On the last post, L from the Home Sick Home asked an interesting question:
Also, my kids aren’t adopted, but do parents of biological mixed race children have the same moral obligations to expose the kids to both cultures and languages?
I am going to say my answer is a big fat NO. I don’t think that parents of mixed race (or multicultural) children have the same obligation to expose their kids to both cultures and languages as adoptive parents.
As the bio parent to a mixed race kid, I think it is nice if we can make sure that M is connected to her heritage. Mr. A’s family did a pretty crappy job of helping him remain connected to his Taiwanese extended family and Chinese culture in general, so when we had M we thought we might try to do a better job. Mr. A spent a chunk of his young adulthood learning Chinese and living in China trying to get a better understanding of himself as a Chinese / Chinese American. By making M learn Chinese as a child and making sure she has a working understanding of herself as an Asian America, hopefully her search for identity will be more about finding herself and less about trying to figure out what it means to be Chinese / Asian American / mixed as a citizen of the USA.
But again, I think it is nice that we try to do that for her. I don’t feel obligated at all. With M, I feel like all those Chinese lessons and trips to Asia etc. are just part and parcel of the kind of liberal yuppie over-achieving parents we happen to be.
It is just one more parenting choice we make that doesn’t have any moral weight to it. I don’t feel any more obligated to do Chinese stuff than I feel obligated to make her learn to play an instrument. Playing violin would be nice, learning chinese is nice.
I know other bio parents of mixed race kids who don’t do any cultural stuff and I don’t feel any judgment at all. (I might confess to wondering if my kid might end up more well-adjusted than theirs, but that is not the same thing as judgment.)
With L, it is a whole different story. So far, in L’s short life a lot of crappy things have happened. She lost her birth family; she lost her ayis; she lost all the children she lived with in the orphanage; she lost the language she heard every day; she lost the opportunity to live in a country where everyone looks like her; she survived the trauma of being uprooted and shipped across the globe.
She survived all those things before she was even a year old.
When L came to us, she was visibly broken. Her world had shattered. Our desire to be her parents caused many of those losses. It was our choice to adopt her. We took her from her home, the only family she knew, her country, her people. We made that choice because we wanted to be the parents of this child.
While I still believe adopting L was the right thing to do (both for us and for L), I am going to do everything in my power to make sure that she does not lose one more thing she doesn’t have to lose because of me.
So L will go to Chinese lessons. She will visit China. We will look for her family and try to give her the tools to know them as much as she possibly can. We will make sure that she has every opportunity to reclaim what was taken from her, be it her language, her home, her culture, her family.
Yes, I feel morally obligated. It is the very least we can do.
It is such a small price to pay for the privilege of being the parent to such an amazing little girl.
*sniff*
This is a really interesting way to break it down. I’m going to have to think about it more! But yeah, I’m with Patti. I don’t want to sound like I’m using creepy adoption talk, but I’m so glad L is with you rather than some other adoptive family, because she really is amazing and part of an amazing family.
Yeah, I guess if you’re the parent of a mixed race bio child (as I am), you don’t have to make a big deal about it since it will come naturally – exposure to food, people, culture, and probably language as well. Though I do think you have to work at it some – at least I do, because I’m lazy. Anyways I love your post and your “Wow” and “Wounded” posts stirred up emotional memories of our first day/week with our adopted son.
I struggle with this. You know I agree about the obligation of adoptive parents, and I am ensuring that both of my children learn Chinese, and hoping we can afford to take them to China-my son definitely identifies as Chinese due to his foster parents- even if he isn’t racially.
But my niece and nephew are half Greek and will be the first ones in their family to have no experience with the language, culture or orthodox religion. Their parents want them to be “regular Americans,” and refuse to send them to Greek classes. This concerns me. So I’m not sure how I feel about bio parents being off the hook. But then, I’m from Chicago, where everyone goes to Hebrew/Polish/Croation/Bulgarian/Chinese school on the weekends-or did when I was growing up.
I do agree the obligation is more serious in international adoption, just not sure about the degree… ~lmc
this is really interesting because my husband and i are immigrants and so our kids are first generation and we want them to be connected to our native culture- but since we are so disassociated from our native culture we have been lax about teaching them much about their roots. As june says- part of us assumes that they will absorb something along the way. I am consciously trying to get them to learn some of our native language more from the point of view that bilingualism has so many benefits rather than a connection to a culture that even i have a hard time identifying with… but we also want to adopt and from our native country and i wonder if we will be so lax if that happens or will we find ways to stay connected more.. thanks for the food for thought.
Interesting, thanks! I was really interested in your reply because you are raising both a biracial biological daughter and a daughter adopted from China.
I guess the only caveat I’d add is that this doesn’t let people ADOPTING biracial children off the hook. It really has more to do with family composition than anything else. Or am I overthinking this?
A bit OT but I let DD off the Chinese lessons because she had difficulty processing written text in English and I didn’t want to lay one more complication on her. I suspect a combination of the wiring getting a bit thrown by the sudden change of linguistic enviro and perhaps some natural processing quirks. To this day, while a wonderful thinker and student, she is an atrocious speller and the reading was not really in place till the beginning of Grade 5 (quite late). She is now having a terrible time with French. I wonder if people think I’m denying her her culture, though! I just had to make that particular call and in there is anyone in my shoes, just share our story.
As an adoptee, I find it sort of interesting that you don’t feel as obligated to expose your half Asian biological child to their heritage/s as much as you do your adopted child. In thinking about having my own children (who will be half Korean, as my husband is caucasian), and after everything I’ve experienced as an adoptee, I’d find it REALLY important to expose my children to their heritage/s. Probably just as much as I would for an adopted child. I think regardless of whether or not you’re adopted, it’s just as important to understand your heritage and your roots, because adopted or not, it still makes up you and your identity.
I’d love to know your thoughts on this blog post (it’s not my blog) http://2happy.typepad.com/
I am going to do my best to refrain from doing a Mommy driveby, but I will go so far as to say I disagree. L’s names belong to her and it isn’t my place to take them away. They are the only things (besides her clothing) that came with her when she joined our family. She knew her name and I can’t imagine calling her something different.
Before her adoption, we struggled with how to name L. I wrote a post explaining our choice shortly after we adopted her here: http://american-family.org/2007/03/12/ls-name/ Go read that if you are curious, because she has 4 legal names and it would take a lot of space to explain it here. (Also, none of her legal names begin with L.)
Since then, we have only ever called L “L”, which was the name she knew in her orphanage (aka her previous home). When I explain it to her now, I tell her that she came to us with her Chinese names Y Q and her nickname L. I chose the name R for her and Mr. A gave her his last name. Whether she will one day care that we each gave her a name, I don’t really know.
Recently, Mr. A and I have discussed removing the “american” name we gave her by legally changing her name to only her Chinese names + Mr. A’s last name, but we have tabled that discussion for now because I kind of feel like we should let her decide. The name I gave her (Ramona) doesn’t seem like her at all and I can’t imagine ever calling her that.
I should also say that we were quite lucky that “L” is similar to several “american” names, is easy to spell and pronounce. That made our decision much easier. .
Your post makes a lot of sense to me. Both my wife and I are first generation Chinese immigrants. We do enroll our kids in a Chinese language school on weekends. But if we were to live in a small town without a Chinese language school, it would be fine with us that our kids don’t go to one. Also, our kids hate Chinese language school. I am pretty sure they will never make their kids go to one when they are parents. It’s a tortue for them because of the teachers and the amount of homework assignments. Your post finally made me understand why so many adoptive parents do what they do with their adoptive children’s heritage.
Heh, I don’t know that you should generalize the choices my husband and I make to those other adoptive parents make. Generally speaking, our point of view puts us on the fringes of what most adoptive think is acceptable/required.
Also, I wouldn’t bet to much money that your children won’t find value in their children learning Chinese. Mr. A hated Chinese school too (see archives), but we send our kids every week. There are many other 2nd generation parents who are there with us. Heritage schools tend to be kind of crappy and not very effective at both teaching Chinese and meeting the needs of families who don’t speak Chinese at home, though. Hopefully, as more 2nd generation parents send their kids, things will improve.
Hello! (i have to say as an adoptive mother of multi-racial children, you have given me a lot of think about. just came across your blog and will be returning often for some good thinking time.)
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I think I disagree with you about biological mixed-race children, and the exposure to (both, but particularly the minority) culture/race. Just because you gave birth to the child and the child might not have experienced the trauma of separation, does not mean that they’ll be immune from navigating the obstacle course of race and culture.
The most concrete example I’ve seen of this problem arising is with children who are mixed race, but raised by the majority culture parent (i.e. Obama). He clearly had to navigate through black culture on his own. It’s a tough tough task, to make sure the children don’t feel like outsiders in their own country.
Well, and taking your argument further, I think the needs of a child depend on their needs, not on theory or past exposure. Your explanation here sounds a bit dangerously close (to my ears) of arguing that if you only had enough money to send L or M to camp (or college), you’d send L, because she’d experienced trauma (partially through your choices). I think the right way to navigate that decision is to decide who would need/benefit more from the opportunity. That might be influenced by their pasts, but it might not.
(and, I hope that you take these comments as a discussion, and not as a drive-by. You have the perfect right to make the decisions about your children the way you want to).
To me an interesting point that can be made is that many people adopting same-race, same-country kids can be faced with the same issues.
Years ago my boss was an adoptive parent of two children who’d been adopted through state foster care as preschoolers. Everyone involved was white, but there were large and obvious class and cultural differences between the adoptive parents and the children’s family of origin. The adoptive parents changed both kids’ names, because (they felt) their original names were clear markers of their lower-class origins, and having those names would make the kids “stand out” in a negative way in the world they were to be living in.
So the question your post brings to my mind is whether adoptive parents of same-race, same-country children share the obligation to keep their children in touch with their culture of origin, in situations where that culture is so different, not racially, but socio-economically?
Although white kids can “pass”, looks-wise, as being born into their adoptive parents’ class, will raising them in isolation from their birth culture cause them pain in later life if/when they seek out their origins and find that they don’t fit in, similar to what internationally adopted folks can feel as adults?
I’m not asking rhetorically–I would really like to know how others deal with this.
My own adopted and bio kids are biracial, and living in a bi-racial home, extended families, etc. and in a diverse area, I haven’t had to sweat too much to see that they are exposed to both race’s cultures in the large sense.
But (of course there has to be one)in truth I would be hard pressed to expose my adopted child to the culture he was born into in a narrower sense, which is very different from ours for reasons of socio-economic class, not race.