Melissa and Emily Adoption Law

About Melissa and Emily:

Emily is a Portland native with a Bachelors degree in Social Work and a Masters degree in Marriage and Family Therapy. She has eight years of adoption experience; six years as an adoptive family case manager in a domestic open adoption agency. This agency was a SNAC (Special Needs Adoption Coalition) member and also placed foster care children into adoptive homes. For the last two years Emily has worked in international adoption as a program director and family education coordinator for an agency that recently became a member of SNAC. She also has ten years of experience working with children grieving the death of a parent or sibling. Emily is married and has two beautiful children- a girl who is four and a boy who is two.

Melissa has been married for 27 years and has four children; two birth children who are 25 and 20 years old, and two adopted children who are 14 and 11 years old. Melissa was adopted at the age of 11 from foster care. She is bi-racial African-American and Caucasian and her adopted mother is Caucasian. She has an undergraduate degree in psychology and a master’s degree in social work. Melissa worked at a community mental health clinic providing crisis emergency services and brief therapy to adults and children. Later she transferred to a team that provided therapy to adopted, foster, and birth children and their families. In 1995, Melissa became a founding board member and a clinician for a small, private non-profit mental health agency that works with foster and adopted children.

Adoption of children from foster care (other than Native Americans) is subject to the Multiethnic Placement Act of 1994 (MEPA) which prohibits the delay or denial of a child’s foster or adoptive placement solely on the basis of race, color, or national origin; and requires that state agencies make diligent efforts to recruit foster and adoptive parents who represent the racial and ethnic backgrounds of children in foster care.

The intention of MEPA was to enable minority children to be adopted from foster care in greater numbers. Now, 14 years later the Evan B Donaldson Research Institute recently published a report Finding Families for African American Children: The role of Race and Law in Adoption from Foster Care that calls for major changes in MEPA to “better serve the needs of children of color and to improve their prospects of moving to permanent, loving homes.”

Adam Pertman (Executive Director of the Evan B Donaldson Research Institute) stated that many adoption professionals felt that MEPA was not working; that the law wasn’t doing what it set out to do, and that it “tied peoples hands” when it came to being able to educate parents about race (NPR interview). Do you agree with these two statements?

Melissa: I have noticed in the past few years that DHS (Department of Human Services) workers are not talking about race and culture anymore. In the past we would review a child’s needs at an adoption committee and include their racial needs. Now those conversations don’t happen. I also don’t see that social work professionals are being educated to address the needs of families who adopt transracially.

Emily: We do not educate families or social workers in the domestic realm about issues in transracial adoption. As adoption agencies we need to do a better job of educating our families so they are aware of issues that may arise, and are prepared to offer their children strong role models from the children’s ethnic and cultural backgrounds.

Melissa: I think DHS workers do not completely understand the MEPA law. They are afraid of lawsuits or getting into trouble. This slows down the process for children. When I am working with a child to prepare them for adoption I have noticed that a caseworker may not explore all possible placement ideas for a child. They may not think about guardianship by a relative because they believe the child has to have to have an adoptive family. Unfortunately we have a serious lack of minority families ready to adopt.

Emily: I agree. I often find that DHS workers are not well-rounded in their understanding of laws regarding the placement of children. And the lack of minority adoptive families is one of the difficulties that we face in the adoption community across the board. We need to find ways to encourage minority families to adopt.

Melissa: I do not think MEPA gives guidance about how to recruit foster and adoptive families of color. Furthermore, Oregon simply has no real recruitment and retention plan for families.

Emily: This is also my understanding. I think adoption professionals and government agencies need to look at the reasons why families are not seeking to adopt children from foster care. Families have a misconception about the severity of issues that children in foster care face. Coming from an agency whose largest program is Ethiopia, I know there are families willing to adopt minority children and even older children. We need to help families see that there are children here they can adopt instead of going over seas.

Melissa: I agree. A few years ago DHS sent adoption workers to minority churches and other events to try and encourage minority families to foster and adopt. I think we need to talk to minority families and find out why they are not adopting and use that information to change the recruitment policies at DHS.

Emily: Yes. Part of this education will be opening potential adoptive families’ eyes to the real needs of children in foster care and the serious need for families to adopt children in the U.S. I agree that there needs to be more outreach to the communities where minority families live so they see that they can be adoptive families.

Melissa: True. However, many families that have decided to adopt internationally believe that foster kids are far more difficult to parent then kids from out side the US.

Emily: It’s a misconception I fight every day. I know from experience that internationally adopted children come with the same and even more severe issues than children adopted from foster care but I do not think families see that. We need to change this through education.

Melissa: In my opinion the bottom line problem is racism; racism within our community and within the agencies that are charged with getting children out of foster care.

Emily: Racism is definitely a barrier, so how do we change this?

Melissa: I was at a meeting with DHS workers, attorneys, court appointed special advocates, and mental health workers and we were talking about the disproportionate number of minority children in foster care. The question was asked: Why is this so and what can we do about it? No one said a word. It was really interesting. I was one of two minorities in the room and I tell you, it was uncomfortable.

Emily:Do you think that education will help or is the issue larger than just education?

Melissa: I think first we have to confront our own “isms” and we have to be able to talk about them even if feelings get hurt. Until the professionals in the child welfare world are willing to talk we can do nothing to change this problem.

Emily: Very true.

Melissa: How hard is it going to be to talk to a DHS worker and say, “I think this 10-year-old African-American boy is stuck in foster care because you are blinded by your own racism?”

Emily: This is a difficult position to take and may make the worker even more resistant to listening to anything else you have to say.

Melissa: Very true, but we must start these conversations. I lived for 11 years in foster care and I can tell you that is no way to grow up.

Emily: I agree, so how do we start the conversation without shutting people down?

Melissa: I believe we need to begin with the supervisors and have a multi-ethnic education team to work with DHS caseworkers.

Emily: That is a great place to start.

Melissa: The problem is that we are not talking about race at the state level, which I think is particularly the fault of MEPA. As time has gone on we no longer talk about race and culture in regards to children’s needs. DHS is a very reactionary agency. Further, there are very few minorities working for DHS. I am not saying it is impossible to address this issue, I am saying someone outside the agency has to bring it to them.

Emily: I don’t necessarily agree that MEPA stops professionals from talking about race and culture, because in my experience with DHS adoption committees this was definitely an issue that came up. I was often asked how the adoptive family would be able to maintain the child’s race and culture in their home.

Melissa: In the past, when a DHS worker was writing up a description of a child for adoptive families, they added information about the child’s race and culture. At committee I often presented a child, and if they were a minority I would talk about the adoptive family needing to be educated about the specific needs of that minority child. Since MEPA, these conversations are shut down at committee.

Emily: Maybe it has changed in the last two years, but that was definitely not my experience for the six years I was advocating for adoptive families. I’ve even had a family not selected because another family was better able to provide continued connections to the child’s culture or race. My job now is to help educate parents about their adopted children. We need to better educate parents and help them find strong connections in their community that will give them role models for their children and the ability to incorporate their child’s culture, race and ethnicity into their family in a natural way.

Melissa: Unfortunately, I don’t think it is just about education. We live in a racist world for one thing. Further, I believe it is very difficult for a non-minority to fully understand the needs of a minority. One of my children is very light-skinned (my birth daughter). Although she is 25 we are still gaining understanding about her experience growing up.

Emily: This is true, but as you pointed out, not even a minority family can fully understand their children’s issues because each of us experience the world in different ways depending on who we interact with on a daily basis.

Melissa: Also, we need to make life-altering changes when we adopt transracially. Our adopted boys are half Latino and we have to live in a way that will expose them to their culture. I can’t live in a community that has few if any Latino people and expect them to develop a positive attitude about their culture.

Emily: I think we need to do our very best to provide education, guidance and support to families so they can do exactly what you’re suggesting.

Melissa: And at the end of the day, we just do our best. With my daughter, I thought she should go to school with people of color. When she was in school it was a huge struggle and I thought we had made a mistake. Now at 25, I hear from her that she feels comfortable around people of color even more so then some multiracial children who have darker skin than she does.

Emily: Exactly. We just need to do our best and hope that the parents’ influence is stronger than societies. And that the parents who are parenting transracially and all their children will make an impact on society that changes everyone’s perspective.

Melissa: Very true. That is the hope for our future.

Kim Park Nelson part one

Interview by Livia Montana
read part two

Livia Montana: You’re working on an oral history project with Korean adopted adults. How did you get interested in the project?

Kim Park Nelson: I’d been thinking about it for quite a long time, but I actually started it in 2002 as my Ph.D. dissertation project. I’d seen research that was supposed to be about adoptees but that didn’t really take adoptees’ voices into account. For instance, there’s a lot of adoption-related social work research where researchers would ask parents about their kids. Those answers were then used to represent the point of view of adoptees. Of course that’s not actually the point of view of adoptees, that’s the point of view of adoptive parents. So my initial intent was to work on a project that focused on the experiences of Korean adoptees.

LM: Why did you choose oral history in particular? Why not just conduct regular interviews?

KPN: My goal is to have adoptee voices heard. But when you interview people you’re asking them to talk about the subjects that you’re interested in, so you don’t actually get to hear what they’re interested in speaking about. That’s why I sit down and ask people to tell their life story, and to tell it in whatever way they feel comfortable with.

LM: What are some of the research questions that you see transracial adoptees regularly asked?

KPN: There are a couple of themes that a lot of researchers seem to be really concerned about. One main question is, “How well-adjusted are you?” Another is, “What was it like for you to grow up as a person of color in a white environment?” Of course these things are important, but I think you get a different set of responses if you only ask what everybody else has asked as opposed to asking someone to speak about what’s important to them. My expectation was that not everyone had the same story and that turned out to be completely true. Though there’s no real uniformity in the oral histories I collected, I feel that I didn’t miss a lot because of the method I chose.

LM: How do you think this research you’re doing is going to affect the lives of Korean adoptees?

KPN: That’s always the soul-searching question for anyone who’s an academic. Academics are such a tiny part of society and life, so I certainly can’t expect that my work is going to touch all adoptees. But I do hope that adoptees who do find my work are helped by it; that it helps them see that our story is important and that we do have something interesting to say. I want to believe that the work I’m doing is going to make life better for adoptees in the future and for adoptees right now, too. One place I can really see that happening is in the class I taught about Korean adoption history at the University of Minnesota. It’s the first class of its kind. Many of the students in that class were adoptees. My hope is that it was empowering for them to hear their history for the first time. So many adoptees don’t know anything about adoption, and so many Korean adoptees don’t know anything about Korea. One of the things that was really nice for me about teaching the class was that I could package the information for students to easily access. I’m very proud that each one of those students now has the tools to be as much of an expert on history, content, and social issues around adoption as anyone who’s doing graduate level research. That’s information I was able to offer to them that very few people have right now. I think it’s important for any group that’s out of the mainstream or marginalized to know the history and policy that’s being written about them. If you never hear about yourself it’s difficult to develop a comprehensive idea about your identity.

LM: In the fifties adoptive parents were told to concentrate on Americanizing Korean adoptees. In the seventies they were told that the “love is color blind” approach was the best. How would you categorize today’s approach to Korean adoption and transracial adoption in general?

KPN: While there’s certainly an interest with acquainting adoptees with their birth cultures, in a lot of ways I think that the “love is color blind” approach is stronger than ever because we’re firmly embedded in a society that’s actually less willing to talk about race than it was in the sixties. The popular notion is that race doesn’t matter. In fact, there’s been such a backlash against the idea of race-based identity that if you talk about it you risk being categorized as a racist yourself. I think it’s good that parents are being coached to get their kids involved in education or arts to try to connect them back to their birth cultures, but it can be misleading because I don’t believe there’s a magic bullet to figuring out racial, cultural, or national differences in adoptive families.

read part two

Kim Park Nelson part two

Interview by Livia Montana
read part one

Livia Montana: You’ve spoken in the past about some of the pros and cons of culture camps. How can culture camps be improved?

Kim Park Nelson: The material at culture camp is often filtered through American adoptive parents, so they think it’s cool to teach something that’s “traditional.” Maybe that’s fine for little kids, but a lot of culture camps go through high school and there’s a lot more that adoptees could be learning. For instance, Korean pop culture is huge and it’s extremely popular all over Asia—there’s so much in Korean pop culture that kids would enjoy. I also think it’s important for adoptees to know about contemporary Korea—it’s actually a very technologically and economically advanced society. In addition, if adoptees intend to pursue some element of their Korean identity with other Korean people, they need some important skills. They need to know about Korean cultural norms and social norms, as well as Korean history and immigration history. They need to learn about how Korean communities operate and what it takes to participate in them.

Actually, I think there are many adoptees that experience camps as traumatizing because the social world that adoptees live in is so segregated—you can get used to being the “only one.” So then when you are in a room that’s filled with Koreans, it feels freaky because you’ve been so well-socialized to be in entirely white environments. Maybe that underlines how much we need these camps. But to me what it also underlines is that we live in a very segregated society.

LM: I read an interview where you said what’s going on in transracial adoption is a microcosm of society. Can you talk more about that?

KPN: I think that a lot of the policy that goes on in transracial international adoption and transracial domestic adoption is based on gender and race perceptions. For instance, Asian girls have been in high demand for quite a long time. To me that seems connected to the stereotype of Asian woman being passive, obedient, intelligent—things that parents want in a child. The children that seem to have the hardest time being adopted in the United States are African-American boys. The stereotypes about African-American males is that they’re going to be difficult, they’re going to act out, and they’re probably going to wind up having drug problems or being criminals. So there’s this “love is color blind” rhetoric, but the adoption agencies certainly respond to the wants and desires of adoptive parents.

LM: You spoke before about how difficult it can be discuss topics around race because of the popular notion that race doesn’t matter. How does that impact your work?

KPN: One of the things that’s very difficult for me in doing adoption research and also being adopted is that there’s a lot of interest right now in the conflict between adoptees and adoptive parents. So much of what happens in adoption research ends up being framed in that way. I think there are adoptees that view transracial adoption as a racist act. What winds up happening is that adoptive parents feel like they’re being accused of being racist by adopting. It’s a lot more complicated than that. Partly what’s going on is that adoptive parents are unwilling to look at the institutions that they’ve been involved in and see what’s wrong with the picture. Another problem is language. You can’t use the word “race” without people getting upset, but yet there is a racial element in transracial adoption and there is a lot of racial inequity tied up in the practices of transracial and transnational adoption. For instance, most people who are adopting from overseas are white and they’re mostly adopting people that aren’t white. I don’t think that that’s some sort of coincidence. There’s clearly a power differential that, unfortunately, is also racial.

One thing that’s really sad about the United States international adoption policy is how it’s participated in convincing whole populations of women across the world that they’re not worthy of being mothers: that any white woman in the United States can be a better mother than them. I don’t think most adoptive parents would say that a rich parent is better than a poor parent, but that’s essentially what the transnational adoption policy for the last fifty years has been based on. This has been going on for so long in Korea that the attitude has been internalized among poor women there. And that breaks my heart.