Transracial Adoption Support Systems Scarce Despite Difficulties

From NBC News:

Catherine Johnston and her husband Paul were living in Oakland, California, when they decided to adopt a child, choosing to adopt from China in part because Paul's family had come from the country. Assuring the Chinese adoption officials that their extended family would provide an ethnically and culturally familiar home back in Oakland put them on the fast track to adoption.

While the exact terms were never spelled out for Johnston, adoption wait times from China for parents with Chinese heritage tend to be a year shorter, and studies have shown that children growing up in an ethnically and culturally-familiar home struggle less with their own ethnic identity.

Johnston, who is white and an adoptee, credits Paul's family for allowing her daughter to grow up avoiding many of those challenges.

"I think I always knew that it is better for the children to be in a same-race environment, and we could provide that," Johnston, who brought her daughter home in 2008, told NBC News. "My daughter is very identified as a Chinese person, and she doesn't seem to have any qualms about that."

Families adopting transracially — when the child and parents are of different races — may immerse the child in the parents' culture while failing to expose them to their own ethnic heritage, leading to a struggle with identity as the child grows and are treated as an outsider.

"Children of color have been historically underserved in adoption and foster care, and it plays out in a number of ways," Beth Hall, executive director and co-founder of Pact, a transracial adoption support organization based in California, told NBC News. "Many of those kids who are placed with white families may or may not understand the contextual meaning of being a person of color in America."

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