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Although parents may struggle to navigate raising a child with a different racial identity, transracial adoption can be deeply harmful to the adopted child and their sibling(s) if parents do not acknowledge racial identity, racism, and plan for future conversations surrounding both topics. Randall and Kevin have a poor relationship and fight often because Rebecca and Jack failed to facilitate a conversation about race and racism between the siblings.

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Kevin's Sense of Self Impacted by Randall 

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Kevin's Sense of Self Impacted by Randall 

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During their night out, Kevin admits to Randall that growing up he felt Randall was privileged with special treatment by Rebecca because of his background as a black child adopted into a white family. This is especially apparent in Kevin's negative reaction to a black man replacing him as The Manny. Perhaps, this is why Kevin seems so attention-seeking at times and craves being in the spotlight. His desire to be recognized has lead to resentment towards Randall and a thirst for external validation, attention, and recognition. Kevin feels threatened by Randall's blackness because (although Randall was subjected to bullying and alienation) Kevin associates Randall's racial identity with preferential treatment from Rebecca. He associates Randall's unique identity to attention and love failing to take into account the discrimination Randall has dealt with his entire life.

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Randall's Sense of Self Impacted by Kevin

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Randall's Sense of Self Impacted by Kevin

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Randall admits that he was indeed given preferential treatment by Rebecca but that ultimately, he NEEDED it because he was not receiving external acceptance, love, or affection from any other source: not Kevin, not Kate, not from friends or classmates at school, and not from his biological parents who he struggled with feeling abandoned by. Kevin's whiteness represents privilege, popularity, and unconditional acceptance into white society. This likely explains Randall's intense desire to compete with Kevin because he feels driven to prove himself in an environment where he is constantly discriminated against for his racial identity.

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Abigail Scott, a Chinese adoptee, shares her experiences. 

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Abigail Scott, a Chinese adoptee, shares her experiences. 

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“I think every adoptee inevitably is going to go through a period where the shock of race is real,” she says. “It can happen when you’re 8 or 13 or 28. And when you’re really depressed and feel really different you don’t want to hear love is enough. That’s b—s— because I wouldn’t be feeling like this if that were true.” The best thing Scott’s mother did, she says, was to listen to her pain, rather than dismiss her with excuses or denials, and love her through it unconditionally.

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Karen Valby is a writer who lives in Austin, Texas. She and her husband, who are white, have two adopted daughters, one Ethiopian and one African- American.
Robyn Wells believed she went into the adoption of her Ethiopian son with eyes wide open. She and her husband Timothy, a police officer and Army veteran, who served two tours in Iraq and one in Afghanistan, brought Ben home when he was four years old. The Wells are white and live in Champaign, Illinois, a multi-cultural Big Ten university town and have gone to some effort to create a diverse environment for their son and three biological daughters. Wells knew that raising a black son wouldn't always be easy. "I figured I'd have to explain some name-calling, have hard talks about language, navigate the waters when somebody's parent won't let my son take their daughter to prom," she says. "But what I have been surprised by is this: At no point in the process of considering transracial adoption did I think I would have to teach my son how to stay alive."

First, she says of her awakening, there was the shooting of Trayvon Martin in 2012. At the time Ben was a 6-year-old boy who had just learned to ride his bike after only two trips up and down the driveway with his father running alongside him. "It was awful," says Wells, "but I thought-as every white privileged parent wants to think-maybe this is an isolated incident." As events quickly proved, it was not.

Many families struggle with the question Wells is facing: how do white adoptive parents help their children of color thrive? Today, more than 40% of adoptions are transracial in nature according to a recent survey from the Department of Health and Human Services. This is up from 28% in 2004. Transracial adoption has become a common enough sight in celebrity tabloids that since my husband and I adopted our two daughters (a 1-year old Ethiopian in 2009 and a newborn African-American last October), we have endured many unfunny jokes about being on trend.

In our own adoption training I mostly remember sitting in our agency's room with other prospective white parents nibbling on fruit and cheese, listening to white people talk about race. The main takeaways were either aesthetic in nature, about the practicalities of black hair and skin care, or hopelessly broad.

On the advice of an African American friend Wells has chosen to start having some hard conversations with her now 8-year-old son Ben, even though she does it in the car so that he doesn't have to see her tears. Her insistence on these talks has created friction with her police officer husband, Timothy who explained by email that his job as Ben's father is "to raise Ben to be a good man... The other part of my job is to balance my wife's education. I don't want Ben to ever be afraid of police or to ask for their help."

So what can parents do? "When I meet adoptive parents I tell them to look to my era to what didn't work," says Chad Goller-Sojourner, 43, a Seattle-based black author and playwright who was adopted by white parents and who is working on a book that is half memoir and half training exercises for adoptive parents. "If you imagine my parents, they were the ones who got the box of Ikea furniture with no directions in Swedish or English. Today you can get the box and have the video and step-by-step instructions in different languages."

There tends to be a dispiriting response to stories of transracial adoption-particularly when adoptees dare share feelings of ambivalence or pain-that adoptees should be grateful, considering the alternatives. But to suggest that they should pipe down because they didn't languish in foster care or an orphanage is to deny the idea that every child deserves the best possible home with a family who is willing and prepared to meet their needs.

In the spirit of searching for better instructions, I interviewed adoptees ranging in age from their 20s to their 50s. From my many conversations, it became clear that we adoptive parents too often choose to delude ourselves with four comforting but dangerous myths.
Myth 1: Color doesn't matter
"Parents who believe they can raise their child color-blind are making a terrible mistake," says Korean adoptee Mark Hagland, a 54-year-old journalist and adoption literacy advocate. "And it's shocking how many people I meet still think this way. If there's a single thing I can share with white adoptive parents [it's to] look at the adult adoptees who have committed suicide, or who have substance abuse problems. Love was not enough for them."

Part of loving your child is seeing and loving the color of her skin-and accepting the reality that she will likely be painfully pigeonholed sometime in her life because of it. Abigail Scott, 21, is a Chinese adoptee who grew up with her single mother in what she calls the bubble of Berkeley, California. Her mother did many smart things to foster her only daughter's connection to the land of her birth. She was active in the organization Families of Children from China. She and her daughter returned to China for a two-week trip when Scott was 12. She encouraged her daughter to apply for Chinese mentorship programs at UCal, though Scott resisted because growing up she found herself increasingly disinterested in exploring her Chinese culture.

Scott says she never told herself that she wanted to be white, but always felt atypically Chinese. She was a muscular lacrosse player who loved being tan. She told her mother never to buy her anything Hello Kitty. She's only attracted to white boys and the majority of her friends were white. When she and her mother went to large family functions, Scott remembers noticing that everyone else in the room was white except her. "But they were all family so I didn't feel ostracized or different," she says.

When she announced that she'd chosen Boulder, Colorado, for college some friends expressed concern. "People told me 'Boulder? Whoa, that's really white,'" she says. "But I just thought 'Oh, you see who I've grown up with, it's not going to matter."

At one of her first fraternity parties, a drunk white boy sidled up to her and asked her about her foreign exchange program. People assumed she wasn't American, that she was a nerd, that her only concern was math homework-and Scott tumbled into a depression. "Maybe it was my insecurities," she says. "I'm not positive everyone thought I was weird for being Asian, or wasn't cool for not being blonde, but I couldn't have been imagining all of it. I'd never felt so Chinese. It was the first time it became apparent to me that I'm a certain race and people have expectations around that."

After a year of making tearful phone calls home to her heartbroken mother Scott transferred and landed more happily at Loyola Marymount in Los Angeles where she is majoring in sociology. She accepts for now that she is confusingly adrift between her American and Chinese identities.

"I think every adoptee inevitably is going to go through a period where the shock of race is real," she says. "It can happen when you're 8 or 13 or 28. And when you're really depressed and feel really different you don't want to hear love is enough. That's b-s- because I wouldn't be feeling like this if that were true." The best thing Scott's mother did, she says, was to listen to her pain, rather than dismiss her with excuses or denials, and love her through it unconditionally.
Myth 2: If I talk to my kids about race, I'm just creating an issue
When I tell Hagland, who is a co-moderator on the closed Facebook group TRA (a Transracial Adoption community comprised of adoptive parents, adult adoptees and birth parents) that many adoptive parents, including me, feel tremendous anxiety around introducing concepts of racism to their children he is kind but emphatic. "May I please nuclear bomb that for you?" he says. "It's inevitable that your black children will be called the N word. It's inevitable that they will be othered for being black. So if you prepare them for that you are helping them." He's well-used to adoptive parents' hand-wringing, which often masks a great fear of inadequacy and powerlessness, on the subject. "Are you not going to teach your child how to cross the street?" he asks. " 'I could never talk about being hit by a car because then my child would fear it.' Well guess what? Part of your role as a parent is teaching your child how to safely cross the street."

Alex Landau, a 25-year-old from Denver, remembers his first racial encounter. He was four years old, an African-American boy scuffling with a white boy on a Denver playground. "And he said 'Not all white kids like to play with black kids,'" remembers Landau. "I didn't know the gravity of what he was saying, and I don't think he even fully knew what he was saying. But I just knew that my skin was different and I had no control over that." As Landau struggled to make sense of his hurt he remembers his white adoptive mother Patsy Hathaway careening into the picture. "My mom came out of left field, grabbed him by the arm, and said 'You don't talk to my son that way. You need to leave!' and kicked him out of a public park."

But for the most part, race was never a conversation in their home. Patsy loved her son fiercely, and didn't think much of the fact that he was the only black kid in his high school graduating class. Meanwhile Landau spent much of his adolescence gelling his hair straight and wearing long sleeves and pants in the summer to cover up his dark skin. When he left home for college, his dad, who comes from a long line of Denver policemen, never gave him the talk-a tradition in many African-American homes-about how to have self preserving interactions with police and other authority figures. "I think my parents were under the impression that we were living in this post-racial era where police were not racially profiling," says Landau.

In 2009 Landau, then 19, was driving in Denver with a white friend in the passenger seat. Cops pulled him over and the officer accused Landau of making an illegal left turn. Landau was hauled out of his car and patted down. "There were three officers there, I was comfortable putting my arms out to the side and asking to see a warrant before they continued searching my car," he says. "I'm not in handcuffs, I'm not being detained, there's nothing wrong. We should be able to talk as people. And then immediately I had my world changed."

The officers grabbed Landau and started hitting him in the face. When he came to, his blood was all over the grass and he couldn't see out of his right eye. "'Where's your warrant now, you f-ing n--?" were the first words he says he heard upon regaining consciousness. When Hathaway arrived at the city jail and saw her son's brutalized face her world changed forever too.

Although the policemen were cleared of misconduct in an internal review (they said they thought Landau was reaching for one of the officers' guns), in 2011 Landau was awarded a $795,000 settlement from the City of Denver. Two of the police officers who attacked him were later fired for unrelated uses of excessive force. Today Landau is the Racial Justice Organizer at the Colorado Progressive Coalition and he and his mother are working on a book about transracial adoption and the patterns and practices of police abuse in Denver. "I know my mother wishes she could have had the insight herself to prepare me for the ugly realities that can occur," he says. "She demonstrates her sorrow and her eagerness to learn through her activism and her connection to the work I'm doing. She's just soaking it all up like a sponge left and right." [For tips on what she's learned click here]

Together they hope to help spare future transracial families the ordeal of that night. "The best thing you can do is prepare your child because the last thing you want to do is visit your child in jail with 45 stitches in his face and have your whole worldview blown apart," says Landau, who recalls the most painful part of this experience as seeing his mother crumble when she saw him in jail. "It was the first time I cried. I was just devastated. So I would strongly advise that parents do not have this sheltered mindset and be open to the narrative of folks who actually live this experience day to day."
Myth 3: No matter what, a "good" school is the best thing for a child
You can celebrate Kwanzaa. You can learn how to twist and box braid your daughter's hair. You can make #BlackLivesMatter your Facebook profile picture. But for many white adoptive parents, the act of raising kids in a diverse environment is too hard, or too inconvenient, or too easy to trade off for better schools or safer neighborhoods.

This despite a 2008 report from the Evan B. Donaldson Adoption Institute, an adoption research and policy organization, that reaffirmed that "black children had a greater sense of racial pride when their parents acknowledged racial identity, moved to integrated neighborhoods, and provided African American role models." The report also found that black kids whose white parents minimized the importance of racial identity became reluctant to identify themselves racially.

"I can't tell you how often I hear white adoptive parents say 'Well, we don't have anything around. We live in a rural community. The closest black person is three hours away,'" says Goller-Sojourner, the playwright. "People will fly across the country for a job. If their kid is a track star they'll find the best school district for that before they even call the realtor. There's something about transracial adoption where people won't find a way to work it out."

Goller-Sojourner's parents sent him to a diverse school in a Seattle suburb up until the fifth grade when they were denied their transfer waiver and he went to a new school where he was one of two black kids of color in the fifth grade. "From day one I was racially attacked and that continued for years," he says. "It only takes one or two people calling you a n-- to stick. The difference is that when a black person is called a racially charged name, they go home and get the love and support from parents who look like them. I went home and got that same love from people who looked just like my tormentors. This was the beginning of trying to figure white people out. Who are the good ones? Who are the bad ones? How do I know?"

Growing up, he was surrounded by white culture. His parents listened to Lawrence Welk during dinner. His mother watched Masterpiece Theater and All My Children. They vacationed in Montana. He doesn't remember a black person ever being invited into his house.

"What happens when a black kid only has a white identity and then goes out into the world?" he asks. Goller-Sojourner developed tricks for attaching himself to his parents' whiteness. In stores he would yell out "Hey Mom, can I get this?" when he got sick of feeling watched and followed. When he left for college, he stuck a wallet-sized photo of his Norwegian-American parents behind his identification so cops would see the picture when he was asked to pull out his license on bogus traffic stops. "I'm not the black person you think I am," he remembers wanting to assert. "I wanted people to know that up front because, one, I didn't want to die, and, two, this is a weird thing, but transracial adoptees want to put white people at ease."

It was only when Goller-Sojourner transferred to New York City's Hunter College that he painfully started building for himself an authentic racial identity. "It was the first time I found my reflection pleasing and I found it reflected back to me in a lot of different ways," he says. "I was never the only black person in a room again."

Today Goller-Sojourner wants to spare future generations of adoptees his long winter of self-hatred. Which means when he meets with adoptive parents he shoots down what he sees as a transparent resistance to diversity. "When you transracially adopt you no longer get to use the term 'good school,'" he says. "That term is meant for white parents with white children, based on good test scores and real estate value. I went to a 'good school.' But when your child gets called a n-- you don't get to call that a good school anymore.

Advocates for diversity at least want adoptive parents to admit it's often their own anxiety over the very idea that's stopping them. "If you admit that it would be uncomfortable for you to move, to go to a black church, or do your grocery shopping on the other side of town," says Goller-Sojourner, "then I say, if somebody is going to be uncomfortable better you than the children."
Myth 4: You are the hero of your child's story
There's an impulse in the adoption conversation to paint the parent as savior-propelled by biblical verse or humanitarian instinct-who swoops in and saves the child. Unfortunately, for this identity to stick, there needs to be someone in need of rescuing. That's a lousy burden for a child.

In Jane Jeong Trenka's memoir The Language of Blood, the author describes how the burden of reflexive gratitude can cripple an adoptee's emotional growth. Neighbors in her all white conservative Minnesota town loved to remind her how very lucky she and her sister were that their German Lutheran parents rescued them from Korea. Her parents called her "chosen," a verbal tic that made the author feel like a sale item from a department store. Any questions or fantasies about her birth mother seemed like a betrayal of their gift of family. How can one build an authentic relationship of love and trust with a person to whom you've been made to feel you owe an unpayable debt? "For the adoptee the imposition of forced gratitude is emotionally crippling," says Hagland.

It's possible that there's a flip side to this impulse to be a savior. Parents think that if we love our child ferociously enough and do all the right things, we can rescue our beautiful children from a reality we find incomprehensible. We can keep at bay any sense of confusion or discomfort a child of color might feel growing up around a dining room table with family members who don't know the conspicuousness and vulnerability of being brown in a white world. But what if it's the wrong fight?

"The concept of the perfect checklist for an adoptive parent is void," says Joy Lieberthal Rho, a Korean adoptee and social worker with 15 years experience in the adoption field. "There is nothing simple about adoption. If we accept that understanding adoption, race and identity is on a developmental continuum over an adoptee's entire lifetime, then we see that an adoptee's work is never done but evolving."

Rho's friend and colleague Martha Crawford, a psychotherapist and adoptive mother of two Korean children, agrees. "White adoptive parents are often deeply concerned about being either, one, the only 'real' set of parents to their children or, two, worried about doing it right. Both are attempts to ensure that their adopted child won't experience any challenges related to being a person of color, or related to being an adoptee. This is an absolutely unrealistic and impossible task," she says. "It is, in my view, an adoptive parent's job to be a sturdy scaffold for kids to do their own work, not to tell them how to construct their identities."

Our children's stories are unique and ever unfolding, messily, beautifully, painfully. A parent can act with agency in crucial ways-change neighborhoods, find mentors, file for school transfers, get steeped in the varied experiences from the ever-growing library of adoptee narratives-but perhaps the adoptive parent's harder role is simply to bear a humble and compassionate witness. Allow your child her story, whatever it may be.

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The Realities of Raising a Kid of a Different Race

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An in-depth look at the myths of transracial adoption

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This same article discusses the importance of surrounding children with an education and community that affirms their racial identity. 

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This same article discusses the importance of surrounding children with an education and community that affirms their racial identity. 

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"This despite a 2008 report from the Evan B. Donaldson Adoption Institute, an adoption research and policy organization, that reaffirmed that “black children had a greater sense of racial pride when their parents acknowledged racial identity, moved to integrated neighborhoods, and provided African American role models.” The report also found that black kids whose white parents minimized the importance of racial identity became reluctant to identify themselves racially."

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Transracially adopted youth are also very affected by white siblings’ attitudes toward race and willingness to fight racism. Ideally, every white family member should become “transracialized,” a term coined by Dr. John Raible, Assistant Professor of Diversity and Curriculum Studies at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. Transracialization occurs when, through immersion in a multicultural lifestyle, white people get comfortable with diverse populations, recognize racism, and support and defend family members of color.

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The North American Council on Adoptable Children

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When I ask children in my Adoption Playshop sessions what they like best and least about their family, their answers reflect the importance of sibling relationships-real, imagined, yearned for, or lived-at-a-distance. They speak of siblings with affection, sadness, anger, longing, resentment, envy, gratitude, guilt, or bitterness.

No matter what they share, it is clear that sibling relationships fundamentally affect the children's sense of self, their self-assurance or insecurity, and other crucial aspects of their life's journey. As parents and caring professionals, we must carefully consider and address sibling issues that enhance and complicate the lives of children in adoptive families.

Sibling Issues in Adoptive Families

Parents and siblings may assign polarized roles among children in a family, so that different children are known as the good, bad, smart, athletic, introverted, or outgoing one in the family. These designated roles may influence how parents regard and treat each child, how children see themselves, and how siblings interact.

When older children join a new family, they bring along predetermined self-concepts and beliefs that shape their expectations of new parents and siblings. When a sibling group is adopted and must mesh with a pre-existing sibling group, these imposed characteristics, beliefs, and ways of interacting will influence how the children relate to one another and whether they get along or clash.

Adopted children with un- or under-treated mental health issues, or other issues from their past, can have troubling behavior that severely erodes the family's quality of life. Other children in the family who become targets of the troubled sibling may need professional help to cope with and find ways to support and help a brother or sister who steals or destroys their belongings, has violent outbursts, publicly embarrasses them, or claims an unequal portion of parental time and attention.

Non-adopted siblings in my groups are initially guarded, but express themselves with more intensity once they realize others are empathetically listening to them-an uncommon happening for many. They and their adopted siblings speak of the frequent need to defend the authenticity of their sibling relatedness in public venues like school. Yet, even as they do so, some still harbor questions about whether blood is thicker than water-questions that parents should anticipate and address.

Siblings who are separated in care and placed or adopted separately often reveal how important birth connections are. They value chances to visit and talk with birth siblings, and proudly show off photos of and gifts from them. At the same time, while separated siblings may wonder and speculate about why they couldn't be placed together, they rarely voice concerns or theories for fear of upsetting their parents or losing the chance to maintain birth family ties.

Siblings who are adopted together usually talk about how great it is to have one another. They may be the only recorders of specific chapters in their history. Some who have comforted, protected, or depended upon one another during times of crisis, however, may find it harder to integrate into a new family. One sibling pair, for example, cared for their dying parents in Ethiopia and survived together until being found and taken to an orphanage. The special bond they developed kept them from feeling as close to new siblings, and from being able to trust and rely on their adoptive parents.

Addressing Sibling Issues

Without skilled and sensitive prompting, most youngsters rarely reveal to themselves or others (including parents) what they truly think, feel, and believe about adoption-related matters. Sibling issues and concerns may be similarly kept under wraps. In the interest of children who are members of the same family, parents can offer meaningful sibling support.

Below are some suggestions:

Create and use a family journal. I encourage parents to construct a journal that the family works on once a week. Everyone takes part by responding to a question or quote or a fill-in-the-blank statement that will spark an open dialogue about family dynamics, establish a foundation for problem-solving, or allow everyone a chance to be heard. Discussions about sibling relationships and concerns should be included regularly.

Seek therapeutic help for serious sibling and family conflicts. When one especially troubled child traumatizes other children in the family, professional intervention may be needed. In these situations, it is crucial that sibling conflicts be addressed in psychotherapy sessions. If therapy can uncover the thinking and emotions driving the conflict, solutions are easier to identify and healing can begin. Over time, if the troubled youth is helped to better manage her emotions and behavior, a lasting sibling connection can develop.

Make certain each child gets individual attention and affection. Non-adopted or less outwardly troubled adoptees may feel resentful and marginalized when a sibling monopolizes parental attention. For children who were not adopted or do not have the "right" cultural heritage, adoption and cultural events may intensify feelings of being undervalued and relegated to the periphery. Parents, adoption professionals, and adoptive family organizations should focus on meeting these youngsters' needs too-actions that promote healthier sibling relationships.

Model and promote open communication. Many children become less communicative as they get older, and those adopted from foster care may find it hard to verbalize their thoughts and feelings. To nurture more honest, open communication, parents must practice active listening and tune in to the emotional content of children's words and actions. Structured family meetings should demonstrate and encourage respectful information sharing and problem solving. Written notes, e-mail, and text messaging can help youth who would rather type than talk.

Provide chances for your children to interact with similarly situated peers. Children with whom I have worked in group sessions are immensely relieved to learn that other youngsters' experiences are similar to their own, and that they are "normal." By observing and interacting with other children in adoptive families, children pick up knowledge that can help them to better navigate life as an adopted person. Within the safety of like-minded and experienced peer groups, children can also develop strategies for resisting racism, adoptism, xenophobia, and other types of intolerance.

Addressing Issues in Multicultural Families

Some white children in transracial adoptive families speak of being the "vanilla kids" in whom no one seems interested (thankfully, on one hand, and hurtfully on the other). They worry that peers and adults are too interested in their siblings' pre-adoption history, and feel sympathy over their siblings' exposure to negative, intrusive comments and questions from strangers or acquaintances.

Most children express resentment when parents promote their internationally adopted siblings' heritage, but ignore other children's ancestries. Others demonstrate an avid interest in their siblings' cultural heritage, but only because they secretly fear they will lose their parents' approval if they don't. Only as adults reworking their sibling relationships-if they do-might they realize that their adopted siblings disliked and resented this imbalance as much as they did.

Transracially adopted youth are also very affected by white siblings' attitudes toward race and willingness to fight racism. Ideally, every white family member should become "transracialized," a term coined by Dr. John Raible, Assistant Professor of Diversity and Curriculum Studies at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. Transracialization occurs when, through immersion in a multicultural lifestyle, white people get comfortable with diverse populations, recognize racism, and support and defend family members of color.

If your family has members who were transracially adopted:

Encourage everyone in your family to participate in adoption education events and multiracial and multicultural adoptive family organizations. Children seem to benefit more when they participate in multiracial and multicultural groups whose participants were adopted domestically and internationally and have different life stories. Under the Kid Code of "I'll tell if you tell," children are more likely to divulge information about themselves and their experiences when their curiosity is piqued by peers whose life path is or has been markedly different. Group members are often surprised to learn that, while race matters, children in same-race families and those placed transracially have shared thoughts, questions, feelings, beliefs, and fantasies about adoption. They are curious about and empathetic with non-adopted siblings who share their challenges and vulnerabilities. In turn, non-adopted children learn a great deal about adoptees' challenges-knowledge that helps them feel closer to and better support their siblings. Parents also benefit from learning that they too have much in common with other adoptive families, and can connect with families to acquire the skills and strategies they need to raise their children. Adoptive family networks can yield new family connections and youth kinships with members of other families that are enriching for everyone involved.

Facilitate transracially adopted children's connection with members of their birth race and culture. Provided they have access to and are encouraged to build same-race social relationships, transracially adopted children benefit from closeness to members of their same-race peer groups. Through these friendships, children of color can debunk stereotypes, socialize without fear of being ambushed by racism, and hone their individual and collective strengths. It is imperative that adoptive parents consider how to foster these connections early and often.

Make your family culturally competent. Everyone in a multicultural family fares better when white members truly understand how people of color experience life. White children who ally with their siblings to resist racism can also pave the way for closer lifelong relationships. Because discrimination can be hard on the whole family, parents must coach all their children about the realities of racism, and help them to develop coping strategies that can be reinforced within adoption-related support groups.

When we think about sisters and brothers, the image of close birth family kinship often comes to mind. Siblings who are related by law but not birth, though, can also develop close and enduring connections. By nurturing and working to meet each child's needs, promoting honest communication, and giving children opportunities to interact with other adoptees, non-adopted siblings, and cultural resources, parents can do much to cement enduring sibling bonds within their adoptive families.

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Adoption & Sibling Relationships: What Children Have Taught Me

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When I ask children in my Adoption Playshop sessions what they like best and least about their family, their answers reflect the importance of sibling relationships-real, imagined, yearned for, or lived-at-a-distance. They speak of siblings with affection, sadness, anger, longing, resentment, envy, gratitude, guilt,

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Rebecca's preferential treatment of Randall was a tool for Rebecca to navigate her own guilt and despair as a white woman with a son facing persistent discrimination in their town. Had Rebecca taken ownership of the situation by acknowledging race and privilege, Randall and Kevin may not have fought and competed with each other as intensely as they did.