Creating a Family: Talk about Adoption & Foster Care

How Do Teachers Understand Adoption (and What Can Parents Do About It?)

July 20, 2022 Creating a Family Season 16 Episode 29
Creating a Family: Talk about Adoption & Foster Care
How Do Teachers Understand Adoption (and What Can Parents Do About It?)
Show Notes Transcript

What do teachers know about adoption? What are the misperceptions? We talk with two researchers on this topic: Dr. Hal Grotevant, the Rudd Family Foundation Chair in Psychology at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, and Dr. Abbie Goldberg, a Professor of Psychology and current Director of Women’s & Gender Studies at Clark University.

In this episode, we cover:

  • How knowledgeable were teachers in understanding the impact of trauma?
  • How knowledgeable were teachers in understanding the impact of attachment?
  • How knowledgeable were teachers in understanding the impact of adoption?
  • How knowledgeable were teacher sin understanding the impact of prenatal exposure?
  • Was there a perception that adopted kids were “troubled”?
  • What did they know about open adoption?
  • How accepting were teachers to the idea of modifying assignments to reflect diverse families, including those formed by adoption?
  • Do teachers know whether kids are adopted? Do they need to know? Do they feel comfortable asking this information?
  • Did teachers present lessons that included the diversity that adoption represents?
  • Does teacher training, either formal or in-service training, often include information on adoption?
  • What can parents do to help their child’s teacher be more adoption-aware or adoption-sensitive?
  • Where can listeners get more information on your research?
    • The “Teachers and Adopted Children” Survey and the Factsheet for Teacher can be found here.

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Please pardon any errors, this is an automated transcript.
0:00  
Welcome, everyone to Creating a Family talk about adoption and foster care. I'm Dawn Davenport. I am both the host of the show as well as the director of the nonprofit, creating a family.org. Today we're going to be talking about how do teachers understand adoption? And the underlying thing here is what can what can we as parents do about it? We will be talking with Dr. Abby Goldberg. She is a professor of psychology and the current director of Women's and Gender Studies at Clark University. Her research and writing focus is on diverse families including LGBTQ plus parents and adoptive parents. And she has authored and edited eight books and over 140 peer reviewed articles in this area. We will also be talking with Dr. Hal Grotevant. He holds the red Family Foundation chair in psychology at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, and he is the founding director of the rapid adoption research program. He is the principal investigator on the Minnesota Texas adoption research project, which is a longitudinal research study that focuses on the consequences of variations and openness and adoption arrangements for all members of the adoption kinship network. And for those people who are longtime listeners of this show, they know that I am a huge fan of that research, and quoted frequently. So welcome Dr. Grotevant and Dr. Goldberg to creating a family. We are so happy to have you.

1:31  
Thanks so much. Thank you.

1:33  
I should also add that Dr. Grotevant is on the board of creating a family and we are so honored to have his guidance and and helping us do what we do. This topic came up because it's a survey that the two of you collaborated on the teacher and adopted children survey. It was completed in 2021, in collaboration with the the Ron adoption research program at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. And it was done to better understand K through 12 Teachers experience with adopted children. And I'm curious about the collaboration because I think it's interesting, as I understand it, Dr. Goldberg was a visiting professor, he had a visiting professorship at the red adoption research program. Dr. Goldberg, is that right? So you were there working under this visiting professorship? Yeah,

2:24  
virtually because it was it was during COVID times. But yeah, this was, of course. But yeah, a lot of how and I had an interest in better understanding the relationship between schools and families. And then I had done some work that looked at families experiences with schools and the kinds of challenges that they faced. And we were interested in getting more insight into the perspective of teachers, so we could better you know, support everybody and helping kids.

2:52  
Curiosity. Dr. Grover, what direct? What made you interested in this topic of teachers, in particular, the teachers understanding of and perception of adopted of adopted children?

3:07  
Well, you know, over the years, both in our research and just in making presentations to the community, and so on, a lot of times, I'd be talking with adoptive parents, and the topic of schools would come up, you know, the challenges that they might be facing in, in the schools where their children were learning, sometimes challenged with school personnel who didn't seem to get it who didn't seem to really understand it option, or who made assumptions about that. And one of the missions of our program of our adoption research program is to do outreach to the community and kind of make the research that's been done available in a broader kind of way. And we have made a number of kind of preliminary forays into doing that, and in the area of education, but wanted to be able to do it more systematically. And like Abby was saying, we do know more about how parents view schools and teachers, but we really haven't heard much from the teachers themselves. So the visiting professorship seemed an ideal opportunity to bring Abby Abby into this kind of opportunity and discussion. And we had a wonderful period of several months where we were, you know, doing focus groups doing surveys, writing articles, writing fact sheets, and so on.

4:30  
Yeah, that makes Yeah, that makes great sense. And it's a great topic. It's honestly one that I probably wouldn't have thought of, but I found that I found the results quite interesting. So let's jump into them. Dr. Goldberg, how knowledgeable let's just start with the basics. how knowledgeable were teachers in understanding the impact of start with trauma, understanding the impacts of trauma? Let's start with that.

4:54  
Yeah, so we asked teachers about a different board At different domains, including trauma, you know, how much do you know about this? Did you learn about it during your educational training or during professional development. And we found that only 30%, about 30% had actually learned about adoption and trauma as part of their teacher training, or as part of their educational training. And a lot of them said that they learned about it kind of on the job, you know, through working with different families. But again, you know, many of them were starting out, you know, two thirds of them more than two thirds, we're starting out with very little understanding of the connection between trauma and an adoption or, and trauma, of course, is a huge word that,

5:39  
yeah, I was gonna ask, did you make a distinction between? That was the question I was going to ask because trauma, and trauma informed schools and trauma, it seems like trauma has become, I worry almost it's become too much of a buzzword that it's losing. Its the impact of its meaning. But that's a whole nother discussion. But it did do Dr. Core Advantage you distinguish between trauma and adoption? Are? Did you just keep it? Or did you just talk about adoption and the impact of the trauma that may result from that?

6:10  
Well, I mean, we were asking, I mean, the entire survey was really about adoption and adopted children. And within that, we asked questions about trauma experience, attachment experiences, and different things like that. But you know, one thing that I think people sometimes don't kind of think about completely is that trauma is such a broad kind of umbrella and a broad topic. And the children who've adopted may experience trauma to different degrees. And, you know, if, if anything comes out of our discussion today, I want to really underscore the idea that there are great individual differences among adopted children. And that, even though here we're talking about adopted children, in school settings, and with teachers, and so on, even so you could take a dozen adopted children in a particular school, and they might have had very different experiences, and be functioning in very different ways.

7:08  
And it's such a good point. And you know, the other thing that I thought we find, we run a really large support group. And when people and it's we have a lot of triad members. And when people are discussing adoption, one of the things that comes up is that there are distinctions there, there are different types of adoption. And the impact of adoption is different, or can be different. Let's put it that way, if you were adopted as an infant, and you are being raised in an open adoption, versus being adopted as a 12 year old after having experienced significant abuse and neglect. So anyway, I'm thankful that you're making that point, because I, I think it's a very valid one. And even

7:47  
I think the the variability within is often, you know, as bigger or greater than the variability between in terms of types of adoption. And right now, I'm running focus groups with, you know, folks, many of whom, who adopted infants in the context of private adoptions, and they're really struggling. And I think, you know, they had an assumption that things would be, you know, quote, unquote, you know, so much easier. For Newborn versus adopted through foster care adopted an older child, and they're saying, you know, we're kind of testimony to the fact that things can be really hard. And sometimes it's really unpredictable. And sometimes you have partial information, and you don't have complete information. And it's really hard to know what you're going to, you know, be experiencing when five years or 10 years or 15 years. And some kids, you know, have more challenges than others.

8:39  
Hmm, that's such a good point. That is a really good point. And that kind of raises a question that I had that I don't know, that you covered in, in your survey, and that is the impact of prenatal exposure. I'm not sure that's exactly what you were referring to when you said sometimes you don't have complete information. But we certainly know that a very high percentage of children in the statistics vary, but it can be up to 80%, depending on who you're talking to, or what research we're looking at, have children who are coming from foster care have had some form of prenatal exposure. We don't know or I haven't seen this statistic for infant adoption. And same with international I think it really varies greatly, depending on what country but but we know that they are higher. So was that what you were referring to so much of the information you don't know? Is that what you were referring to? are indigenous survey touch upon the knowledge of teachers about the impact of prenatal exposure?

9:35  
I mean, I'll just speak to the first part, um, prenatal exposure, certainly, but also history of mental illness and birth family members, you know, other issues that may have occurred during the pregnancy, you know, abuse, for example, that may have some impact. You know,

9:52  
there's such increased stress if nothing else, yeah, just high stress levels, right.

9:56  
Absolutely. Sometimes, you know, records being incomplete or not having information about a birth father. So that's, you know, half of the information is absent.

10:04  
Such a good point. Dr. Birdman as far as the survey can you address about? I don't? I'm not sure when I read it. I didn't see you ask about it. But I just was curious. Anything about prenatal exposure? Was that him involved at all?

10:18  
We didn't really ask specifically about it. But again, I do think that there are all the unknown kind of things that Abby was just referring to are, you know, really create a lot of variability in terms of how children present when they're young, but also, sometimes these things don't become evident until they're older. Exactly. Oh, yeah. And so it's really important for adoptive parents to kind of walk that fine line between being informed and being knowledgeable about ways to possibly anticipate something without being overly anticipating all of these things are going to happen. It's a really kind of difficult thing. And of course, having all that information being unknown, is really challenging. We did some work a couple of years ago on the effect on adoptees of not having family health history, information. And interesting. And with so many, you know, young adults now coming up, approaching adulthood, and really taking advocacy and activist positions in the community about adoption, many of them are speaking out about the really difficult impact it's had on them and on their families and on the families they want to create as well showing not having reliable information about their family medical and genetic histories.

11:44  
That is such a good point. And I we hear all the time. And I think I think partly it's it's also the shift into the idea of, of genomics in general that we even perhaps it's over exaggerated what we think those of us who even have access to, we believe that if we know what's in our genes, and in our history, we can predict everything, which is probably not accurate, but there's certainly a lot just you can't pick up any any popular media and and our listen to it and not hear about the importance of knowing your genetic history. So it's got to weigh really heavy. And we hear it all the time from the adoptees and our groups. So yeah, such a good point. I want to tell you about 12, free online courses that are now available at creating a family.org online Parent Training Center, you can go there Bitly, slash j, b, f support to find them, there's a great variety, they are one hour, they come with a certificate of completion, so you can utilize it if you're one of those people who need CPE courses, you can utilize it for that. And it's brought to you by the support of the jockey being family foundation. You know, you spoke about walking that that fine line, and it's, it reminds me one of the things that that we face as an organization is by trying to make parents and others aware of the potential issues that adoption can bring. And, and the impacts of trauma and impacts of all the things that can happen to children who have been placed in this situation, there is a fine line between creating the the, the atmosphere, that adopted people are for lack of a better word troubled, or having a lot of issues. And this was quite a few years ago, but we had written an article, something about some research, I think we were just quoting research or whatever, on some of the potential issues or something. And adopt a really took us to task saying, you know, this is not the, you know, I know so many adoptive people, and this is not our life experience. And, and you keep perpetuating this and you're making it look like that. We are basket cases and that. And I I really took it to heart I thought you know, it was a woman I said, you know, she's right, she's got a point. But on the other hand, we do walk that line of wanting people to be aware, we want parents to be prepared, we want their expectations to be set so that they're going to be the best parents possible for this child. And that brings up the question I have is in your survey, that if the whole general I mean in a lot of the popular media, you will see you know, the the storyline is that the adoptee, you know kills the parents or they adopt the, you know, breaks up parents hearts or the adoptee or whatever. It's it's the negative. Is that rubbing off Dr. Goldberg on our teachers. I mean, do they teachers believe that adopted people, in this case adopted children have a bunch of issues?

14:52  
Yeah, I mean, I think by and large, you know, many of them believed that adopted children far more likely to have problems than children in the general population. Two thirds of them believed that adopted kids were more likely to have emotional problems. And almost half believe that adopted kids were more likely to have behavioral problems. So it's unclear where that information comes from. Right? They may not be as aware of the point that how really, I think appropriately started out with, which is that there's a lot of variability, right. And if you, you know, it's like the saying, you've met one adopted child, you've met one adopted child, there's a lot of variability. So it's tough sometimes to talk about averages, because you're losing all of that variability. But their ideas may come from popular media, they may come from children they've experienced in their own lives, may be, you know, very limited, maybe they know, to adopt children. And so that's where they're getting that information. And that's part of why this, we felt this research was so important, because we do have a tendency as a society, I think, to draw, you know, a lot of conclusions about adoption and adopted people and families from very limited interactions or knowledge. So, you know, most people that I interact with, who don't know much about adoption, are shocked to hear about open adoption, like, they're very confused, how come I didn't know about this, you know, because their idea of adoption is rooted in, you know, at the most simplistic level, Annie or, you know, Stuart Little or some other kind of popular representation, and maybe international adoption, or maybe adoption to the child welfare system, but not, not usually, private, domestic and or open adoption. So our kind of broad ideas about adoption tend to be pretty limited, and pretty filtered.

16:43  
Yeah, very good point. How are we gonna say no,

16:45  
and the, the ideas that making into the media, are the ideas that will sell stories, quite honestly, yes. And so those are not the stories of just typical happy, well adjusted kids growing up in neighborhoods with their families, and sure, having a few bumps and things here and there, like all kids, but those are not the stories that make it into the media. The ones that make it into the media are the outlandish kind of scare stories, we found that when Ruth McRoy and I were starting our work on open adoption, we found that that was the same thing that drove attitudes about open adoption, because the only things that people had heard about, were the scare stories about birth, parents coming to steal back their children, and all of that. And, you know, maybe there were a few of those cases. But that was not the predominant thing. And so, anytime these ideas get filtered through the media, I think we have to be really careful to realize, you know, that that's just one slice of what they're seeing, and that there are all these other children and families out there living just they're living out their lives, you know, and there are many of them, most of them are doing just fine.

17:57  
how knowledgeable were the teachers in your survey about the variations and types of adoption and including open adoption? And I'll direct that to begin a picture. Dr. Cobourg, speak up and Austin are directed to begin with Dr. Greta Van.

18:12  
Well, it varied. I mean, obviously, it varied in terms of how much they knew about it. But most of them said that they had not had specific training or preparation, in terms of knowing about the different types of adoption. A lot of them talked about learning adoption, quote, unquote, on the job, meaning that as they experienced different kids coming through their classrooms over the years, or as they met other teachers who were doing things related to adoption, some of those things were would rub off. But the thing that one of the things that really stood out to me in the results was that things were not being communicated in any kind of systematic or comprehensive way to the teachers, you know, and we asked, we really did try to probe about why this is wire, why are these things not happening? And I don't know, Abby might want to add on to this as well. But it seemed to me that one of the overwhelming points was that there's so much pressure on administrators and on teachers, to be learning about different topics, to be doing different things in the classroom, to be preparing children for testing and all of that, that sometimes these issues that affect a smaller proportion of the children in their classroom. Just don't come to the top of the list. And it's it's sad.

19:35  
Thoughts on that? Dr. Google?

19:37  
I would just echo that. You know, I think for both of us, it was just amazing. Just the lack of systematization of this information and exposure right there. If you're lucky, you have a colleague down the hall, who is an adoptive parent or somebody who has some knowledge of adoption, you know, your your Special Education, you know, teacher has some knowledge of adoption, but it's not like, you know, it's all kind of by luck, right. And I don't feel that even schools like when I've shared information about these findings, there's a kind of an there's a curiosity and an interest. But there's also never really thought about that before in terms of having a systematic professional development, for example, components, about adoption, or even about foster care, which is interesting. And what I found really startling was how many teachers thought that they had never even taught and adapted student or very few adapted students really, really, really interesting. And of course, they probably have, but they just didn't know it, which is also kind of part of the problem.

20:47  
Yeah, such a good point, how would they know unless they was a transracial placement even then, that may not be an obvious it's an adoption. That's surprising to me. If for no other reason that adoption is fairly common.

21:01  
So a third, a third of them thought that they had taught under five adopted children in their career.

21:08  
Interesting, and we didn't ask, I know, this has been adoption, not fostering. I wonder if they would have they would say the same for fostering?

21:17  
That's a great question. I mean, that might be more salient to them. Because often, there's sort of paperwork and other events that kind of coincide with a foster care placement, you know, you know, when a child comes in in the middle of the year, or it's under a certain designation, and there's certain rules that apply, they might be more aware of that,

21:37  
I would assume they would be because they, they would know that the child is not living with their biological parents, they usually will know what the child's plan are, how long the child is anticipated to live there. So you're probably right. But in some ways, it's good to separate adoption, because although we often kind of lump adoption and fostering, they are different, obviously, not only for the legal ramifications, but also for just a host of for a host of reasons, I think they can make distinction. Hey, guys, are you a subscriber to our free monthly newsletter? Well, if you're not, you're missing out, you need to head over immediately to creating a family.org/newsletter and sign up. And you will receive a monthly newsletter from us. It can be directed, we have both a family one which is aimed for adoptive Foster and kinship families, we also have a professional one, you can choose which one you want. We curate information that is out there. Some of its our some of it's not, it's fresh content, delivered right to your inbox monthly. And if it doesn't suit your fancy, you can unsubscribe very easily. So thanks, head on over to creating a family.org/newsletter. So Dr. grote, about how accepting were teachers to the idea of modifying assignments to reflect the diverse families, including those foreign by adoption? Well, overall, they

23:08  
were actually quite receptive to the idea when it was presented to them as a question to respond to, I think, again, it can mean different things to different teachers, you know, I think one of the things that they seem very responsive to, was the idea of acknowledging the diversity among families, so kind of talking about different kinds of families, different kinds of family configurations, and so on. But some of the acknowledgement, you know, was limited by their own knowledge of adoption. So, if they're not particularly aware of the difference between an infant adoption and an international adoption and adoption from foster care, then it's kind of hard to, to be communicating that, but overall, they seem receptive to the idea, and kind of wanted to know more, we did ask about specific, you know, what kinds of specific things they might do in the classroom. And we also knew from prior work of Abby's and other people, what are some of the issues that parents feel a problematic? And you know, some of the big issues are any kind of assignments that deal with things like family tree, family genealogy, baby pictures, various kinds of things. And so I almost think that our survey may have been a bit of a prompt to some of the teachers who took it just to consider these things. It's like, oh, I never thought that maybe, you know, an assignment about bringing in baby pictures might be a problem. You know, I don't know that. But I think that's very possible that some of the questions that we asked may have prompted some more thought on their parts as well.

24:54  
Yeah, I mean, we did have an open ended section at the end to ask for feedback, or is there anything that has Giving you pause we asked in a survey, and many of them use that space to indicate, wow, I never thought about fill in the blank. And a lot of it was about, you know, the issues with doing these sort of gene environment assignments, or wow, I never thought about the impact that, you know, Mother's Day might have on a child, for example.

25:20  
Abby, I'm interested in your, your thoughts on the teachers acceptance of diverse family forms that much of your research has been based on on diverse families. And it's his This has got to not always have been the case where teachers have been open to and cognizant of that they need to be not accepting so much. But as recognizing the diversity that the family units their children represent. When would you say Can you can you pinpoint when it started shifting? Or were you let me ask first, were you surprised that the teachers were so open to the idea of, of recognizing diversity in their family units?

26:04  
Well, I think we specifically asked about sort of adoptive families in this survey. So we don't have as much of an idea of how they're open maybe to other types of diversity, like LGBT parent families, for example. I'm not so surprised. I think that there's a selection bias of people who would fill this out, first of all, like, they, they might be more open in general to the topic, and they might think it's an interesting topic, and they might feel more receptive to kind of inclusion and diversity and those sorts of issues. But I mean, I think there was also a market level of transparency and kind of vulnerability in places where they're acknowledging like, I actually don't know very much about this at all, or this was never mentioned in my education. And, you know, that level of honesty, you know, you can be open but as house and you can be open, but not very be very knowledgeable. So, it's unclear how successful you will be in deploying kind of modifications or changes to your whole curriculum, if you really don't know much about adoption in general. So

27:06  
do you think that parents that teachers need to know that children are adopted?

27:13  
Well, that was a great that mean? That's a really great question. And it's one that we talked a lot about, as we were kind of going through the responses and kind of summarizing the results, you know, on the on the one hand, you want in order for teachers to do the best job they can with the children in their classroom, they need to be informed about what's going on in the child's world more broadly, you know, what's going on at home? What's going on in their community in their neighborhood? What are the things that the child is bringing to the classroom with them? And what do they? Where do they go at the end of the day, when they take their, you know, academic work home? And how is that experience with regard to adoption? So the question is, are there things about adoption that would be important for teachers to know, in terms of planning curriculum, and certainly, the idea of being aware of a child's adoptive status as something that might help a teacher, think about assignments, like family trees, and bringing in baby pictures and Mother's Day, I think those are really, you know, legitimate and important. I think there needs to be a dialogue between teachers and parents, and some kind of sense of agreement about, you know, what, to teachers, maybe there's some things about the adoption or about the family, that wouldn't necessarily be helpful to the teacher, or might only be helpful to really specialized personnel, like school psychologist or something like that. But there may be other things that would be important to know. And I think, to the degree that teachers and parents can be having conversations about that, I think it's it's really good. We did ask teachers, how they learned about children's adoptive status. And as I recall, the majority of them said that they learned it from the child, it was not that they had learned it from, you know, demographic forms that were filled out at the beginning of the year, or that parents came into Parents Night and talked about it. Many of them learned about it from the child, or they inferred it from what they observed about who came to Parents Night or who came to pick up the child. And, you know, they might be wrong on making such an inference to so I think the idea of having a more robust Parent Teacher connection on behalf of the child came through as something that's really desirable and important.

29:49  
You know, it makes me wonder, though, is if obviously, if a child is struggling with behaviors or something that are relating to something that's relevant to them akra trauma that they have experienced are our prenatal exposure or whatever, that they that no, that's clearly something that teachers need to be informed about, because they need that information in order to help that child succeed. But are we running the risk of othering? These children? And let's say kids, like, Dr. Grove, he said, the majority of these families are just families, you know, they're, they have their ups and downs, but not necessarily significant, not necessarily related to adoption. So, Dr. Goldberg, is it if it's if the child has if the if the child is not presenting with needs? This the does the teacher need to know?

30:40  
You know, it's all about what the teacher actually does with that information. So if a teacher is trained to hear that, file it away and use it in a way that's useful, say, to think about curriculum, or to just have an ear out, you know, for anything that might pop up that might kind of invoke adaption, right. So if the child has a particularly strong response to a reading passage, or to a film that's shown in class, or is struggling with an assignment around identity or belonging or loss, for example, that's, that would be great for the teacher to know that that child was adopted. So they can respond appropriately and empathically. And join that child and talk maybe to the parents. But if a teacher doesn't have any training and adoption, and knows that the child is adopted, then yeah, that could be challenging. And maybe it could cause harm, because that teacher might just be pulling from whatever stereotypes they have, and responding in a way that it could feel really, like you said, very othering, isolating, kind of telescoping the adoption at the expense of all else, you know, oh, that must be because you're adopted? Or, you know, look, it looked like you were really upset, you know, and does that have anything to do with your adoption and that

32:03  
isn't helpful. Or, or say, the kid acts out like, well, this is a kid now this kid's got, you know, this is a troubled kid, even though the kid is acting out because they've been teased, or they didn't have breakfast, or they're just in a bad mood. Yeah.

32:17  
The other thing that adoptive kids really hate is being viewed as the expert on adoption. Just as if you're the only kid in the class who's identified as being adopted, or you're the only kid in the class who's have a particular, you know, ethnic or racial background, or you're only the only kid in the class with two moms or two dads, you know, all of a sudden being viewed as the expert on that topic. And being called on by the teacher to, oh, well, this is National Adoption Month, what can you what's your family? Do? You know? Yeah, or something like that? So a lot of it, it's it really boils down to sensitivity on the part of teachers about knowing what to do with the information and how to how to use it appropriately and when to use it appropriately.

33:06  
Yeah. And, and I, I get that some parents, I mean, obviously, if it's a transracial adoption, and it's going to be an obvious adoption, but I do understand why some parents would say, Well, I'm going back to the idea that of what Dr. Goldberg said about some, not an inconsequential number, the teachers didn't think they had ever taught very many adopted kids. And I was I've been thinking about that. And I'm wondering if it's because parents just thought, it's, you know, we don't have issues, this child doesn't have issues at this point that are outside the norm. Therefore, it's it's not information that would be helpful. It's just it's an interesting thing. I've not given it much thought as a parent, my family is, is obviously an adoptive family. So it's never come up for us personally. Because it's

33:54  
teachers also make mistakes about assuming that children are adopted when they're not based on physical differences. Or if only one parent comes to the teacher, you know, meetings, then, you know, a child might be biracial. And, you know, surely if they only see one parent, they may draw a very incorrect conclusion.

34:12  
Yeah, no, it's a very good point, that Charles biracial, the mom is black, they don't say that the dad, so they just make assumptions. Yeah, you know, it's a very good point. So maybe this is the $64 million question based on your survey and your other research. And we'll start with you, Dr. Goldberg, what can parents do to help their child's teacher be more adoption aware or adopt adoption sensitive?

34:38  
I mean, in an ideal world,

34:41  
they should be ideal. I

34:43  
think you need some professional development, to teach you everything myself and I don't have to bring in all these books and I don't have to meet with you repeatedly to kind of help you to understand right i I don't love the idea that parents have to kind of start at the bottom floor. Are with teachers and sort of give them the education they need to sort of understand and teach their own child. But I do think there's ways that they can kind of support teachers in getting the training and the education that they might need, you know, a really a really intentional parent might make a recommendation to the school, right, you know, have a professional development today around an option for all teachers. But I think at a very basic level, if you're talking about one teacher, one parent, right, really just starting from the sort of perspective that, you know, hopefully you're all on the same page with wanting this child succeed, and supporting the teachers to understand, you know, who this child is, right, and who they are as an adopted person, but also just as a person. But I struggled because I just I always picture parents having to educate teachers, and I don't think I want that to not be the frontline of defense. I want parents to feel like they can employ teachers as collaborators, and not as students. Yeah,

36:09  
hell. One of the challenges about that is that the information about a child's family and their adoptive status is not passed along from year to year in any kind of systematic way. So it does create a burden on parents, as Abby is talking about that, you know, maybe when their child is in the first grade, you know, they really have this wonderful conversation. That's what really well, and then, okay, now the child's in the second grade. Well, do we start all over again? Can we assume that the second grade teacher will have gotten that information from the first grade teacher? No,

36:44  
I was just gonna say I can answer that question for you. No, you can make that assumption.

36:48  
No, you can't. And then as the child gets older, so maybe it's a little bit easier when the child is in elementary school if they have one kind of homeroom teacher, but as soon as they hit middle school and high school, and they're moving from one class to another, you know, how do you, you know, how do you do that with five different teachers each year it gets, it gets really, really crazy for the parents, and also for the teachers who, you know, are dealing with hundreds of children. So the lack of any kind of systematic way of gathering the information and passing it on, is also challenging. And I think it you know, I think the space is open for there to be some kind of best practices identified of how could school systems do that in a more family friendly way? Hmm.

37:41  
You guys have heard me say this before, and you'll hear it again. And that is that this show as well as everything we do at creating a family would not happen without our partners and our partners are really our agencies who are putting their money where their mouth is they believe in our mission of providing unbiased education and support to adopt a foster and kinship families and they're willing to support it with their dollars and we could not do what we do without their support. One of our longest sponsors has been hopscotch adoptions. They are a Hague accredited international adoption agency placing children from Armenia, Bulgaria, Croatia, Georgia, Ghana, Guiana, Morocco, Pakistan, Serbia, and Ukraine. Although the Ukrainian program is understandably on hold right now, they specialize in the placement of children with Down Syndrome and other special needs. In addition to doing a lot of kinship adoptions, they place kids throughout the US and offer home study services and post adoption services to residents of North Carolina and New York. Well, I am so thankful that you did this survey and you published it, I am thankful for the information because information is power and, and it for no other reason. It's opening up this dialogue, and I'm very appreciative of that. Now, let me ask starting with you, Dr. Brode. event if families want to learn more about your research and your research and this specific thing, we will link to this report and in our in the show notes. So this particular survey, Where would people go to get more information about what you

39:17  
did? Great. Well, thank you. Our website is umass.edu backslash Rudd, chair, r u DD chair. And so if they go there, they'll find a whole bunch of resources on many different topics. But one of the tabs there is adoption in schools. So if they go to the adoption in schools tab, they'll see the full report of the work that Abby did while she was on the visiting professorship and they'll see a brand new fact sheet for teachers a four page fact sheet that we just finished putting together this week in collaboration with Dr. Gwen bass who is a an adoption educator and advocate So that's certainly one place they can go.

40:03  
And I will, we will link to the fact sheet as well in the show notes. All right. Dr. Goldberg, Where would people go to learn more about your research?

40:15  
Well, my research you can find that my website, Abby goldberg.com. But I also have a teaching website that's just basically resources for teachers and for educators and parents on making classrooms and schools more inclusive of LGBT parent families. And then I also linked to a lot of the resources that Helen I developed as part of the Read program. So if people are looking for more LGBT specific resources, they can go to teach all families.com I was

40:42  
gonna say, make sure you give that URL teach all families.com Thank you so much, Dr. Abby Goldberg and Dr. Hal grote event for being with us today to talk about your research and specific research as it relates to schools. Thank you so much.

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