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I adopted from the foster care system and agree 100% with the article. I had 30 hours of training and our transracial part was about 5 minutes when the facilitator told us that you don't wash AA kids hair everyday and you may need to fix special foods for Hispanic kids... that was it. So does that sound like adequate training for people who probably have no interaction with people of color? The facilitator who was a foster parent told us that she was given no information on parenting transracially when she was trained and had to learn the hard way by experimenting on the child. After a series of bad placements the county had brought in a hair dresser to teach how to care for AA hair. By the time I went through training those classes where gone mainly because there were very few people interested in transracial placements. The state had basically set them up for failure.
You will find that agencies will be reluctant to dedicate too much of the training time to transracial parenting education because of the time factor... they feel like the abuse, neglect or drug exposure issues are higher priority. When raising a child from the foster care system I think everything is a high priority including race and having a parent who will know how to protect them from racism. If you have no experience... what do you tell you child to do if someone calls them a racist name? What if you child is treated in a different manner because of his/her race? Will you recognize it? How do you handle it if you recognize it? How do you handle friends and family who have negative things to say and treat your child as different or an outsider? This is all valid training material... you can just look at the forums to figure out what people need training on. I seriously scratch my head when I see some questions asked on the forums that should have been answered looooong before a child was placed in the home.
I think some people are embarassed to admit they don't know everything or just arrogant enough to think they do know everything.
I do not know everything. I'm black and my kids are black... I can help with that. My kids are adopted and I am not... I will need help addressing that aspect of their lives because I'm not living it or breathing it. My DH and I have taken every class we could take and thoroughly enjoyed them because it help us become better parents to our kids.
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