Here’s a list of ideal traits for individuals or couples that are open to transracial adoption.
In reviewing the book Transracial Adoption and Foster Care: Practical Issues for Professionals, by Joseph Crumbley, we came across an interesting resource for prospective adoptive parents that are contemplating their openness to transracial adoption.
The Minnesota Department of Health and Human Services’ Worker Assessment Guide for Families Adopting Transracially and Cross-Culturally identifies several capabilities that are desirable in parents who with to adopt cross culturally or transracially:
- They have a sense of their own values and attitudes about the racial and cultural differences of others and of how their attitudes and values were formed.
- They have an understanding of why and how racism, prejudice, and discrimination exist and operate and how to counteract their existence and effects.
- They have the ability to attach and empathize with a child of a different racial, socioeconomic, and cultural origin.
- They have the capacity to provide the child with positive racial and cultural experiences and information.
- They have the ability to prepare the child for reentry and reconnection with their racial and cultural community.
- They reside in a community that provides the child with same-race adults, peer relationships, and role models.
- They have the capacity to incorporate and participate in cross-cultural and racial activities.
- They acknowledge that the family becomes an interracial family following the child’s membership.
- They have the capacity, skills, and tolerance needed to appropriately manage people’s responses (i.e., prejudice and discrimination) to them as an interracial and transracial adoptive family.
- They have the willingness and capacity to develop the skills and implement the tasks necessary in developing a child’s positive cultural and racial identity.
- They have the interests, skills, and resources to meet the child’s dietary, skin, hair, and health needs.
- They appreciate the child’s differences in racial, cultural, and family origin, while simultaneously meeting the need for “full membership” in the family.