|
Recently, citizens of Sweden have adopted children from approximately 55 different countries.
|
|
|
|
Research on Cultural Competence of Adoptive Parents |
|
|
|
Vonk, M. E., & Massatti, R. R. (2008). Factors related to transracial adoptive parents’ levels of cultural competence. Adoption Quarterly, 11, 204 - 226.
Background
Approaches to transracial adoptions have changed over the years. Adoption professionals used to encourage parents to take a “color-blind” approach where they emphasized how the child belongs in the family and minimized any sense of the child being different from other family members. During this era very little was done to educate most transracially adopted children about their cultural origins. However, as these children grew older concerns were raised about this approach. Now prospective adoptive parents are often encouraged to consider how they will maintain connections to their child’s culture early on in the process of deciding to adopt. Although the nature and intensity of preadoption education varies between agencies, it is common for adoption professionals to encourage adoptive parents to think about cultural connections and being what is often called a “conspicuous” family. Despite the use of the term “cultural competence”, the idea of what it means to maintain connections to a culture is often vaguely defined and has been little research. This study is a start to filling that gap.
Theory of Cultural Competence
The part of this article that may be the most useful to adoptive parents and adoption professionals was the explanation of a model of cultural competence for transracial adoptive parents that the first author (Vonk) developed a few years ago. The model identifies three different areas of cultural competence:
1. Racial Awareness: Includes parents’ attitudes that will help their children develop positive racial and ethnic identity. These might include understanding a child’s racial identity, the role of race/ethnicity in their child’s life, and the potential effects of racism and discrimination.
2. Multicultural Planning: Includes the different ways parents help their children participate in the culture of their race/ethnicity. This includes the many cultural activities that adoptive parents often talk about such as learning native language or traditional dance, going to cultural festivals in the community, reading about the culture and history, etc. Within this category greater weight is placed on direct experiences of the child’s culture (such as participating in events with the local cultural community) rather than merely reading or learning about the culture.
3. Survival Skills: Includes actively helping your child develop the skills to deal with discrimination and racism. The emphasis here is on active coping skills, not just telling your child to ignore the situation or telling them that it doesn’t matter because you love them. It is very much the opposite of a color-blind approach.
This breakdown of different components of cultural competence can be useful to adoptive parents and adoption professionals. Rather than grouping all culturally-related activities together, the distinction between these three components can be used to identify gaps. Many parents find it relatively easy to do multicultural planning. This is often the “fun” part. Even here, though, a distinction is made between experiencing the culture versus just learning about it. There are many groups organized by both adoptive parents and adoption agencies that hold events where they incorporate children’s birth cultures into the events. However, that type of “learning about” is very different from participating in actual cultural communities where children interact with people who are being raised in the community.
The designation of racial awareness and survival skills as their own components is also an important distinction to make. It underscores how multicultural awareness does not build our children’s skills for dealing with racism and discrimination. The descriptions of these components also underscore the fact that both parents and children need to engage in awareness and survival skills.
Method
As for the study itself, the authors have developed a survey measure to assess adoptive parents’ level of cultural competence (the Transracial Adoption Parenting Scale). They used this survey with a sample of 1,411 parents who had adopted children from China or Korea through Holt International between 1991-2000. Although the sample included more people who had adopted recently (35% had children 0-3 years old and 33% had children 4-6 years old), there were also older children included (19% 7-10 years old and the remaining 14% older than 10 included 11 who are now adults). This is a strength of the study because it captures how experiences and attitudes may change over time. The experiences parents have when their children are cute toddlers may be different than when their children are older and moving out into the world on their own. It would have been better if more parents of older children were represented in the sample, but this is still better than a sample that only includes parents of young children.
The study measured both cultural competence and actual behaviors associated with cultural competence. This is another strength of the study as we don’t always act upon our beliefs or attitudes.
Main Findings
In their analyses of the responses the authors found that the following factors were related to cultural competence (in order of importance): participation in post-adoption support groups, being a mother, having traveled to the child’s country of origin for the adoption, post-adoption contact with adoption professionals, absence of biological children in the family, and higher family income. An interesting point was that while many people express concern about living in a non-diverse area, these surveys did not find a relationship between where the family lives and cultural competence. This might be due to some imprecision in the question about where the family lives, but it is still surprising.
Although there may be some issues with the people who responded to the survey being different from people who did not respond (what in research we call a response or self-selection bias), the findings are still important. Having a good measure of cultural competence is a critical contribution to research on this topic. This is a solid springboard for further research.
|
© 2010 Informed Adoption Advocates
Joomla! is Free Software released under the GNU/GPL License.
|
|
