Adoption

Unfortunately, many adoptive parents and adopted children become accustomed to hearing and witnessing “microaggressions.”

These seemingly unintentional or offhand slights imply a child’s adopted status (or a parent’s adoptive status) – or race or culture – indicates some form of inferiority. Individually or in aggregate, microaggressions can be withering.

All members of the extended family of adoption (adoptee, adoptive parents, birth parents) are likely to experience microaggressions based upon the fact that they’re “named” in adoption. These often occur in person and sometimes in the media, such as on TV shows and movies.

For example, it’s common for adoptees to hear comments suggesting that they should be grateful to have been adopted (thus minimizing their loss), and there are all sorts of descriptions of adoptive families that imply they’re somehow less legitimate than biological ones. Similarly, birth mothers – and sometimes other members of their families – are frequently the subjects of negative stereotypes, stigma, shame and verbal slights.

Being confronted with microaggressions, particularly when they come regularly, can chip away at self-esteem and be traumatizing; it can be especially painful to watch a loved one (e.g., child or parent) try to handle these affronts. Below are examples of microaggressions that are both common and deeply hurtful. They can come from friends, relatives, co-workers, strangers and, of course, in depictions of adoption and its participants in news and entertainment media.

There’s little data on how best to prepare your family for adoption-oriented microaggressions, but most experts believe talking at an early age with your children about the issues they may confront is a good idea and can help dismantle the stigma of secrecy by normalizing adoption.

In the data below, adoptees’ quality-of-life scores are broken down by the age at which they learned they were adopted (corrected for coping mechanisms available at each age).

Many experts agree that, as adopted children grow up, they face complex questions around identity and loss. Receiving support and therapy from an early age can help children build a “scaffolding” for wrestling with these questions in a healthy way.

Children of color can be subjected to hundreds of microaggressions per month (English, Journal of Applied Developmental Psychology), irrespective of whether they’re adopted. That means children of color who are adopted, particularly by white parents, get the double whammy of being taunted or demeaned both for their race and the way they entered their family.

It’s the responsibility of all parents to help their children develop and maintain healthy self-esteem, and part of that challenge is to teach them how to handle these intentional and unintentional slights.

However, since 40% of US adoptions are “transracial,” many adoptive parents have little first-hand experience dealing with the sensitive subject of discrimination against racial minorities, let alone guiding their children on how to handle it.

To address the subject, many experts favor two powerful tools: “cultural socialization” and educating children about the biases they are likely to face (sometimes called “preparation for bias training”). There is data showing a corroboration between those tools and improvements in children’s self-esteem, sense of identity, and ability to cope.