The Impact of Adoptive parents' Preference to Adopt Trans-racially on Adoptee's Racial/Ethnic Identity Development

Purpose: Research suggests that adopted children of color face more challenges in the racial/ethnic identity process (Friedlander, 1999) particularly if adopted trans-racially. There is evidence that the family environment significantly impacts the developmental process of the child's identity which is why it is important to understand parental influences. For instance, not all adoptive parents who adopt trans-racially anticipated doing so. Other forces may have influenced the trans-racial adoption such as shorter waiting period and preferred age. The present study will evaluate whether the adoptive parents' desire to adopt trans-racially impacts the trans-racially adopted child's racial/ethnic identification. Considering the continued need for potential adoptive parents and the increasing amounts of trans-racial adoptions, it is important to consider the impact an adoptive parent could have on racial/ethnic identification if they were not originally open to the idea of adopting trans-racially. The purpose of this study is to determine whether there are differences in the trans-racially adopted child's racial/ethnic identification depending on whether the adoptive parents originally wanted to adopt trans-racially.

Methods: The current analysis used data from the Building Understanding data set; a federally funded research project with 1,196 respondents, designed to examine the experiences and challenges of transracial and inracial adoptive families. Measures were self-report questionnaires developed to extract information regarding adoption issues, race, ethnicity, identity, the child, family, parenting and adoption services. The focus of this study was on issues of race, ethnicity and identity of the trans-racially adopted child. The current sample consists only of the responses of those families who adopted trans-racially which includes responses for 1055 adoptees. Their ages ranged from 4 years old to 23 years with a mean of 10.32 (SD=4.09). Forty-one percent were male, 56.4 percent female and 2 percent missing. Logistic and linear regression analyses were performed via SPSS.

Results: Logistic regression analyses show no significant differences among parents' desire to adopt transracially and the adoptee's current identification with his or her own racial group and previous identification with his or her racial group. However, linear regression does show significant differences in the adoptee's feelings about his or her racial/ethnic group based on parent's desire to adopt transracially (F=3.595, df=2, 949, p=.028). Specifically, transracial adoptees whose parents did not originally want a transracial adoption had more negative feelings about their racial/ethnic identity when compared to adoptees whose parents said yes to wanting a transracial adoption (t=-2.305, p=.021). Parents who said either transracial or inracial adoption was acceptable also had kids with more negative feeling about their racial/ethnic identity compared to parents who said yes, although not significant (t=1.846, p=.065).

Implications: These findings indicate that transracially adopted children have more positive racial/ethnic identity when parents do want to adopt transracially. Thus, the concern may not be whether transracial adoptions hinder healthy racial/ethnic identity development, but whether potential adoptive parents should adopt transracially if they did not desire to do so in the beginning.