Helping teachers understand adoption at Anti-Racist Parent - for parents committed to raising children with an anti-racist outlook

Helping teachers understand adoption

by Anti-Racist Parent columnist Margie Perscheid, originally published at Third Mom

My approach was to keep it simple – both because as a former teacher I knew that my children’s teachers would have limited time to spend reading the packet, but also (truth be told) because I didn’t get my best ideas until the kids were in high school.

My packet had two things in it: a copy of a little book, now out of print but available used, called When Friends Ask About Adoption by Linda Bothun. Adoption language has changed since this book first came out in 1989, but at that time (the year our son arrived) it was considered a good resource for helping others understand the adoption experience.

I annotated my copies with notes clarifying how my family addressed many of the topics – openness, adoption language, etc. There are many new books available not that will accomplish the same thing, but what was nice about this one was its size – short and sweet.

In the absence of something, you might scout the net for fact sheets that provide similar information and include them instead. There’s one on the Child Welfare Information Gateway: Explaining Adoption to Your Children, Family and Friends. It could be a good foundation for a personalized information sheet. I’m sure there are many more like this out there, too.

I also included another little booklet, A Teacher’s Guide to Adoption, also out of print. However, there are other excellent resources out there. The Center for Adoption Support and Education (C.A.S.E.) has a terrific guide called S.A.F.E. at School, which can be purchased at their website. Based on five principles, Acceptance, Accuracy, Assignments, Assistance, and Advocacy, S.A.F.E. at School provides information that will help teachers create a respectful environment for our children.

If I had it to do over again, I would have added a few other things, too:

A list of adoption resources: In the eighteen years since we adopted, the internet has exploded with information about adoption. Wading through it to find the good stuff is hard enough for those of us who are living adoption. Giving teachers links to reputable, ethical organizations and accurate information will help them find answers when they need them. So I would include a list of organizations, websites, books, etc. that my children’s teachers could keep handy, copy, and share.

A primer on family diversity: In the U.S., we tend to think of diversity in terms of race. But there’s diversity in every aspect of our lives, including family structure and history, adoption being just one of them. I would include something to heighten their awareness of this, including suggestions for alternative family history assignments. The Family Diversity Projects website offers articles, suggested books, and sample projects, and is a wonderful resource for all of us, not just educators.

One thing we DON’T want to do is give teachers the impression that individual children should be singled out for alternative assignments. New kinds of assignments that teach awareness and respect for diversity while teaching the lesson should be the goal.

Margie Perscheid is the adoptive mother of two Korean teens. She is a co-founder of Korean Focus, an organization for families with children from Korea with chapters across the country. Margie is on the Board of Directors of the Korean American Coalition DC Chapter, a former board member of KAAN, the Korean YMCA of Greater Washington (now KAYA), and ASIA (Adoption Service Information Agency). Margie writes about her intercountry adoption experiences at Third Mom. She, her husband Ralf, and their two children live in Alexandria, Virginia.

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How to Be an Anti-Racist Parent at Adopted The Movie on 10 Sep 2007 at 5:24 pm

[…] Carmen Van Kerckhove, co-founder and president of the anti-racism training company New Demographic, writes for two of our favorite blogs, Racialicious and Anti-Racist Parent. Today, she sent us these five tips for parents. We think it’s a must-read. Be sure to visit Anti-Racist Parent to download the free 11-page e-booklet "How to Be an Anti-Racist Parent: Real-Life Parents Share Real-Life Tips." And, don’t miss today’s post on helping teachers understand adoption. […]

Comments

Jenna wrote:

Again, this is fine and dandy. But all of this information offers little hope or resource for first families who have to make the decision to discuss their parented child’s placed sibling with their teachers or not, how to word it so that it is properly understood and how to field questions. They don’t make manuals for biological families. There are no resources for us.

If we don’t discuss it with the teacher, we run the risk of our child being called a liar for discussing his sibling. When we do, we subject ourselves to judgment and ridicule which, UNFORTUNATELY, is also passed on to the child too many times to count.

This topic, in general, makes me want to home school.

Posted 10 Sep 2007 at 12:31 pm ¶
kim wrote:

Jenna…

What is a “parented child’s placed sibling?”

If it is as I can parse from the unfamiliar wording, why would this be up for public discussion?

Posted 11 Sep 2007 at 5:54 pm ¶
Lyonside wrote:

I think Jenna is talking about situations where via open adoption or closed adoption, one child in a birth family has been adopted, and the younger (assumedly, but not necessarily) sibling knows about this other sibling who doesnt’ live with the family.

So if the child talks about the other sibling, and the teacher/students know the family well enough to know that there are only X number of kids in the household, that could cause problems.

I’m honestly not sure how often this happens, but I’d hope a teacher would respond non-judgementally, just as s/he would towards a child with siblings in foster care, or half-siblings living in another household.

I was raised as an only child, and to my mother, I am an only child. But i do have older half-siblings. Occassionally I would mention them, or my nephews, in school, and get some puzzled looks, but when I said that they were half-siblings and older, that neutralized the situation. There need to be accurate, compassionate, neutral terms for the birth families’ various situations, true - as Kim pointed out, “parented child’s placed sibling” is going to be pretty confusing for the average grade-schooler.

Posted 12 Sep 2007 at 9:25 am ¶
Margie wrote:

Jenna, this is a really good point, one that I don’t have an answer for, from personal experience or from the literature or resources I’m aware of.

But the moment I read your comment, that entire dynamic became clear. I wrote this post with adoptive parents as the audience - we need to think about this very same subject with everyone involved in adoption in mind.

Thank you for raising this point - it’s huge!!

Posted 17 Sep 2007 at 7:23 am ¶
kim wrote:

I don’t know about this, and I say this hesitantly and with a truly measured dose of self-preservation and protection in mind.

As concerns Jenna’s statement, and Lyonside’s follow-up, I would have to question the sensitivity elicited in the teacher/acquaintance/administrator upon hearing that one’s sibling (or child) is in foster care. I think the level of judgmental thinking that goes on there is not very different from what happens when one learns that a neighbor has been detained, or arrested, for an immoral act of some kind.

The label sticks.

I also do not see the situations of adoption and foster-care as analogous to having half-siblings.

In this society, and this ties in with the discussion in Jae Ran’s thread where she questions the disruption or dissolution of adoption through voluntary termination of parental rights: the idea that a child was not with its birth family signals in many people, even in this age of open and publicly discussed adoption, the suggestion that something was “wrong” with the child, or with the birth family.

So, too, with children placed in foster care, and, I would suggest, so, too, with the situation around knowing a child has a “placed sibling” with another family.

The hesitancy comes with my concern over, (and this is me, woman and mother, talking to another woman and mother) the reasons the conversation is being had, and the expectations of the speaker. Are there expectations of sympathy, even empathy where it resonates, or … tenderness toward a plight?

Are there expectations of a sensitive, open ear to an anger, resentment, regret, or injustice that still needs to be expressed?

Is it public discussion to keep alive the emotional lines and ties that a geographic and/or legal distance prevent from being made manifest? ( I can imagine that this could be part of it.) How does it serve the sibling at home to engage and interact in these discussions? Who does it serve?

How is it served?

Posted 17 Sep 2007 at 11:39 am ¶