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

What do teachers understand 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 teachers in 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 for this information?
• Did teachers present lessons that included the diversity that adoption represents?
• Does teacher training, either formal or in-service, 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.

Transcript

Please pardon any errors, this is an automated transcript.
Welcome, everyone, to Creating a Family. Talk about foster, adoptive, and kinship care. To our regular listeners, thank you so much for coming back. And to our new listeners,
welcome, especially welcome to you. We're thrilled to have you here. I'm Dawn Davenport. I am both the host of this show, as well as the director of the nonprofit,
creatingafamily .org. And we're going to be talking about how teachers understand adoption, and perhaps more important, what can parents do about it to change their attitude about adoption.
We're going to be talking today with Dr. Hal Grotevant. He was formerly on the board of Creating a Family. He is one of my favorite people. He is the Rudd Family Foundation Chair in Psychology at the University of Massachusetts Amherst.
and we'll be talking with Dr. Abby Goldberg. She is a professor of psychology and current director of women's and gender studies at Clark University. This is a re -air of a show we did a while back and we're re -airing it as part of our Back to School campaign.
Both Dr. Grotivan and Dr. Goldberg have done a lot of research in this area and I think you're going to find it fascinating. - Welcome Dr. Grotevant and Dr.
Goldberg to Creating a Family. We are so happy to have you. - Thanks so much. - Oh, thank you. - I should also add that Dr. Grotevant is on the board of Creating a Family and we are so honored to have his guidance in 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 Rudd Adoption Research Program at the University of Massachusetts,
St Amherst. And it was done to better understand K -12 teachers' experience with adopted children. And I'm curious about the collaboration because I think it's interesting,
is I understand that Dr. professor, had a visiting professorship at the Rudd adoption research program. Dr.
Goldberg, is that right? So you were there working under this visiting professorship? Yeah, virtually, because it was during COVID times. But yeah, of course.
But yeah, a lot of Hal and I had an interest in better understanding the relationship between schools and families. And 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 perspectives of teachers so we could better support everybody in helping kids. - I had a curiosity,
Dr. Grotevant, what made you interested in this topic of teachers? In particular, the teacher's understanding of and perception of adopted of adopted children 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 adopted 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 challenge with school personnel who didn't seem to get it, who didn't seem to really understand adoption 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 forays into doing that in 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 professorships seemed an ideal opportunity to bring 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. Yeah, that makes it 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, start with trauma, understanding the impacts of trauma.
Let's start with that. Yeah, so we asked teachers about a variety of 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 were starting out of very little understanding of the connection between trauma and adoption. And trauma, of course, is a huge word that-- - Yeah, I was gonna ask,
did you make a distinction between, that was the question I was gonna ask, 'cause trauma and trauma -informed schools and trauma, it seems like trauma has become, I worry almost as it's become too much of a buzzword that it's losing the impact of its meaning,
but that's a whole another discussion. But did you, Dr. Grodovan, Did you distinguish between trauma and adoption or did you just keep it or did you just talk about adoption and the impact of the trauma that may result from that.
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 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.
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's 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 raking that point because I think it's a very valid one. And even I think the variability within is often, you know, as big 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 if they adopted an infant or 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 gonna, it'd be experiencing when five years or 10 years or 15 years and some kids have more challenges than others.
- 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 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 and the statistics vary,
but it can be up to 80%, depending on who you're talking to or what research you're looking at, of 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 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 or,
and did your survey touch upon the knowledge of teachers about the impact of prenatal exposure? - I mean, I'll just speak to the first part. I'm prenatal exposure certainly,
but also history of mental 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, there's such stress if nothing else. Yeah, just high stress levels. Right. 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. So. Right. Such a good point. Dr. Grotemann, as far as a survey, can you address about it? 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 even involved at all? 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 are older.
Exactly. Yeah, and so it's really important for adopted parents to kind of walk that fine line between being informed and being knowledgeable about ways to possibly anticipate something without being overly anticipating that 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 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 sure not having reliable information about their family medical and genetic histories.
That is such a good point and we hear it all the time. And I think partly it's also the shift into the idea of genomics in general that 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 in a popular media and and or 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 in 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's online parent training center.
You can go there bit .ly /JBFsupport 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 CE courses.
You can utilize it for that and it's brought to you by the support of the Jockey Bean Family Foundation. You know you spoke about walking that fine line and it reminds me one of the things that we face as an organization is by trying to make parents and others aware of the potential issues that adoption can bring 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 atmosphere that adopted people are, for lack of a better word,
troubled, are 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 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, if the whole general,
I mean, in a lot of the popular media, you will see, you know, the storyline is that the adoptee, you know, kills the parents or the adoptee, you know, breaks the parents hearts or the adoptee or whatever,
it's the negative. Is that rubbing off Dr. Goldberg on our teachers? I mean, do the teachers believe that adopted people, or in this case, adopted children, have a bunch of issues?
- Yeah, I mean, I think by and large, many of them believe that adopted children are more likely to have problems than children in the general population.
So two thirds of them believe that adopted kids where 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, maybe very limited, maybe they know to adapt to 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 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 through the child welfare system,
but not usually private domestic and /or open adoption. So our kind of broad ideas about adoption tend to be pretty limited and pretty filtered.
Yeah, very good point. Hal, what are we going to say? You know, But the ideas that make an into the media are the ideas that will sell stories quite on this one.
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.
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 make sure Dr.
Goldberg speak up, but I'll direct it to begin with with Dr. Grotemann. 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 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 an intensive way to the teachers,
you know. And we asked, we really did try to probe about why this is, why are these things not happening? And I don't know, Abby might wanna 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 sad. - Thoughts on that, Dr. Gauber? - 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? 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 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 a curiosity in the interest,
but there's also a, never really thought about that before in terms of having a systematic professional development, for example, component 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 an adapted student or taught 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. Yes, that's a good point how would they know unless they was a transracial placement even then that may not be obvious that it's an adoption.
That's surprising to me if for no other reason that adoption is fairly common. So a third, a third of them thought that they had taught under five adopted children in their career.
Interesting. And we didn't ask, I know this was about adoption, not fostering. I wonder if they would have, they would say the same for fostering. That's a great question. I mean,
that might be more salient to them because often there is 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 actually. I would assume they would be because they would know that the child is not living with their biological parents.
They usually will know what the child's plan or 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 from the legal ramifications but also for just a host of reasons I think they can make distinction.
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Grotevant, how accepting were teachers to the idea of modifying assignments to reflect the diverse families, including those formed by adoption? - Well,
overall, they 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.
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 infinite adoption and an international adoption and a adoption from foster care,
then it's kind of hard to to be communicating that. But Overall, they seemed 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 Abbey's and other people, what are some of the issues that parents feel are 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.
Yeah, I mean, we did have an open -ended section at the end that asked for feedback, or is there anything that has given you pause, we asked in a survey. And many of them use that space to indicate,
wow, I never thought about on 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. Abby, I'm interested in your thoughts on the teacher's acceptance of diverse family forms that much of your research has been based diverse families and it's 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 where you let me ask first were you surprised that the teachers were so open to the idea of recognizing diversity in their family units?
- 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 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 And,
you know, that level of honesty, you know, you can be open, but as house that you can be open, but not very, 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. Do you think that parent that teachers need to know that children are adopted. it? Well, that was a great, I 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 experienced? 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 do 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 specialize 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 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 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 too. 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.
You know, it makes me wonder, though, is obviously if a child is struggling with behaviors or something that are relating to something that's relevant to the background trauma that they have experienced,
or prenatal exposure or whatever, that 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. Grover said, the majority of these families are just families, you know, they have their ups and downs,
but not necessarily significant, not necessarily related to adoption. So Dr. Goldberg, is it, if the child has, If the child is not presenting with needs,
does the teacher need to know? - 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 adoption,
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 is adapted so they can respond appropriately and empathically and enjoy that child and talk maybe to the parents,
but if a teacher doesn't have any training and adoption and knows that a 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 isn't helpful. Or, or say the kid acts out, well,
this is a kid, you know, this is kids got, you know, this is a troubled kid, even though the kid just acting out because they've been teased or they didn't have breakfast or they're just in a bad mood. Yeah. - The other thing that adopted 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 of a particular ethnic or racial background or you're 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 doing?
You know, 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. - Yeah, and I get that some parents, I mean, obviously if it's a transracial adoption and it's gonna 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 consequential number of the teachers didn't think they had ever taught very many adopted kids and 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 this is not information that would be helpful that's just it's an interesting thing I've not given it much thought as a parent my family is obviously an adopted family so it's never come up for personally because it's an obvious.
Well and 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 sure if they only see one parent they may draw a very incorrect conclusion.
Yeah no it's a very good point that the child's biracial the mom is black they don't see that the dad, so they just make assumptions. Yeah, you know, it's a very good point. 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? I mean,
in an ideal world, they Let's be ideal. I think you need some professional development and I shouldn't have 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 don't love the idea that parents have to kind of start at the bottom floor with teachers and sort of give them the education they need to sort of understand and teach their and 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, a really intentional parent might make a recommendation to the school,
right? Have a professional development day around adoption for all teachers. But I think at a very basic level, if you're talking about one teacher, one parent, I really just starting from the sort of perspective that,
you know, hopefully you're all on the same page with wanting this child to 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 struggle because I just, I always picture parents having to educate teachers.
And I don't think I want that to not be the front line of defense. I want parents to feel like they can employ teachers as collaborators and not as students.
Yeah, pal. 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 things go 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, I was just going to say I can answer that question for you. - No, you cannot make that assumption. - No, you can't. And then as the child gets older, so maybe it's a little bit easier when the child's 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 do that with five different teachers each year? 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.
- Mm -hmm. 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 adoptive 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, Guyana, 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 U .S. 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 if 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. Brodevant, if families want to learn more about your research and your research in this specific thing,
we will link to this report in the show notes. So this particular survey, where would people go to get more information about what you did. - Great, well, thank you.
Our website is umass .edu /rudchair, R -U -D -D 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 and schools. So if they go to the adoption and 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 an adoption educator and advocate. So that's certainly one place they can go.
And 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?
Well, my research you can find at my website at bgoldberg .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 Hal and I developed as part of the RUD program. So if people are looking for more LGBT -specific resources, they can go to teachallfamilies .com.
- I was gonna say, make sure you give that URL, teachallfamilies .com. Thank you so much, Dr. Abby Goldberg and Dr. Hal Grotevant for being with us today to talk about your research and specific your research as it relates to schools.
Thank you so much. - Thank you. - Thanks, Don.