Organizations, including the Open Door Society and the Council on Adoptable Children, likewise began to publicize the needs of these orphans of color.
However, in 1972, the National Association of Black Social Workers formally condemned interracial adoption, citing that adoptees were at risk of developing a poor racial identity due to a lack of contact with role models of the same race.
[9] Harry and Bertha Holt also played a large role in introducing the concept of interracial adoption in the United States.
The purpose of these revisions was to strengthen compliance and enforcement of the procedures, remove any misleading language, and demand that discrimination would not be tolerated.
The interesting part about the research I conducted on these adoption websites is that searching up the keyword “interracial” would bring up suggestions for personal articles from adoptees about their experiences/stories.
For interracial adoptees, many white parents have increased difficulty connecting with and helping their child embrace their racial identity.
Research has shown that transracial adoptees experience feelings of exclusion from peers of both their racial identity as well as the majority (i.e., White).
This work adds further evidence to the notion that family processes, rather than parental sexual orientation, are most closely tied with children's outcomes.
These measures investigated indices of academic, familial, psychological, and health outcomes for 4 groups of interracial and same-race adopted adolescents.
The damage in this approach is that it provides very little room for a KTA to discuss the more unique challenges they face, as a result of not looking like their family or peers.
This can lead KTA's to believe that they must ignore or reject the Korean side of their identity, in order to gain membership to their white community and family.
One of this study's most interesting findings showed that interracial adoptive parents' decisions on where to live had a substantial impact upon their children's adjustments.
It was found that adoptees show normal levels of self esteem despite their somewhat elevated risks of short stature, lower school achievement, and behavior problems and their substantially elevated risk of learning problems and mental health referrals Furthermore, we did not find differences in self-esteem between transracial and same-race adoptees.
[24] Ryan Gustafsson conducted a unique study at the University of Melbourne which took a deeper dive into theorizing Korean transracial adoptee experiences.
Research suggests that the age of adoption and parenting acculturation styles may influence the way in which transracial children construct and build their own identities.
[26] Many groups continue to argue that children put up for adoption should be matched with parents of the same race in an effort to better help the child assimilate culturally and racially.
This study relates back to the importance of how influential transracial adopted parents acculturation, socialization, and awareness of race plays into fostering a positive racial identity for the child.
Another study looked at both the parents and the children to measure how color-blind racial attitudes would affect engagement in activities of the adoptee's heritage.
[27] It is important to note that this study looked at international adoptions, which subsequently includes transracial adoptees, but was not specifically focused on a particular subset of individuals.
Another study focused on Korean transracial adoptees sought to explore self-concept and acculturation through measurements of religion, honesty, relationships with opposite sex, physical appearance, general self-concept, math, emotional stability, and relationships with parents in relation to age of placement of Korean adoptees.
Oftentimes transracial adoptees may think of their birth family and the life that they could have had with them, and this scale can measure these thoughts which opens the door for more research to be done relating to how BFT plays into self esteem, confidence and psychological well being.
Specifically, these studies analyze the presence of an ethnocentric bias in legal and scientific assessments of children's well-being and adjustment.
Linda D. Manning conducted a research study on this topic titled "Presenting Opportunities: Communicatively Constructing a Shared Family Identity".
However, the findings of the linkage between discrimination and distress support that it is important for adoptive parents to incorporate racial socialization in the child's upbringing.
Similarly, The United States Department of Health and Human Services [36] has extensive literature on how to prepare families for racially and culturally diverse adoptions.
The National Association of Black Social Workers (NABSW), for example, argued that transracial adoption was, in essence, a form of racial and cultural genocide.
However, in countries like the United States where there is not one set race and the demographic is more like a melting pot, oftentimes children of color in the domestic foster system are left out.
"One of the problems with race-matching policies," says Donna Matias, a lawyer with the Institute of justice, "is that it leaves the children in the system to wait.
Additionally, due to lingering hatred and racism, even in the 1960's, certain white families were desperately afraid of having their own children engage in interracial relationships.
[54] Additionally, a recent public opinion survey of 1,416 people, for example, found that 47% of respondents believed international adoptees have more medical and behavioral problems than domestically adopted children.