By Dr. Jane A. Liedtke, founder of "Our Chinese Daughters Foundation" (www.ocdf.org)

Introduction

Families with children adopted internationally now have a better understanding of the importance of giving their child a multi-cultural context for their lives and a full understanding/tools to deal with issues of adoption. We base this on years of research and experience with multi-racial adoptions in America and emerging research/documentation on the part of the Korean adoptive community about their experiences growing up being "adopted from Asia."

There are really two areas to be concerned with and we don't always need to focus on the two together. In fact, sometimes it is healthy to approach them separately. First, your child was born in a different country and culture. And, that race, culture, ethnicity is what they bring to your family making your family more multi-cultural/multi-national. A German-American family adopting a Chinese child is no longer solely a German-American or "American" family. They now are also a family with Chinese heritage and culture. When everyone in the family thinks of themselves as sharing that Chinese heritage and culture, the adopted child will have a very supportive and healthy environment. This helps them be themselves and desire to learn more about the country of their birth. Second, your child is adopted and there are issues related to being adopted that are separate from cultural heritage. Sometimes adoption conditions/circumstances are based in societal and cultural practices abroad but we should not force the two together all the time. The child needs to form a positive identity about their birth country AND a positive identity about being adopted. Developmentally, children may approach one without thinking about the other or be "ready" to deal with one before they are "ready" to deal with the other.

Preventative Medicine or Building the "Toolbox"

Often I have referred to the practice of traveling with children to their birth country to learn about their culture and heritage as "preventative medicine" or the experience as creating a "toolbox" for your child. Travel itself is as an educational experience for children and a valuable means for creating dialog and learning about culture and adoption. Exploring your child's birth country while they are elementary school age sends them a signal that their birth country is important to your family. This is a very different message than attending once a year a cultural heritage day at a special holiday.

The early travel experience allows the child to have information to share with their peers at school about where they are from. This is different than reading books, seeing movies, and being an observer of life that is far away from their daily reality. They need to be a participant in their culture and see it, touch it, smell it. Then as they encounter questions about themselves or are asked by peers, or perhaps even teased - they will have a host of things to say about being from that country based on their own personal experiences.

Through their birth country visit children begin to add more to their toolbox and the variety of tools and variety of strategies they have for dealing with what life will throw in their way is the key. Building the cultural toolbox, just like learning a foreign language, is best done when the child has that natural exploratory advantage - early developmental stages. This is to avoid the resistance which may come as children get older and have more questions than they have answers for or the questions are more complex than their toolbox of experiences can resolve. So, the toolbox gives them the context, the visual images, the experiences, and the confidence to handle new questions.

If their toolbox is limited to what we tell them, such as their adoption story, or a video on "Big Bird in China" or "Big Bird in Japan" we are limiting their ability to function and we are not providing them experiential tools - seeing is believing! Life in China is not like Big Bird in China. Big Bird gets to see famous places in China but Big Bird does not deal with societal issues, modern life and traditional culture - and how they mix together. Children are very very perceptive and they take in the environment even if they don't use all the information at that very moment.

The most important thing a child returning to China (or to any birth country) can come home with is being in love with their toolbox - liking their country of birth and feeling good about their experience there. It does not mean that everything in the toolbox will be perfect positive images or experiences, but they will be real and they will be "theirs" and not something someone else told them. (1 of 4, to be continued...)