In the past days I’ve been writing about how your adoption decisions may be different when you have children already in your family to consider. One of these questions is whether you want your children to share the same ethnicity?
Many parents believe that their child will feel a deeper sense of belonging if there is someone in the family who looks like them. I admit to sometimes wishing I looked like others in my family, and I wasn’t even adopted.
However, a recent article in Adoptive Families magazine suggests that it may be less necessary than was formerly believed. Many adult adoptees raised in white communities and schools report feeling that there was “something wrong with them”. But I think that if you live in a diverse community, and, importantly, if parents themselves have friends of different races, the child will know you truly accept and value diversity, are aren’t just telling her it doesn’t matter because she’s your daughter.
Another consideration with ethnicity is whether you can do justice to another culture in your home. It does take energy to connect children to those of their heritage. Will you do two heritage family camps or two heritage day camps each summer? Drive children to two sets of language or dancing lessons? Remember that you will want to celebrate your own and your spouse’s ethnic heritages as well, and those of any birth children you have.
Would one child have a much richer connection to her community than another, possibly feeling that one community was a favorite?
If your family is now all the same race, how would your other children deal with being a visibly different family? If there are now two races in your family, you will be even more visible and receive even more stares and questions if you add a third race.
I am of the opinion that most younger kids don’t mind and most older kids can deal with it. But it depends how secure your children are already. Preteens and teens want badly to fit in. It may be that when they are with a sibling of color they will be treated differently. Again, I am of the opinion that becoming aware of racism and having a chance to process it with his family, is very valuable for a child who will enter a diverse society.
It may not be possible to adopt another child of the same ethnicity even if you wanted to. Parents may now be too old for certain countries’ adoption criteria, or the country may have closed to international adoption. In the U.S., some birth mothers want a family where their child would be the only child. You may need to be open to a child of another race or ethnicity.