let's learn about adoption.

I don't have any super interesting/funny stories about life in the Farm today, but a new adoption study by the Evan B. Donaldson Adoption Institute came out!  Whoo-hoo, right?  I'm too lazy to do all the linking myself, so I will just direct you to this super blog and you can find it all there.  The things I was most interested to see confirmed in this report?  (I say confirmed, because those of us who spent a huge amount of time thinking about and reading articles by adults who were adopted already knew all this.)

 

That most transracial adoptees considered themselves White or wanted to be White as children. - This. Is. Huge.  White adoptive parents in general are not doing enough to instill a strong sense of racial pride in their children of color.  Society doesn't help the cause though, which is why we need to be supervigilant to set them up with what they need.  Love isn't enough!

                            

That positive racial/ethnic identity development is most effectively facilitated by "lived" experiences such as travel to native country, racially diverse schools, and role models from their same race/ethnicity. - Um...duh.  How is this new information?  I personally am pushing my clients more and more to demonstrate how they are going to do this before they are approved to adopt transracially.  It should be a given.

 

And

                                 

That contact with birth relatives, according to the White respondents, is the most helpful factor in achieving a positive adoptive identity - Thankfully more and more people are open to having fully open adoptions these days.  I know it isn't always the adoptive family's choice however, so let me just say again how blessed I am have Sasha and Alexis' birth families in our lives.

Now...pass it on!