Inside Transracial Adoption moves beyond the debate to offer real solutions to real challenges. Steinberg & Hall's moving personal stories are encouraging and supportive and reinforce the message that race matters, racism is alive, and families built transracially can develop strong and binding ties. A good read, filled with warmth and humor, this book offers families and professionals insight into the experience of multiracial adoptive families.
If a book could realistically carry a thirty-odd word title, then this book's might be something like How to Get to the Place Where It Feels Almost Fun to Let People Wonder How You and Your Kids Could So Clearly Belong to One Another When You Look So Different!
Inside Transracial Adoption provides creative, confident, pro-active, and provocative guidance for parents who are experienced veterans or who are considering transracial adoption for the first time. Whether through domestic or international adoption the authors offer direction for building close, loving, and very real families consisting of individuals who are proud and culturally competent members of differing races.
What's "normal?" Where do we live and go to school? Does class have an influence? How can parents become aware and informed and honest enough to combat racism both inside and outside their families? How does a child of color develop racial identity, feel that he "fits" in both culture of family and culture of origin, and build confidence as an adult of his race when raised by white parents?
Using a careful blend of academic research, social reality and personal experience, Steinberg and Hall have honed their experiences working with thousands of transracial and transcultural adoptive families and as the recipients of three federal grants on transracial adoption, to offer detailed, step-by-step, get-real guidance for families about tough issues they will have to face related to race and adoption. They do so with humor and pathos, confrontation and empathy, mixed liberally with the gutsy panache for which they are well known in the U.S. adoption community This is a must-read book that pulls no punches. It is destined to become the classic guide to living Inside Transracial Adoption!
About the authors Gail Steinberg and Beth Hall
Beth and Gail are the co-founding directors of Pact, An Adoption Alliance, as well as adoptive parents to children of different races and ethnicities. The authors of numerous articles, they lecture across the country and are committed to serving children first.
Comments from Readers
"Steinberg and Hall share prescriptive insights based on well-documented research and personal experience. Their children provide a unique filter through which the parents learn to appreciate the child's birth culture and the child matures to embrace a multicultural world view."
** Gloria King, Executive Director, Black Adoption Placement and Research Center
"The authors' insights, compassion, and willingness to tackle both the joys and challenges of these pioneer families makes this a must read."
** Susan Soon-Keum Cox, Vice President, Public Policy, Holt International Children's Services, transracial adoptee.
"Eloquent, interesting, and intensely practical, you can't read this book without thinking differently about your own life as a child, a parent, and a member of our diverse society."
** Lois Melina, author of Raising Adopted Children, Making Sense of Adoption, and The Open Adoption Experience
"This is the book we've been waiting for. Brimming with facts and examples, challenge and inspiration, and plenty of hard-nosed practical advice, Inside Transracial Adoption provides detailed guidance for parents raising children in transracial or cross-cultural families. Whether our transracially adopted children were born here or abroad, we are raising them in a race-conscious society, and Steinberg and Hall have mapped the territory where race and adoption intersect. What an achievement!"
** Amy Klatzkin, editor of A Passage to the Heart: Writings from Families with Children from China.
"Sensitively written by two dynamic women who have personal as well as professional experience with transracial adoptions, Inside Transracial Adoption is full of insights and practical information. It's a must read for all adoptive parents."
** Mary Sheedy Kurcinka, author, Raising Your Spirited Child and Kids, Parents and Power Struggles
"Every adoption professional should read this book. I found new thoughtful information in every chapter."
** Ada White, Director of Adoptions, Child Welfare League of America