ADOPTION AND RACIAL/CULTURAL SOCIALIZATION IN DIVERSE ADOPTIVE FAMILIES: ASSOCIATIONS WITH DEMOGRAPHIC FACTORS, ACADEMIC OUTCOMES, AND PARENT-CHILD RELATIONSHIPS

Abstract

As families in the United States (U.S.) are increasingly diverse in race and family structure, it is essential to understand family socialization around identity and possible associations with family relationships and child development. In this study, we investigated adoption communicative openness (i.e., how parents talk about adoption) and racial/cultural socialization among 96 adoptive families (46% completed transracial adoption) with lesbian, gay, and heterosexual parents and school-age children (M_age = 8 years) who lived across the U.S. We found that these practices (described by parents) were associated with children’s reports of parent-child relationships and children’s teachers reports of their academic functioning. We discuss the importance of considering distinct forms of identity socialization practices, as reported by different informants, among adoptive families diverse in race and parental sexual orientation, and as related to associations with individual outcomes and family relationships. We describe how our results could inform future research, policy, and practice.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. Color evasiveness is a more appropriate term as it does not equate blindness with ignorance (Syed et al., 2018) but we use colorblind to represent the broader literature cited here.

2. We compared a 2- (i.e., same- and different-sex) and 3-group (i.e., L, G, and heterosexual) model. Results, however, were generally the same. Thus, to retain power, we report models comparing same- and different-sex parent households rather than all three groups.

3. Throughout the results and discussion sections all references to academic functioning, in the context of our findings, is teacher-reported, which was removed for clarity and succinctness.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the American Psychological Association.