Behind the International Adoption Journey

While her White adoptive parents were loving and supportive, Branco had yearned to know about her birth family since she was a little girl and started searching for them in her 20s. "It took 24 years of active searching," said the 51-year-old, an associate professor of clinical mental health counseling at Palo Alto University in California, who studies transracial adoption. Zhou and colleagues have conducted 51 qualitative, in-depth interviews with Korean American adults who became parents biologically or through adoption. Psychologists may find that therapy enables adoptees to share their struggles with bias and discrimination, which they may not have felt comfortable broaching with adoptive parents and other family members. Children adopted transracially from countries outside of the United States likely have encountered another type of verbal assault as well, called an adoption microaggression, said Amanda L. Baden, PhD, a professor of counseling at Montclair State University in New Jersey who was adopted by White parents from Hong Kong in 1969. In her research, Baden described common themes involving adoption microaggressions, which can be directed at children adopted domestically or internationally as well as their adoptive parents. In one study, involving 30 families with White parents and at least one child adopted from Korea, just nine of the families acknowledged that racial and ethnic differences had an influence on their family. A Korean American parent may choose to reengage with their culture and ethnicity after having a child, which may change the dynamics within the partnership if the other parent is White.