feature articles

Families with Children From China, Northern California
 

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An Adoption Talk at School 
by Amy Klatzkin 

© Amy Klatzkin 2000

In the first months of first grade at my daughter’s school, each child has a special day when she or he gets to make important choices (like who gets to stand in line first) and to help the teacher in prominent ways. The child of the day is also interviewed by the class, and the teacher records the answers on a big poster. My daughter was the first of two FCC girls in her class to have a special day, and inevitably some questions about adoption came up—although interestingly they were afterthoughts. My daughter’s poster was finished and her time was up when one of the children asked, “Weren’t you adopted from China?” 

I got a message on my answering machine that afternoon from her English teacher saying that adoption had come up at the end of the interview and that my daughter had handled the situation with confidence and pride. The teacher had then read to the class a book called Families Are Different, in which a girl adopted transracially from Korea talks about her white parents, her Korean sister, and the occasional discomfort of being different from other families. But then she looks around the neighborhood and notices that while in some families everyone looks alike (even the dog), in others there are many differences. All families, she concludes, are held together “by a special kind of glue called love.” 

I was glad the teacher had taken the initiative to read the book, and I was gratified to hear that my daughter had enjoyed her special day. So I was surprised, when I picked Ying Ying up that afternoon, to see her looking so sad. It turns out that the interview was fine, and she had enjoyed talking about herself and didn’t mind the questions about adoption. She loved the book and was pleased that her teacher had read it to the whole class. But there was still a problem. 

One child had asked if the two girls adopted from Korea were real sisters. And the teacher had answered, “They’re kind of sisters.” 

It’s possible that no one in the class but my daughter picked up on the subtext of that answer. But there’s no question that some adopted kids catch all the nuances when grownups talk about adoption. Mine has her radar fine-tuned. She knew the teacher would never call girls born into their family “kind of sisters.” And she knew what that meant: that the teacher probably had some ambivalence about just how “real” those sisters were. 

My daughter doesn’t have a sister, but she has adopted friends who do. Weren’t Betty and Zoe real sisters, she asked? 

I explained that sometimes grownups who aren’t in adoptive families aren’t always good at answering questions about adoption. What’s confusing, I explained, is that just one minute before Zoe was adopted, she and Betty weren’t sisters, but that from the moment of adoption on, they were sisters forever. And by the way, would she like me to come talk to the class about adoption next week? 

At the beginning of the school year I’d given all my daughter’s teachers a copy of the adoption materials FAIR put together for schools a few years ago (see Linda Park’s article on p. 31). The English teacher had invited me to give a classroom talk on adoption, but I hadn’t scheduled a date yet. I wished I’d done it before my daughter’s special day, but after was going to have to do. 

I was nervous about talking to the class and talked to several parents who’d done it before to get some suggestions. Then I talked with Ying Ying. She had a terrific idea. She has a doll called Emma who was made to look like her when she was one year old. “Let’s dress Emma in my orphanage clothes,” she said, “and we can talk about Emma’s adoption.” 

And that’s what we did. The class loved it, and everyone wanted to hold the “baby.” My daughter got to be a participant in the discussion rather than the subject of it, which really pleased her. We talked first about lots of different types of families, and how some look alike and some don’t. In a school where a third of the children are biracial, it’s not just transracial adoptees who look different from one or both parents. We used this common realization as a springboard to adoption. 

Together we made two lists on the board. On one side we listed what babies need: diapers, bottles, food, clothes, hugs, love, and so on. On the other side we listed what parents do: feed, clothe, and hold babies, change diapers, give medicine, and so on. Interestingly, I had to add to the parents’ list the one thing that would help me show what was different in adoption: bringing babies into the world. 

You have to be careful how you phrase this, since first-graders have a wide range of knowledge about procreation. Some six-year-olds can give accurate anatomical names to all the relevant body parts, while others know only that babies grow in a mother’s tummy. One boy in my daughter’s class insisted that babies come from the earth. I said, “Oh, that’s an interesting idea,” and redirected the discussion. 

Once we had our lists of what babies need and what parents do, I moved on to adoption. I told them an important thing to remember about adoption: that it happens for grownup reasons and that it’s never, ever a child’s fault. Birth parents sometimes have big problems (like being too young to be parents or, in the case of birth parents in China, being afraid to break rules about how many children you can have). Because of this big grownup problem, some birth parents decide that they can’t be forever parents to their child. Up on the board I put a circle around “bring babies into the world” and said of Emma, the doll, “Emma’s birth parents could bring her into the world, but they didn’t think they could do all these other things,” and I pointed to the long list of things babies need and parents do. 

“Emma’s forever parents,” I explained, “adopted her because they wanted to do all those other things for her, but they didn’t do the first thing: they didn’t bring her into the world. So Emma has two sets of real parents: her birth parents in China, whom we don’t know but who are certainly real, and her forever parents, who are also real and who are part of her real forever family.” 

I don’t know if it was the doll or the lists, but for most of the kids something clicked. They were excited to understand something concrete about adoption, and my daughter was proud of the whole thing—especially the interest everyone took in her orphanage clothes. “Those were really my clothes,” she confided to the class, to general acclaim. 

When the other FCC girl in my daughter’s class had her special day, no one asked her about adoption. They know all they want to know for now. 

What worked for my daughter and her class may not work for your child. It may not even work for mine next year, when new questions and concerns may arise. It’s hard work to keep up with our children’s changing needs. We can’t deal with the issue once and consider it done with, because adoption is a lifelong journey. We need to keep lines of communication open with our children so we’ll know (or can make educated guesses about) what issues are coming up in school and can help our children, their friends, and their teachers develop greater awareness and understanding of adoption.