adoptive parents sometimes feel like a targeted group when others question whether their children are “theirs” or ask whether they are their children’s “real” parents, which seems to imply that they are not as legitimate as parents who give birth to their children. Like any other group, however, adoptive parents are not a monolithic community. Each parent has a different approach to, and understanding of, adoption, so it is critical to ask parents how they handle adoption and racial issues within their family rather than assuming one knows because one has worked with other adoptive parents in the past.
Educators often have a limited understanding of the losses and challenges associated with adoption, particularly given the lack of training educators receive on the topic (Smith & Riley, 2006; Wood & Ng, 2001). Educators may believe that adopted children should be able to behave and perform similarly to their nonadopted counterparts because of an underlying assumption that placement solves all of the adopted child’s experiences with loss, grief, and trauma. In one study, parents of adopted children gave lower ratings on their child’s school adjustment compared with parents of children who were born to them and reported higher rates of complaints about children’s behaviors when the child was adopted (Howard, Smith, & Ryan, 2004). Adoptive parents themselves may or may not understand how their child’s experience of loss, grief, and trauma manifest as behaviors, including depression, rage, school failure, drug and alcohol involvement, sexual activity, and juvenile justice interactions. When these behaviors are displayed in school, parents report that they feel blamed by teachers and administrators for their children’s struggles, rather than treated as partners in helping to unlock the impact of past experiences and the ongoing issues that their children are experiencing.
The most common school-related question we hear from adoptive parents is whether or not they should tell the school and their children’s teachers that their child is adopted for fear that teachers and staff will assume that their children have “problems” based on preconceived stereotypes about adopted children (Smith & Riley, 2006). Educators may unwittingly engage in adoptism, defined as the bias that exists within society to privilege families that are connected genetically over those made through adoption. Adoption-sensitive teachers and educators recognize that the world often treats adoptive parents and adopted children as “second-best” families, and use their skills and knowledge to advocate for these families and their unique needs and partner with adoptive parents to create a TRA/ICA-sensitive learning environment.
Race and Adoption in the Schools
Last year, when he was a kindergartener at the local public school, my son took another child’s show-and-tell toy and hid it in his cubby. He was sent to the principal’s office with a formal disciplinary referral for stealing. It landed him an in-school detention and a call home from the principal. I never imagined I’d have to discuss with school personnel the absurdity of applying “zero tolerance” policies to five-year-olds.
Pact client
Race, ethnicity, and culture matter in the classroom, whether the TRA/ICA child is in a diverse school and community or in a predominantly white community or school. Bias and discrimination by classmates, teachers, school staff, and administrators exists for all children of color (Tatum, 2003). Race and ethnicity also factor into educational outcomes (Kao & Thompson, 2003). TRA children, who do not always feel authentically connected to their same-race peers or adults, may interpret the racism they experience as inherent to being transracially adopted. Even in environments in which supportive and well-developed racial sensitivity exists, TRA students may feel unable to seek assistance from staff. During one discussion session facilitated by JaeRan with a group of adolescents at Pact Family Camp (where adopted children of color and their families can explore feelings about race and adoption with others who share their experiences), parents were surprised and upset to hear their children describe racist incidents experienced in school and that teachers and administrators often minimized these incidents or allowed them to continue—or were themselves the perpetrators.
Bias and discrimination are not limited to blatant actions by racists or adoptists but also are evident in the everyday lived experiences known as microaggressions. (We define adoptists as those who treat adopted and fostered people as damaged, pathologizing their experience. Adoptists believe that all nonadopted people are inherently healthier, more competent, and therefore better than their adopted and fostered counterparts.) Coined by Chester Pierce (1974), the term “microaggressions” describes brief, everyday exchanges that send denigrating messages to people of color because they belong to a racial minority group. Micro-aggressions are delivered in the form of subtle snubs or dismissive looks, gestures, and tones whose impact is minimized as being unintended or innocuous (Sue et al., 2007). Baden and Pinderhughes (2014) found that microaggressions apply to adoption as well. Examples of microaggressions in school include white teachers rarely calling on students of color or schools placing adopted children in lower-level reading groups without evidence that this is appropriate to the particular child. Microaggressions may also masquerade as compliments, as when white teachers express surprise when a student of color is high-achieving. A meta-study by Tenebaum and Ruck (2007) found that teachers’ expectations on their student’s learning abilities varied depending on the child’s race or ethnicity. Microaggressions impair performance by sapping the psychic and spiritual energy of their recipients. When a child must direct part of his energy each day to coping with these kinds of interactions, he has been forced to direct his energy and attention away from learning, participating in class, completing his work, and building healthy relationships with other children. Microaggressions have a significant, cumulative, and harmful impact on the developing adopted child of color.
When thinking about racism it can be easy to focus on interpersonal dynamics and ignore the larger context of institutional racism. Racism, sexism, heterosexism, ablism, and adoptism are all enforced and maintained by a society’s institutions. Educational institutions are fundamentally influenced by the societal mores and assumptions of the dominant culture in which they exist. For parents and educators to serve the transracially adopted child, they must first understand the institutional power dynamics at play in their lives, so that they can begin to confront the multiple oppressions that these youth face and can advocate for systematic change. Widespread racial disparities exist in education, as demonstrated by the school-to-prison pipeline and racial achievement gaps documented nationally (Alexander, 2012; Gregory, Skiba, & Noguera, 2010; Morris, 2013). A recent report by the U.S. Department of Education (2014) found that children of color, particularly African American children, are three times more likely to be suspended or expelled from school compared with white children, starting as far back as preschool. Children of color are also more likely to be categorized as needing special education services (Rebora, 2011).
To eradicate racism, we must change institutional structures that reproduce and reinforce racism. To address institutional changes, we must confront two aspects of bias: intent and impact. Many “good-hearted” people and organizations do not set out to hurt anyone (intent), yet are sometimes unintentionally racist (impact) without realizing or recognizing why. White adults in particular can fall into the trap of focusing on intent when they respond to situations with dismissive comments, such as “I’m sure she didn’t mean it like that” or “the school is trying to serve children of color better, but the problem is bigger than each of us.” Despite the difficulty, individuals and institutions must hold themselves accountable for the impact of their actions and attitude even when the intent was well-meaning, by making reparations through personal growth as well as systemic advocacy for change.
DEVELOPMENTAL CONSIDERATIONS FOR TRANSRACIAL AND INTERCOUNTRY ADOPTED STUDENTS
Creating an educational setting that is sensitive to the needs of TRA/ICA children is not a one-size-fits-all solution. At each age, the transracially or internationally adopted child will experience different challenges.
Within a year after my adoption from South Korea at age 3, I was able to recognize other Asian people, pointing to them and saying “like me!” to my adoptive family in my newly acquired English language.
JaeRan Kim
People are often surprised to learn that children begin to recognize racial differences in the toddler years (Mayer, 2012). It is often assumed that transracially or internationally adopted children must not notice or understand race if they haven’t asked questions or talked about it aloud. Yet, as Van Ausdale and Feagin (2001) found in their study of preschool children, children not only notice race but also are actively exploring what racial difference means to them in their interactions with each other. To make things more complicated, when children do talk about racial difference, it often is expressed in ways that make white adoptive parents and teachers uncomfortable. The adults may worry that the child sounds racist and respond in ways that may shame the child, which in turn leads the child to understand that it is not okay to talk about race. Or the child may be concerned that if they “notice” race, they will no longer feel as connected to their parents and family. As Crumbley (1999) reminds us, it is common for TRA children to express a desire to be white like their parents in an effort to reinforce this connection.
Consciously or unconsciously, these attitudes and responses can work against the child’s developmental need to explore physical and racial characteristics, inadvertently hindering the TRA/ICA child in terms of their immediate and long-term identity exploration. It is important to remember that children need to go through each developmental stage in chronological order no matter their pace; if well-meaning adults minimize or delay racialized exploration, the child will struggle to move to the next stage in their necessary development. Tatum (2003) reminds us that preschool-age children are developmentally on target when they notice differences in how people look physically. Children are naturally curious, pointing out skin color or hair color and texture differences; this is developmentally appropriate and reflects their growing observational skills. TRA/ICA preschoolers need supportive teachers and school staff to validate and acknowledge racial differences and also need to recognize and intervene if actions move into discriminatory or bullying behavior, such as refusing to let a child be part of an activity based on race or adoption status.
Along with the developmental tasks that all children undertake, adopted children have additional developmental tasks to work through (Brodzinsky, Schechter, & Henig, 1993). For children and youth of color, the significant losses that led to their placement are necessarily racialized. Factors such as the loss of the first family or first culture and heritage complicate the developmental progression of children of color, particularly as they move beyond the preschool years and through adolescence (Brodzinsky, Smith, & Brodzinsky, 1998; Crook, 2000; Feagin & Sikes, 2006). Educators often experience the TRA/ICA student’s struggle with these developmental tasks through the child’s behaviors, particularly if these behaviors are challenging and externalized to the point at which they are interfering with learning for other children in the classroom. Adoptive parents may not know the extent to which these behaviors are occurring in the classroom, and they may not always understand that these behaviors can be connected to their child’s early preadoption experiences.
Many behaviors that present as problematic in the classroom and home stem from the survival skills that adopted children developed as a way to cope with their traumatic experiences. These behaviors might look like delays, regression, anxiety, oppositional attitudes, ADD, or ADHD. For example, an adoptive-sensitive educator working with a child who is acting clingy at age 8, in a way that doesn’t seem age-inappropriate, will consider whether this behavior is tied to the child’s multiple disruptions that interrupted or delayed the child’s development of trust and individuating from his nonadopted peers.
Although attachment disorder gets a lot of media attention and often is associated with adoption, educators should know that an adopted child who appears disconnected and angry with her parents may be quite capable of attachment and is acting out of fear of losing or being rejected by yet another family or parent figure. From a developmental standpoint, it makes sense that adoption in and of itself interferes with or interrupts typical development. When educators do not understand the additional complexities that TRA/ICA children are trying to manage, and how these complexities affect learning and performance in the school setting, they are much more likely to misdiagnose or misunderstand these children and their needs.
At the same time, it is essential to understand these differences without pathologizing the experience of being adopted—as if adopted children or adults are somehow permanently damaged in a way that sets them up as less than their nonadopted counterparts. Adults should understand that adoption results in normative crises (Pavao, 1998) that, in turn, predict that certain issues and trigger points are likely to be salient for the population, rather than viewing them as inherently or permanently damaged.
We suggest that adoption does not prevent development but rather may disrupt development in such a way that the child’s milestones may not match the child’s chronological age. For example, given that an infant’s task is to trust that his needs will be taken care of, imagine how the disruption of leaving his birth or first family for new caregivers affects the child’s current and future developmental tasks of trust and attachment. (The phrase “first parents” is being used increasingly as a way to refer respectfully to the people who brought an adopted child into the world; it acknowledges that throughout their lives they will never cease to be the individuals who created that child. Among some adopted individuals and families of origin, “birth parents” has come to signify a devaluation of their status to one strictly defined by biology and the moment of childbirth.) When children are institutionalized, neglected, or traumatized, they can get stuck developmentally at that particular age, yet too often we continue to hold expectations and discipline them as if they were older children, as if their development and chronological ages were identical (Schooler, Keefer Smalley, & Callahan., 2010; van Gulden, 2010). When milestones are not met, adults become frustrated and too often label the child as having a “problem.” Yet we would never expect a baby of 3 months to be able to crawl. Similarly, a child that did not learn to trust due to multiple disruptions of caregivers must continue to work on this task even as they reach the age when other children are working on individuating and autonomy.
Educators must understand that the adoption experience can be quite varied; how a child adopted as an infant at birth understands his or her experience will likely be very different than a child adopted at an older age. Children in open adoptions who are able to interact with their first or birth family may have a different perspective than those children who have no contact. Children adopted as toddlers and preschoolers will be adjusting to, at minimum, a transition between their birth or first family and their adoptive family, and many have experienced placement(s) in foster care or institutional care as well. These transitions mean becoming adjusted to everything that is new to them—new parents, new homes, new beds, new neighborhoods, new routines, new rules, new food, and often new schools and peers and friends. The magnitude of the stress associated with these transitions spills over into the classroom. Children are remarkably resilient, but a great deal of psychological energy must be devoted to the transition, so to expect them to be firmly attached or settled in the early stages of their transition is unrealistic. Even when children appear to be quickly acclimatized to a new family setting, it is useful to remember that their apparent connection to their new family is initially a survival reaction that requires time to develop into a firmly attached relationship.
Educators may see challenging behaviors at transition times such as arriving and settling into the classroom, saying goodbye to parents, preparing to leave at the end of the day, and transitioning between activities, classrooms, or teachers and staff. Remember that these children must focus on the tasks of connecting to their new family and environment during a time when they have experienced a lot of change and had little to no control over their situation, which may have included trauma, abuse, neglect, or institutionalization. As parents are likely to be managing these same behaviors at home, school staff and parents benefit from working together to find ways to manage transition-related behaviors.
Every year my son has a major meltdown at the end of the school year. While all his classmates and teachers plan end-of-the-year celebrations and field trips, my son is the one refusing to go to school, disrupting the classroom, and acting out against his friends and beloved teachers. It took me a few years to understand that this transition was actually traumatic for him; it meant the end of a relationship with a teacher he cared about, friends, and even a routine that he depended on. Before we adopted him, my son had experienced both the loss of his birth family and had been in many foster homes. Given all the losses in his young life, it is no wonder he saw the end of a school year as another round of people disappearing from his life.
Adoptive parent
Other developmental tasks that might be disrupted as a result of an adoption include issues around food or sleep during lunch, snack, or nap times. Children who have experienced food insecurity may hoard or steal food. Some children have had limited diets. Rigid attempts to control food or eating issues in school typically only reinforce the child’s fears of food scarcity or exacerbate a child’s unhealthy eating behaviors (Rowell, 2012). Being mindful that adopted children may have issues related to sleeping, and working with parents to develop strategies for managing them, is important in the context of younger children who still nap and also older children when asked to participate in sleep-away field trips or other overnight activities. Author and educator Jane Katch (2011) describes working with the parents of a child adopted from Russia to reduce problematic eating and napping issues in the classroom, including having two lunches from which the child could choose to eat, and setting the child’s nap cot closer to her friends so that when she woke up she was surrounded by familiar faces.
Many ICA children are adopted during the late infant through early preschool years, a critical period of language development. Their language development is interrupted as a result of their adoption and the transition to learning English. As a result, these children may have additional difficulties communicating because they are losing their ability to communicate in a first language that may not be fully developed, and yet they may not be able to understand English. In addition to affecting reading and writing skills (Dalen, 2002), relationship skills necessary for communicating with teachers and classmates are likely to be affected.
PRACTICE NOTES
Adoption may interrupt developmental tasks, including the following:
Ability to manage transition times in school including drop-off and pick up times, recess, lunch or snack, or change in classrooms or teachers Food issues during lunch or snack times, including stealing or hoarding food, refusing to eat, or developing unhealthy eating habits
Sleep issues, such as sleeping in class, disrupted nap participation
Language, writing, and communication skills
Peer group relationship management
Delayed behaviors that may be misinterpreted as oppositional or diagnosed as ADD/ADHD or anxiety rather than as residual coping mechanisms based on previous placements and early childhood experiences of trauma
Young children may have been told they were adopted, but that does not mean they have a full understanding of what adoption means. There are several critical developmental milestones in children’s progressive understanding of adoption (Brodzinsky et al., 1993). Around age 6 or 7 years old, children begin to understand cognitively that to gain their new (adoptive) family they must have lost another family (Brodzinsky et al., 1993). This understanding enables them by age 9 years old or so to think about their first or birth parents and to wonder whether their first or birth parents are thinking about them as well. In the middle school years and later in the teen years, children focus even more on why adoption happened to them. They are coming to grips with who they are, relative both to the family with whom they live and their first or birth family, about whom they may have little or overwhelmingly negative information (Brodzinsky et al., 1993). These realities present additional developmental challenges for TRA/ICA children that they must integrate along with all the developmental tasks that other nonadopted children of color are facing.
As adopted children begin to realize that to get their adoptive family they had to first lose another family, they may begin to recognize far more complex and sometimes buried feelings about adoption. Adoption is an “ambiguous loss.” Boss (2000) describes two different types of ambiguous loss: physical absence coupled with psychological presence, such as divorce, parent incarceration, soldiers missing in action, foster care, and adoption; and physical presence coupled with psychological absence. When the ambiguous loss is physical absence, the status of the “lost” person (such as a first or birth parent) is not known; yet the grieving person is thinking about and grieving for them on a regular basis. Boss points out that ambiguous loss is difficult to resolve because unlike when a death occurs, society does not have a familiar symbolic ritual for this type of loss; in addition the loss is not socially recognized or is kept hidden from others and the person suffering this loss is not acknowledged as grieving or is expected to “get over it.”
Adopted persons, including children, are often told they should be grateful for having such a wonderful adoptive family. Expectations to be grateful for an experience that also makes one feel sad can lead to feeling invalidated (Boss, 2000). According to Boss, “The greater the ambiguity surrounding one’s loss, the more difficult it is to master [the loss] and the greater one’s depression, anxiety and conflict” (p. 7). Adoption, which we are taught to think of as positive and happy, can create a huge amount of ambiguity for the child, who might struggle with their sad or grieving feelings that go unvalidated by parents or other adults or peers.
The awareness that it is different to be adopted deepens in middle childhood. Children are concrete thinkers and imagine themselves at the center of everything (Piaget & Inhelder, 1974). If something good happens, it is because they have been good. If something bad happens, it is their fault. Children of color adopted by white parents may decide that their skin color is the reason or at least part of the reason that their birth family did not parent them. A child with medical problems or learning disabilities might similarly think that their first or birth parents couldn’t take care of her because of her special needs. Even children who suffer the worst forms of abuse at the hands of their first or birth parents often believe that they were hurt because they were bad children. Managing their feelings about their first family and the (sometimes multiple) other placements they may have experienced before joining their adoptive family can interfere with engaging in school-related learning tasks. When a TRA/ICA child is struggling in school, in addition to an assessment for learning disabilities, parents and educators should consider these factors to ensure that they are not being misconstrued as inattention or lack of academic commitment.
Adolescence can be a tumultuous time for every child, but adopted youth of color must do a lot of extra psychological heavy lifting during their preteen and teen years. Normal adolescence involves a crisis in identity; adopted teenagers will face additional complications. “Tweens” and teens often express their reactions to loss by rebelling against parental standards. Knowing that they have a different origin may contribute to their need to define themselves autonomously. On the other hand, adopted adolescents may conform to others’ behavior, beliefs, or expectations, to fit in or out of a sense of guilt or responsibility to their adoptive parents. Peer group membership becomes of ultimate importance during adolescence. Because membership is signified by “being the same as,” TRA tweens and teens may have a more difficult time trying to figure out where they fit in.
According to Riley and Meeks (2005), despite being 2 percent of the overall teen population, adopted teenagers make up 5–17 percent of adolescents using mental health services in the United States. Adopted teens and their families require therapists and clinicians who are educated about their unique struggles. Riley and Meeks (2005) identified six common “stuck spots”:
• Reason for adoption: Adopted tweens and teens often have myriad feelings of unresolved grief about why they were placed. When adopted adolescents are flooded by feelings of uncertainty and rejection, they need to know that not everyone will leave them.
• Missing or difficult information: Teens often look for detailed facts about themselves and their first on birth family that may not be available or known, bringing up feelings about loss of control. This loss needs to be acknowledged and processed.
• Difference: Feeling different from peers in adolescence is a profoundly difficult experience and can affect a child’s sense of self-worth and security. This may play out in the context of racial and cultural differences when kids are adopted across racial lines and have grown up without a peer group of either other youth of color or other adoptees.
• Permanence: Tweens and teens who have already lost one set of parents may exhibit new anxiety reactions and behaviors relating to the possibility of losing their adoptive parents. This can manifest as misbehavior or testing behavior to see whether parents will let them go if their behavior is “bad” enough or result in kids who are afraid to leave the adoptive home. Others may struggle with retaining relationships because they consider themselves unworthy of long-term security.
• Identity: The questions of “who am I?” and “where did I come from?” are central to the adolescent adoptee. This often leads to increased interest in birth family search or connections, and for TRA/ICA youth, an increased focus on finding their place racially and culturally.
• Loyalty: Many adopted teens experience guilt about their interest in their birth parents, which they are afraid may hurt or upset their adoptive parents. Teens often need explicit permission from their adoptive parents to feel comfortable exploring feelings about and connections to their birth family; this can be complicated when the child is of a different race, ethnicity, or culture than their adoptive parents.
For adopted children of color, racial identity development can be especially intense and is made more complex by our society’s confusion between race and class. For TRA/ICA children raised in nondiverse schools and communities, several challenges exist: they must manage relationships with classmates and teachers who have uninformed or preconceived beliefs, biases, or ideas about their racial, ethnic, or cultural group; teachers and administrators may not recognize or respond to subtle or overt teasing and bullying based on race, ethnicity or culture; and a racially or culturally inappropriate or insensitive school culture often remains unchallenged.
Children raised in diverse communities have different challenges. They may feel pressure to join (or conversely experience rejection by) their racial, ethnic, and cultural peers. Teens in closed adoptions or without racial or ethnic mentors in their lives may actively seek people of their own race in the school or community without guidance on how to evaluate appropriate relationships within that community. Conversely, they may shun same-race peers because of fear of rejection or learned stereotypes about people of their heritage community. These issues of authenticity or clashing values can result in a child feeling isolated, and this in turn will likely affect that child’s academic performance.
We know that learning environments are far more successful when children see themselves reflected in their environment (Derman-Sparks & The A.B.C. Task Force, 1989) and that includes seeing and hearing reflections of their adoption and racial experience. Without these supports, children who still need to process their adoption experiences or racial identity will approach important school-age milestones in ways that teachers might attribute to lack of focus or learning disabilities. For this reason, it is essential that careful and professional assessments be conducted.
Race, Disability, and Special Education Issues
Without an understanding of the challenges the adopted child, birth family, and adoptive family can face, schools and other community institutions often, unwittingly, work against the best interests of adoptees and adoptive families. … All of the children who are adopted, or who are foster children, or who are in other complex family situations and working hard to make sense of these complexities, have emotional obstacles to dealing with these challenges and divided loyalties. This extra emotional work—what I would call a normative crisis under challenging circumstances—influences the learning styles of these children.
Joyce Maguire Pavao (1998)
Performance and behavior in school are often the impetus for a child’s referral for an assessment for a disability. In general, adopted children are more likely than nonadopted children to receive special education services (Brodzinsky & Steiger, 1991; Howard, Smith, & Ryan, 2004). Sometimes TRA/ICA children have preadoption experiences that include poor prenatal care, prematurity, low birth weight, prenatal exposure to alcohol or drugs, mentally ill birth parents, abuse, neglect, multiple placements, or institutionalization (Smith & Riley, 2006). McCarthy (2005) found that 40 percent of the 293 children adopted from Eastern European countries received special education services. In another study, 32 percent of ICA children and 40 percent of children adopted from foster care received special education services (Howard, Smith, & Ryan, 2004). These experiences may contribute to the child having a developmental delay or disability that requires additional educational support.
Children with disabilities experience discrimination and bias in the schools. The U.S. Department of Education (2014) found that children with disabilities were twice as likely to experience a suspension or expulsion compared with their nondisabled classmates. Students with disabilities are also subjected to the most severe forms of discipline, such as seclusion and physical and mechanical restraints, at much higher rates than their classmates without disabilities (U.S. Department of Education, 2014). The intersection of race and disability also matters, particularly for African American, American Indian, and multiracial children with disabilities, who are disproportionately suspended from school at rates higher than white children with disabilities (McFadden, Marsh, Price & Hwang, 1992; U.S. Department of Education, 2014).
The Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA) is the current law that ensures children with disabilities have access to quality, free, public education. IDEA specifies parents’ rights related to special education, which include the right to request an assessment; to be informed in writing whether the school initiates an assessment; to give or withhold approval for an evaluation; to obtain an independent evaluation; to be provided with copies of their child’s school records and to request corrections of incorrect information; and to file a complaint with the Office of Civil Rights if discrimination or misdiagnosis has occurred (National Learning Center for Disabilities, n.d.).
Unfortunately, educators can sometimes become defensive when parents feel the need to advocate for their children or raise questions about how a student is being treated related to his race, adoption status, or learning challenges. Children’s needs will be best served when administrators and teachers see adoptive parents as partners in supporting the TRA/ICA child. In an ideal world, schools would be supportive of parents who are pursuing the following strategies:
• Parents need to insert themselves into the school’s bureaucratic processes, which often are not set up to be inclusive to parents; it is essential to be educated about the rules and rights that govern the school system’s responsibility to educate your child, which might mean continuing to ensure success and advocate even after receiving multiple “no’s” from school staff or administrators.
• Parents should closely monitor their child’s performance in school. Maintaining records and periodically checking in with the child’s teachers beyond regularly scheduled conferences should be seen as a positive enhancement that will allow each to learn from the other as they sort out the multiple intersections likely to be influencing the TRA/ICA child’s educational progress.
• Parents should ask questions and be invited to clarify their beliefs regarding whether teachers are either minimizing or overemphasizing areas of need or concern, particularly as it relates to adoption histories and racial needs if those are not areas of expertise or extensive experience of the school staff.
• If a school is not responsive, parents should search for organizations locally and nationally that can provide guidance and help them understand their rights. National organizations include the National Center for Learning Disabilities (n.d.), which has great advice for parents about how to recognize and advocate for their children with learning differences or other special needs, and Wrightslaw (n.d.), which has information about special education law and advocacy for special needs children.
Teachers and other important adults can make a huge difference in how children perceive themselves and process the experience of having learning disabilities, special needs, or ADD and ADHD. When teachers and school administrators see TRA/ICA children in terms of their abilities rather than their disabilities, they can help the children see their learning issues within the context of their other differences without making assumptions that their learning issue is determined by their race or caused by their adoption.
My son never loved school but he sees himself as a learner. This is what my son wrote for one of his high school papers: “My personal challenge is that I have a learning difference called dyslexia. Dyslexia is a learning issue that affects how I learn but does NOT mean I am not as smart as anyone else. There are some big super-stars that have dyslexia like Thomas Edison and Danny Glover. I had to learn that I am as smart as anyone else in this world. Learning differently has made me patient because when you have a learning disorder you take longer to get some things than other kids, like multiplication facts. Frustration is one of the biggest things you’ll run into if you are teaching a kid with learning disabilities. I remember when I was younger that homework would only take my other classmates ten minutes and it would take me MUCH longer. I wouldn’t be able to go outside until my homework was all done. I would get so mad that they got to play and I didn’t. Sometimes you have to learn to fight for yourself because the people who are trying to help you under-estimate you. Sometimes I have to speak out and say, “This is too easy, can I please have something harder?” Overall I feel that I am a better, stronger person with more understanding of others who are challenged because of my own learning differences.
Beth Hall
INDIVIDUAL EDUCATOR INTERVENTIONS IN THE CLASSROOM
Part of what a child learns about in school is how the world operates beyond her own home. If he is lucky he is taught to search for commonality and to appreciate difference, first among his classmates and then in the wider community. As mentioned earlier, children who don’t see their lives reflected in their assignments and by their teachers may react in a number of ways: with anger, withdrawal, or noncompliance with the assignment. Ensuring that books and other learning materials represent a spectrum of human diversity, including positive portrayals of adoptive families, is critical. A diverse curriculum and classroom materials benefit TRA/ICA children by providing much-needed reflection and validation of their racial, ethnic, and cultural heritage and adoption identity, but it is equally important in normalizing diversity and difference for the white and nonadopted students, who otherwise are prone to assuming their own experience is “normal.”
We focus here are two areas of concern that can have a huge impact on the experience of transracially adopted children in schools: classroom assignments and school ecology or environment.
Classroom Assignments
One way that children are taught about the world and people around them is through assignments that focus on family and society. When these assignments are inclusive and respectful of many diverse family models, cultures, and racial groups, all children benefit. TRA/ICA students growing up in unique families especially benefit from seeing their families reflected as part of the spectrum of human experiences. Too often, however, these assignments are not sensitively designed and actually can undermine the well-being and sense of learning readiness for TRA/ICA children.
Most assignments can be modified to allow everyone to feel included while still reaping the benefits and meeting the learning goals. Usually, simply offering examples that give children options and choices will ensure that children and families from all kinds of backgrounds and histories can find at least one option that validates their own situation and gives them choices about what kind of personal information they wish to share.
FAMILY TREES
My daughter came home from her elementary school with a “family tree” assignment. It’s a form with boxes and circles that the kids are supposed to fill in: mom and dad, brothers and sisters, grandparents. When we suggested that she could use either our family or her birth family, either was okay with us, she ripped the paper in half and screamed with tears streaming down her face, “I hate school.” What are we doing wrong?
Pact client
Parents and educators are tasked with helping transracially adopted youth process and understand their feelings and also to be an ally in thinking about how to advocate for changes for children who don’t fit the “standard” family tree configuration. Parents can help children process their feelings by offering some of their own. “I keep thinking about all the different kinds of families that don’t fit into this kind of form. What about Jenny who lives with her mom and grandma, but doesn’t know her dad? How about Jimmy, who has two moms, how is he supposed to fill it in? And what about you and other adopted kids: they have two sets of parents and they shouldn’t feel like they have to choose. I like your teacher, but I don’t think this assignment is good for a lot of different kinds of families. What do you think?”
Wood and Ng (2001) recommend some alternative assignments teachers can assign:
• Draw a picture of the people in your life who love you and you consider family.
• Draw a picture of who lives in your home and what their relationship to you is.
• Create your loving tree or caring tree and tell something about each person that does something important for you or teaches you something.
• Create a kinship tree or genogram that shows people who you are related to genetically as well as those who are part of your family because you live with them or because you care about or take care of each other.
Personal Timelines and Birthdays
Our kindergarten daughter, who was born in China, joined our family when she was two years old. The first assignment of the school year turns out to be a ME board project in which the kids are supposed to tell the story of their birth and family through pictures and descriptions. What do we do?
Pact client
Many adoptees and foster children cannot complete an assignment that is based on their birthday, and that alone makes it inappropriate. Similar assignments include personal timelines or baby picture guessing games (particularly uncomfortable when a child’s photo is all too easy to guess because she or he is the only student of color). Many ICA and some TRA children know little if anything about the circumstances of their birth and often find it embarrassing if they are the only one to bring in a picture of themselves at age 2 years old or with an orphanage identification number when all the other kids have newborn or hospital photos. Celebrations or rituals on children’s birthdays can present challenges as well because some adopted children do not know the time, place, or date of their birth. Alternative assignments include:
• Ask kids to bring in pictures from “when they were younger”—ones they like or were taken on a day that was important to them. This gives them an opportunity to share what they choose. They can bring in something relatively recent without feeling like they can’t do what the teacher asked.
• Invite kids to create a “significant events in my life” timeline showing or describing five or ten chosen events. This way they can choose events that may or may not have anything to do with when they entered their family. Give examples like: “I learned to walk” or “I got a bicycle” or “I started school.”
• Celebrations are important so we urge teachers to work carefully with parents to understand whether there are any sensitivities about these issues among their students. Celebrations and rituals can be tailored to avoid pointing out difficulties or painful aspects. For a child who does not know his or her birth date, a teacher could find out whether the family knows what month the child was born in, and create celebration rituals for that class that focus on all the children’s birth months.
Mother’s Day and Father’s Day
For children who have more than one mother or father or are being raised by someone other than a parent, these celebrations can bring up circumstances (painful or simply private) they may not want to explore in the classroom setting. Alternative assignments could include having the child create something to give to a maternal or paternal figure or someone who is important to them or drawing a picture or writing something about someone in their life who has made a difference or taught them something.
Names
Adopted and foster children often are given different names by their birth parents and adoptive parents or are named by someone who is no longer in their life, such as in the case of many ICA children who were named at their orphanage. Alternatively, we suggest asking children to share their name and tell each other one thing they like or don’t like about their name or something about the meaning or history of their name in different cultures. It is fine to explore the meaning of names but that should not be confused with requiring children to reveal their personal naming history.
Cultural Holidays
Educators often point to particular holidays or “ethnic” study units that happen once a year or for a special occasion as a reflection of incorporating diversity. Unfortunately, this approach creates a kind of tourist curriculum that minimizes or treats them as exotic. For example, if the only element of a school’s curriculum that acknowledges a Latino tradition is a festival on Cinco de Mayo, the school’s implicit message to its students is that there is no other meaningful history, literature, or cultural celebration in Latino culture. To create a curriculum that is truly diverse means that multicultural awareness is not pushed to the periphery but rather emphasized within literature choices, in historical texts, in year-round school displays, and in daily classroom discussions. Truly diversifying the curriculum benefits not only those who belong to nondominant races or cultures but every child who needs to be prepared to live in a diverse world.
TEACHING RACIALLY CHARGED HISTORY OR CURRICULUM
Children understand that what is “important” is reflected in the books they are assigned to read and the history they are required to know and understand. Assess whether all of the “main characters” in a school’s textbooks are European in background, Christian, and born to their families. Does the curriculum include at its center the views of all the people affected and involved, such as African American, Japanese American, and Native American people, or does it include only a white, Euro-American point of view on topics such as slavery, World War II, Japanese internment, or Indian reservations.
When TRA/ICA children are in predominantly white schools or community, it is common for teachers to ask a TRA/ICA child to become the “poster child” for teaching moments related to their heritage. Although younger children may embrace the opportunity to share some of their racial, ethnic, or cultural heritage, older TRA/ICA children are often uncomfortable being singled out in this way. Older TRA/ICA children and adolescents must manage their racial identity development at the same time the curriculum becomes less celebratory about race and culture. Although curriculum may include sessions on slavery, the Civil War, and the civil rights movement, other historical experiences of people of color are often excluded or are given minimal inclusion. This can be an embarrassing and shameful time for adopted students of color. In predominantely white classrooms, TRA/ICA children and youth may be expected to be content experts or held to a higher standard of knowledge in these lessons; in addition, they may be asked to comment more in classroom discussions or represent “their people.” Confronted with curricula written from a predominantly white perspective and by white authors, the TRA/ICA student may come to believe that this partial or unbalanced information is the full story of her racial, ethnic, and cultural group; on the other hand, a TRA/ICA student who is well-educated on the topic may have critiques about the content or feel that the way it is being presented perpetuates racial, ethnic, or cultural stereotypes. In this situation, the student may feel unsafe expressing those concerns, given the power differential between a white teacher and a student of color.
One family we worked with, whose son was unprepared to interview his African American adoptive parents because he knew that his birth family was Ethiopian, came up with the idea of writing a paper on international adoption in general. He interviewed several adult and teen adoptees regarding their thoughts and feelings on the subject so that he didn’t have to reveal his own personal story. Another student wrote a very personal narrative that included interviews with her birth family, but was allowed to make a video of her presentation that was only viewed by her teacher instead of the whole class because of the student´s desire to keep some of the information private.
Beth Hall
Whatever the solution, parents and teachers must be children’s allies in recognizing and acknowledging the child’s frustration and anger about being asked to explore unresolved identity issues in front of their classmates. Helping them find a workaround that allows them to pass their classes is important, but even more important is creating classroom and school environments that anticipate such issues and offer assignments that do not precipitate these crises in the first place.
SCHOOL ECOLOGY AND ENVIRONMENT
Early in first grade at my daughter’s school, each child is given a special day when she gets to help the teacher in prominent ways and make important choices (like who gets to stand first in line). Classmates interview the child of the day, and the teacher records the answers on a big poster. My daughter was the first of two adopted children in her class to have a special day, and inevitably questions about adoption came up—although, the teacher reported, they were afterthoughts. The class had just finished interviewing my daughter, and the teacher was about to move on, when a classmate asked, “Weren’t you adopted?”
I got a message from the teacher that afternoon saying that adoption had come up and that my daughter had handled the situation with confidence and pride. The teacher then read to the class a book called Families Are Different. In it a girl adopted transracially from Korea talks about her white parents, her Korean sister, and the occasional discomfort of being different from other families. But she looks around the neighborhood and notices that while in some families everyone looks alike (even the dog), in others there are many differences. All families, she concludes, are held together “by a special kind of glue called love.”
I was glad the teacher had read the book, and I was gratified to hear that my daughter had enjoyed her special day. So I was surprised, when I picked up my daughter that afternoon, to see her looking sad. It turns out that the interview was fine. She had enjoyed talking about herself and didn’t mind the questions about adoption. She loved the book and was pleased that her teacher had read it aloud. But there was still a problem.
One child had asked if the two adopted girls in Families Are Different were real sisters. And the teacher had answered, “They’re kind of sisters.” It’s possible that no one except my daughter picked up on the subtext of that answer. But some kids catch all the nuances when grownups talk about adoption. Mine has her radar fine-tuned. She heard that the teacher wasn’t sure just how “real” those sisters were. My daughter doesn’t have a sibling, but she has adopted friends who do. Weren’t Betty and Zoe real sisters, she asked?
I explained that sometimes grownups not in adoptive families aren’t always good at answering questions about adoption. What’s confusing, I explained, is that before Zoe was adopted, she and Betty weren’t sisters, but that from the moment of adoption on, they were sisters forever. And by the way, would she like me to come talk to the class about adoption next week?
Amy Klatzkin, How I Explained Adoption to the First Grade, Adoptive Families Magazine
Children perform better in school when they feel their families are supported in the ecology that is their school. Solomon (1976) argues that oppressive habitats in schools and neighborhoods carry negative valuations on the people and children who inhabit them, creating “an overriding sense of one’s powerlessness to direct one’s own life.” Students who experience acceptance at school are more highly motivated, engaged in learning, and committed to school (Osterman, 2000). Students in schools that have a greater sense of community are more academically motivated and have higher educational aspirations (Bryk & Driscoll, 1998; Solomon et al., 2000) and are also more likely to develop social and emotional competencies and enjoy school more (Schaps, Battistich, & Solomon, 1997). More recently, educators have been looking at how schools must create welcoming environments to serve diverse populations:
When asking students to explore issues of personal and social identity, teachers must provide safe spaces where students are seen, valued, cared for and respected. Teachers can show they value students’ lives and identities in a variety of ways. Some are small, like taking the time to learn the proper pronunciation of every student’s name or getting to know young people’s families. Others require more time and investment, like building curriculum around personal narratives or incorporating identity-based responses into the study of texts. At the community level, it is important to understand neighborhood demographics, strengths, concerns, conflicts and challenges.
Critical Practices for Anti-Bias Education
It is therefore critical to increase family involvement and teach respect for diversity both within the school and in the world beyond so all students and families feel safe and welcomed. To create a welcoming and inclusive school environment, staff and teachers can begin by understanding each child’s unique family structure in the following ways:
• Asking what children call each parent and caregiver or guardian and using that language with the child and when referring to their family.
• Consulting parents or children to see whether they are open to sharing how they talk about their family, including how it was formed and who is part of their family.
• Being careful not to “out” a student as being adopted (or fostered) or a different race than their parents, unless they or their parents share this information themselves.
• Ensuring that assumptions or biases about people based on racial or ethnic group are explicitly challenged and talked about as wrong in the classroom and throughout the school by those with power (teachers and administrators).
• Making sure that institutional language and policies are inclusive. School forms should be inclusive of all kinds of caregivers and are not gender-specific, eliminating distinction between “kinds” of parents or guardians. Letters should be addressed to all family members or caregivers rather than specifying “mother and father.”
• Developing a robust antibias, antibullying policy that includes plans and policy for addressing specific problems as they arise. Children and youth report being bullied about both family structure and race.
• Funding trainings for teachers and staff about how to support adopted and foster children and their families, as well as families of color, and then moving beyond those two categories as separate experiences to understand how they intersect in the lives of transracially adopted children.
Transracial adoptive families benefit when a school is welcoming to families of all races and economic backgrounds. An inclusive school works to diversify and empower its own staff; showcases all students’ unique talents; holds events for parents and caregivers at times when those who work can attend; provides childcare so single parents can participate; uses multiple communication methods to stay in touch with families; invites and is responsive to parents’ input; offers a wide variety of ways to get involved in the school community, and doesn’t make fundraising the sole focus on parental involvement.
Triggering language becomes a barrier for children and parents in recognizing allies. As mentioned earlier, adoptive and foster parents respond to the use of the term “real parent” or “real brother or sister” negatively. Adopted and fostered people have at least two sets of parents, adoptive and first or birth—more if you include former foster parents, and they can all be “real” to the child and parents. Similarly triggering is “biological child” versus adopted child. All people—whether adopted or not—are born, which means they all are biological beings. For this reason we suggest avoiding the term “biological” to describe children who are not adopted.
Sometimes educators, particularly those who are white, state they “don’t see color” or race. However well intentioned, this attitude minimizes the reality that significant racial disparities still exist in our society. As Samuels (2009) reminds us, colorblind models serve to deny the experience of people of color and the legacy of racism on which this country was founded. To “see color” is actually part of seeing people for who they are, just as we see gender or eye color. In the absence of a proactive approach regarding race and adoption, education will support the status quo. Unless schools provide children with the tools they need to talk about bias and difference, children will assume that their schools approve of the biases children perceive in the world. A school’s failure to discuss differences will imply to students of color that their school, in some sense, “approves” of bias against them. For white children, the implication will be that bias and prejudice is okay and not something with which they need to concern themselves.
Multicultural education may sound straightforward, but it has multiple interpretations. It is challenging to establish priorities regarding learning about one another’s history, lifestyles, contributions, traditions, attitudes, and how (or how much) schools should reflect the world’s diversity. To become truly multicultural, schools must incorporate diversity and acceptance of difference into the core curriculum through books and materials being used as well as through the active pursuit of an antibias mind-set (Scharf, 2013). Schools can consider having affinity groups for diverse families, which can promote connections based on shared experiences.
Increasingly, the thought is to move institutions, including schools, beyond the goal of diversity to embrace the goals of equity and inclusion. Equity means fairness whereas diversity is variety. One can have diversity without achieving equity or inclusion. An equity approach to education recognizes that different people have different needs and therefore designs programs to fit different populations differently to address each individual or group’s needs. To achieve equity, schools must build in equity assessments explicitly; otherwise, they are likely to be subject to implicit bias, whether recognized or not. Schools that already consider equity (not diversity) a high priority are likely to be able to apply the same standards to the situation of transracial and intercountry adoption. Race Forward (2014) has identified equity goals to create a successful school community: (1) build in decision-making guides that take equity for underserved or underrepresented constituencies into consideration; (2) foster active engagement and empowerment of stakeholders; (3) give distinct, specific, and sufficient attention to key disparities and inequities; (4) support and implement strategies to remove barriers; and (5) systematically analyze potential impacts of disadvantaged groups. Studies conducted on schools that have employed such strategies have documented that these principles are in fact effective, creating schoolwide change through individual teacher education and focus on equity goals (Deshmukh Towery, Oliveri, & Gidney, 2007).
Schools are a great place to start challenging institutional racism, because they are community based. The “racial achievement gap” (Gregory, Skiba, & Noguera, 2010) is often a reflection of a resource gap, where unequal inputs yield unequal outcomes. Parents, teachers, and administrators can intervene by asking questions, talking with students about their experiences, requesting public documents, organizing parents, talking to elected officials, notifying the media, and taking public action. White allies do not have to wait for people of color to complain before taking action. White allies can be change agents and agitators, by speaking out when something’s wrong. As Hall and Steinberg (2013) advocate, all children need to know that the following:
• Heroes come from every race and ethnicity and include adopted people. Ensure your school and classroom includes literature, images, and real-life examples that embody this principle. Adopted children of color need heroic role models that reflect them.
• White middle-class America is not the measure against which all other lifestyles must be compared. Do not tolerate an environment in which mainstream or normal means “white.” No child should ever be held out as the one “example” of their race, either in their classroom or community.
• Race matters. Adoption matters. We are a race-conscious, adoptist society and children deserve and need guidance to learn how to negotiate that reality. Children also deserve the opportunity to become who they want to be based on what is inside them, not on their physical appearance or origins. Freedom of opportunity can emerge only when we teach students to evaluate history from more than one point of view, holding multiple viewpoints without emphasizing one as better than another.
CONCLUSION
A review of the literature on adoption and education tells us that very little work has been done to establish evidence-based practice regarding the service and support of TRA/ICA and their families in the schools. This review suggests that topics of transracial and intercountry adoption are missing from teacher education programs and curriculum and highlights the lack of rigorous research on the impact of teacher knowledge or classroom ecology on the educational outcomes for TRA/ICA students.
Teachers are guides, leading students from the known to the unknown, from ignorance to wisdom, from the past to the future. To a child the teacher is the world, the embodiment of knowledge. Twenty-first-century teachers stand before classes far more complex than those of their counterparts a generation ago. Dramatic social changes call on teachers to be ever more sensitive to the needs of diverse populations, which must include transracially and internationally adopted youth. Clearly with the ever-growing numbers of these children in the school system, this research is essential to allow educators to have benchmarks and guidelines for how best to serve the TRA/ICA constituency.
We offer the following suggestions for what educators and schools can do to become TRA/ICA-competent as well as some pointers that agencies can offer to families to help them make decisions and assessments about the schools their children attend:
• A diverse population of students, families, faculty, and administration. We have seen that children with complex needs do best in schools that already are well versed in working with complex families. This means creating environments inclusive of many kinds of families, including multiracial and nontraditionally formed families. School communities that focus on serving monolithic communities often struggle to create a welcoming environment for nontraditional families, increasing the likelihood TRA/ICA children might experience bullying or rejection by their peers or educators.
• Successful students with various gifts and challenges. Diversity is not the only or ultimate goal; schools need to be striving for equity for all their students, particularly for students who have differing needs and experiences. Pay attention to attrition rates for students of color or students with special education needs. It is not enough for schools to focus on the recruitment of students of color; there needs to be equal emphasis on the retention of students of color. If the graduating class consists of students of various races, family constellations, and special needs all graduating with honors and accolades, the school likely has directed resources toward supporting and strengthening students with different gifts and challenges.
• Curriculum that includes specific as well as embedded TRA/ICA-sensitive lessons. Faculty and administrations open to hearing from experts within the adoption community about the sensitivities of adopted children and their needs will create adoption-sensitive educators who incorporate adoption content and resources into the curriculum, highlight visibility of TRA/ICA families in the materials and books students use, and modify curriculum that is particularly sensitive to TRA/ICA issues in such a way that is inclusive of all kinds of families.
• Teachers are trained to respond to students’ questions and concerns using respectful language and educated explanations of transracial and international adoption. Generally, school administrators determine the in-service education offered to teachers. TRA/ICA children should not have to hope they receive an individual teacher educated to their needs. An adoption-sensitive school includes administrators who recognize the importance of a staff well educated on transracial and intercountry adoption.
• A school environment in which students with different capacities and challenges are valued equally. Special needs children sometimes are seen as a drain on educational resources, and these kinds of schools are not likely to be supportive of the special needs that often are associated with adopted children whether they are expressed in terms of educational, emotional, or behavioral challenges.
Furthermore, we call on the research community to prioritize research on transracial and intercountry adoption, particularly for research that promotes evidence-based teaching strategies and interventions that inform and lead to adoption-competent practices in the school. To start, there is a need for data that would help build an adoption-competent education workforce, including: understanding how teacher or administrator attitudes toward transracial and intercountry adoption shape school and classroom ecology as well as TRA/ICA student outcomes; the impact of adoption-sensitive curriculum on TRA/ICA students; classroom instruction methods that educators implement for adopted children with histories of early deprivation, developmental delay, or trauma; and how teachers mediate and intervene in TRA/ICA-related bullying or discrimination of TRA/ICA students by peers. In particular, little is known about the extent to which educators receive TRA/ICA-specific information or teaching strategies in their undergraduate or graduate curricula or continuing education through trainings or conference sessions. Much more information on the depth and breadth of TRA/ICA content in teacher education is needed.
PRACTICE HIGHLIGHTS
Educators and classroom environments play a crucial role in the development of a child, influencing and shaping all aspects of a child’s trajectory in ways that go far beyond grades and performance outcomes. When a child knows and believes that the teachers and school staff understand his or her family, this adds to a feeling of safety at his or her school, which in turn leads to a more successful learning environment for that child. When teaches and staff model language and attitudes for other students, they are helping to create an environment that feels better for children in all kinds of different family structures because they see that differences are seen as “normal” and “okay.” In a transracial-adoption-sensitive school, every adult—the principal, teachers, specialists, lunch staff, bus monitors, custodians, and paraprofessionals—play a critical role, sharing responsibility for all of the students by listening to their experience and creating sensitive and inclusive curriculum and environments that will support them as full members of their school community. When this happens, the children’s learning and growth is optimized.
DISCUSSION QUESTIONS
1. This chapter presented a number of typical assignments that can be triggering or difficult for children with transracial and intercountry adoption histories. What additional classroom assignments might pose difficulties for transracial and intercountry adopted children and youth, and how could those be adapted to be more inclusive?
2. What are ways that school administrators and staff could create a welcoming and adoption-sensitive environment for transracial and intercountry adoptive students and families?
3. In this chapter, we presented the ways in which allies who do not share firsthand experience with adoption or as a person of color can act as allies to transracial and intercountry adopted children and their families in school environments. What are some ideas that this chapter has given you that might be implemented in your school?
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