Birth culture is oversized in our adoption community.

Teaching Adoptees about their birth country’s culture is a significant focus in adoption-targeted events and media and has been for nearly thirty years. Camps, weekend events, magazines, television, and websites are frequently built around the birth culture concept. Unfortunately, birth culture education is often used in place of an equally, and sometimes more important, component of an Adoptee’s identity – race. We all recognize that race and birth culture are two separate things, but they are frequently lumped together in adoption resources and this generally results in the replacement of race-focused discussion. I’ll illustrate birth culture’s current role, the importance of race talks and offer some tips for talking about race with your child.

Understand that birth culture is a component of Adoptee identity. It is just that, a component – a part of a greater and more intricate whole identity. Likewise, race is also a component of an Adoptee’s identity. An important concept to understand is that the meaning and value of these two components to an Adoptee ebbs and flows over time. It will change over their entire lives, sometimes day-to-day and sometimes decade-to-decade. Also, there isn’t necessarily a correlating relationship between the two – an Adoptee may find one part more important than the other at times or may feel both or neither are important to them; this is true for all components of the greater Adoptee identity.