When You Don't Know Your Child's Racial or Cultural Heritage - Weekend Wisdom

Question: We very recently brought home our second child through domestic infant adoption. We feel very fortunate, and our son is developing well; we are also settling into the new routine.  We matched with our Son's birth mother through a local agency, and unfortunately, she decided that she did not want to meet us. She gave no information about the biological father.  We know she was caucasian, but honestly, it is unclear whether our son is entirely caucasian or not. The pediatrician said it was a mystery, and he may be caucasian with a darker complexion, or biracial, some amount of Hispanic, black, or any other heritage. We want to do everything in our power to be informed, acknowledge, and celebrate any ethnic background that is presented, but short of doing a DNA ancestry service on a baby that is a few weeks old, I don't really know where to begin- I'd appreciate any guidance you have. 

Resources:

• Raising a Transracial or Multicultural Child
• Adoptee Voices
• Ethical Issues in Genetic Testing in Adoption
• Genetic Testing and Genealogy for Adoptees
• Genetic Testing for Adoptees – Is It Worth It?

Transcript

Please pardon any errors, this is an automated transcript.

Hello and welcome to Weekend Wisdom. My name is Tracy Whitney and I'm the host of
this podcast. Weekend Wisdom is brought to you by CreatingaFamily .org. We crafted
this show to give our listeners an opportunity to engage with us and to have their
questions answered. So if you have a question about adoption, foster care or kinship
care, you can send it to info @creatingafamily .org And we'll come through our
archives, listen to podcasts from previous experts and do our best to find an answer
for you that will strengthen your family. Today's question comes from Bo, who says,
"I have used the creating a family online learning tools throughout my family's
adoption process, and the resources have been very helpful. I listened to the podcast
as well, which I have found to be a valuable resource. We very recently brought
home our second child through domestic infant adoption and we feel very fortunate
that our son is developing well and we are settling into a new routine. We matched
with our son's birth mother through a local agency and she unfortunately decided that
she did not want to meet us. She gave us no information about the biological
father. We know that she was Caucasian but honestly it's unclear to us whether our
son is entirely Caucasian or not. The pediatrician said it was a mystery, and he
may be Caucasian with a darker complexion, or biracial, or some amount of Hispanic,
Black, or any other heritage. We want to do everything in our power to be informed,
acknowledge, and celebrate his ethnic background as it's presented to us, and,
short of a DNA ancestry service on a baby that's a few weeks old, we don't really
know where to begin. We'd appreciate any guidance you'd have for us. Thank you.
Well, Bo, thank you very much for your kind words about our online services and
education platform as well as our podcast. We hope you keep listening and
congratulations on your new little guy. Adopting a little one through domestic infant
adoption is a huge transition for your whole family, adding to your family and
taking care of the needs of a sibling who's already in the family. A lot of it is
big stuff. And I hope that you guys are doing okay through the transition. And that
brings me to kind of a general answer about your questions. And we know that this
is a tough topic because, yes, we want to be well -prepared when we're raising
children of a race different than our own. We want to be well educated, we want to
do our best to provide those racial mirrors and instill pride and respect for their
birth culture and their birth heritage. And when you don't know all of that
background information, it can feel pretty overwhelming and like you don't know where
to start. The good news is that with a baby this young, you have your hands full
with a lot of other important stuff. You need to take yourself off the hook just a
little bit right now and stay focused on settling everybody into the new dynamics,
stay focused on learning this baby's cues and this baby's needs. You don't say if
this baby had any prenatal exposure or not, but if they did, then you definitely
need to be attending to those needs and educating yourself about those impacts. So
for right now, whether the baby is Caucasian, black, Hispanic or anything else,
those things matter just a little bit less for a little while. And so take a deep
breath and let yourself kind of stay focused on eating, sleeping,
pooping and snuggling. Those are the main things that this baby needs right now in
these early days and even months of coming home to you. So I do understand your
concerns and I don't want to dismiss them in any way. You do want to be educated
and informed and be the parent that he needs when he's tackling his racial or
cultural identity. And so while some of this can be a tomorrow problem, I do want
to address the issues that you're asking. And I want to also affirm that it can
feel pretty overwhelming and stressful to not know a huge chunk of your son's
identity. Right now, again, you can start educating yourself about the general issues
of raising a transracial or transcultural child. I don't know what your current
relationship is with his birth mother or what the current status is, you indicated
she didn't want to meet you, but you didn't indicate if that meant she wanted no
contact. And so I think that might be a good place for you to start. Start
building a relationship with her in whatever way she feels ready and comfortable with
that. So if that's contact through the agency or contact only by text or contact by
a neutral email address, that kind of a thing. Something that you can do to just
kind of open that door is start with just some pictures of the baby and how he's
doing, maybe some statements about his general development and how he's settling in.
And again, that may be through the agency or it may be through only texting. She
may not want to meet in person with you yet. The hope is that if you continue to
reach out and show yourselves to be trustworthy and safe and welcoming, she may
develop some level of trust with you that makes her want to open up a little bit
more. And if you can demonstrate your care for her as a person and her role in
your son's life, she may eventually feel safe enough to open up to you and share
more information with you about this child's birth father. It might only be for the
sake of your son that she does this, and that's okay. You take what she's willing
and able to offer you in those ways. I would say that in these interactions that
you might try to start with her, you keep them very free of expectations of future.
Just focus on what she can offer and give now, what you can offer and give now,
and do your very best to respect her journey, because yes, your journey and her
journey intersect over this child, but she may not feel safe enough to share that
journey with you. And again, this is just about building trust and opening doors. At
some point, if you are able to, she may start sharing more about herself,
and that would be another way to open the door. If you are building this contact
with her, she might feel safe enough to share something about her family story. You
could try and ask some questions about her specific family heritage. Yes, you
indicated that she's Caucasian, but is that Irish Caucasian or is that Latvian
Caucasian or is that Lithuanian? You know, everybody has kind of a different
different connection to their cultural heritage that she may feel safe sharing with
you.
I do hear a little bit of hesitancy in your question about pursuing DNA testing
right now and I get that. I agree that it's probably much too soon to consider
that route unless you have some very specific medical concerns about heritable
diseases or heritable disorders. It seems like that might be a little preemptive,
especially if you haven't made efforts yet to connect with her. I understand all the
questions and I understand the not knowing. I have children adopted internationally
and we don't know very much at all about their cultural heritage beyond their race.
We don't know either birth mother or birth father stories at all. So again,
I understand those questions, but if you're focusing right now on the baby stage and
getting those snuggles in and learning how to meet his needs and maybe offering some
of that to her as she allows it or receives it, gaining ownership of his whole
story is kind of a long -term view. I think you have to remember also that the
technology around DNA testing research and how adoptees feel about DNA databases and
things like that could be something for you to look into, something for you to
consider, educate yourself about, because even if you can't gain access to your son's
full heritage information now, you can equip him as he's growing and learning to
seek this information out himself when he's ready, when he's interested. And so if
you get to, you know, is preteen years and he's still asking big questions and
she's still not answering anything, then you can start considering other routes to go
to help him find the answers that he needs. But yes, I agree with you that DNA
now is probably too young and too soon. It is important to listen to adoptive
voices over these matters. And so I will link in our show notes our resources that
we have for adoptee voices and former foster voices that we have found across the
internet, across social media that we recommend and that we respect. It's important
to equip your son no matter what happens, whether you have contact with his mother
or not, whether you find these answers or not. It's important that you're equipping
him with the confidence and the safety that he can ask you anything. and even if
you have to say to him, I don't know, but I'll be happy to help you find the
answer as you grow and as we learn together. Truth of the matter is that when your
son gets to the age where you allow him access to social media and his own phone
and things like that, he will very likely try to search. And that is something that
we hear from most parents who are raising children through adoption or foster care.
They search, quite frequently they search for siblings, but they also search on
social media and take what they already know or what they think they know and try
to go on social media. So it's real important that you guys keep a really open
path of communication between you. It's really important that you come alongside of
him to help him develop and form, identity, and answer his identity questions and
help him feel supported in all of that so that he knows that he can ask you
anything and he can come to you anytime. We will link some information in the show
notes about genetic testing and what adoptees might think about it. It's also
imperative that you try to understand from her perspective, the birth mother's
perspective, understand that If you never get this information from her,
if you never get questions answered, you are gonna have to, as the parent, figure
out how to be okay with that before your son has to figure out how to be okay
with that. Your tone and the way you handle it is gonna lead the way for him. And
so one of the most complex parts of adoptive parenting can be the fact that we
have to grapple with all of these unknowns. And so figure out ways to support
yourself that could be an online support group like the Creating a Family one on
Facebook. It's facebook .com /groups /creatingafamily.
There's plenty of parents and adoptees and foster families in that group that can
speak to a lot of these same issues. Another way to support yourself and your
partner, if you have one, is to work with a therapist or a trusted friend or a
lay counselor, somebody like that to learn how to process how it feels to have,
you know, big chunks of information that you don't know, and you may never know,
working through how that feels, how to respond to it, things like that.
If you can do that before your son gets to the age where he's starting to ask
those questions, coming to him with that level of support, having already solved it
inside of yourself or work through it, if you don't solve it, work through it
within yourself is going to set you up for a much more successful relationship with
your son. He'll see that you've done the hard work of preparing for this and that
it will kind of instill trust between the two of you. you. In addition to the warm
and welcoming online group at Facebook that I mentioned before, we also have post
-adoptive support groups for parents where you can do some peer learning about the
issues that adoptive and foster families face after placement, how to help your
children as they grow and develop their own identities, how to support them through
some of the challenges that come as impacts from things like prenatal exposure or
trauma or loss, things like that. So if you're interested in joining one of our
support groups, Bo, we would love to hear from you and you can email me, tracy
@creatingafamily .org for more information about those specific peer learning support
communities. You deserve whatever support and education you pursue for yourself to
help you prepare of this little guy's big questions about life, you deserve the
support and education that will equip you. And we're grateful that you reached out
to us. We hope that you learn and keep learning. We believe that knowledge is
power. And so we are fully committed to helping you keep learning as you raise this
little guy. But again, for now, enjoy the snuggles, enjoy the sleepy baby on your
chest and the sweet smell of a baby's freshly shampooed head and enjoy letting your
other children get to know him and building that sibling relationship and work a
little bit later on the big questions of figuring out your child's racial identity.
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