Midwest Adoption Conference

Today I attended the 13th annual Midwest Adoption Conference with the hopes of doing some networking and continuing my education about issues related to transracial international adoption. I have to say that I was extremely impressed with how well organized this conference was, and I am definitely planning to attend next year's conference as well.

I came away with a lot of interesting information that I'm certain will occupy my mind for at least the next few days. One of the things that resonated most with me was a statement made by the Keynote Speaker Barbara Tremitiere, the adoptive mother of 13 children, and biological mother of 3. She said that we need to change our perceptions of adoption so we understand that adoption is a way for a child whose first parents cannot or will not parent them to have a family. She then made the point that any other expectation puts tremendous pressure upon the child.

I took this to mean that as adoptive families, we need to be aware of the needs we hope our children will fill, so that we are able to cope if and when our children are unable to meet those needs. Again, we need to keep in mind that they have had no control over the process of adoption that has brought them to our families. She also mentioned that children rarely attach to parents the way that we attach to them. We need to maintain our awareness that these little people have already experienced tremendous loss in their short lives, and we need to give them the time and space to grieve those losses and heal so that forward movement is possible.

Other workshops that I attended included a discussion of specific issues and obstacles that children of mixed race identity are likely to face in their lives. I found one of the more interesting points in this presentation to be the idea that parents have a responsibility to help their children understand both the risks and the rewards associated with publically claiming their heritage. Ultimately the most successful children from multiracial and multicultural families are the ones who learn to navigate across racial lines within societal systems. As parents, we are charged with validating our children's feelings, advocating for them, and equiping them with the skills to become strong, proud children of colour. We need to give oour children explicit permission to explore their understanding of their cultural and racial identity, as well as provide them with opportunities to engage in that exploration.

I also want to speak to the idea that transracial families hold a very unique position in our society. At some point in their lives, our children will probably realize that the way they are treated when they are with their (in our case) white parents is different from how they are treated when they are apart from us. We will always see them as our children, but society at large will eventually see them as black men and women, and we must take the time to prepare them for the implications of this label. This is precicely why it is so critical to provide our children with positive role models from within their culture -- to mitigate the devastating effects that cultural isolation can have upon a child's self-esteem and to give our children concrete examples of how to transition from children to adolescents to adults.

Finally, another extremely important point was made about attuning ourselves to the distinction between segregation and sanctuary. One of my favourite books is "Why are all the Black kids sitting together in the Cafeteria?" by Beverly Tatum. There is an incredible amount of information distilled within the pages of that book, but essentially I think that we all need to consider what our presence within a group does to change the dynamics of that group. Sometimes we are welcome, and other times our presence may mean that others' freedom to express themselves becomes stifled. As adoptive parents, we need to accept that our children may decide to involve themselves in communities that do not involve or include us, and we need to be okay with that because it is what they need in order to define their own identities.