Cutoffs, Estrangements, and Complex Adoptive Families

Transracial adoptions connect children with “forever families,” however narratives from adopted individuals reveal that adoptive families are not always for forever. Relationships among adoptees and their adoptive parents shift as adoptees move from childhood through adulthood. Those shifts can result in altered perspectives and changes in family dynamics. As members of the adult adoptee community, researchers, and clinicians, we will present our study on estrangement in adoptive families. We asked: 1) how do adopted individuals experience estrangement? and (2) what are the precursors to, and implications of, estrangement? We will present preliminary findings and gather input and insights from attendees.

PRESENTERS: AMANDA BADEN, REBECCA RANDALL, & MEGGIN NAM HOLTZ

Keynote: Reclaiming Birth Origins for Transnational Adoptees: Reculturation, Identity, and Birth Search

Upon adoption transnationally and often transracially, adoptees must shed their birth cultures, lose their birth languages, separate from their birth families, learn new languages, assimilate to new cultures, and build connection to new parents, siblings, and environments. And all of this happens when they are infants, toddlers, or even school-aged children who have memories and connections in their birth countries. In adulthood, transnational adoptees often seek to better understand their identities as adoptees who want and need to reclaim their origin stories and their birth cultures.

This presentation will address the following questions. How do adoptees identify? What’s most salient: race, adoption, or culture? How do we cope with the stigma associated with adoption and relinquishment? This presentation will attempt to answer these questions by exploring the development of adoptee identity, cultural-racial identity, the means for adoption socialization, and reculturation (i.e., reclaiming birth culture).

Navigating the Intersectionality of Race, Culture, and Adoption: Lessons on Microaggressions and Adoption Sensitivity

This workshop will focus on helping clinicians, case workers, therapists, and adoption stakeholders (e.g., adoptees, adoptive parents, and birth parents) understand the complex intersection of race, culture, and adoption in the lives of adoptive families. Using various experiential activities along with an interactive and engaging style of discourse, Dr. Amanda Baden will present topics including racial and adoption microaggressions, racial consciousness, privilege, adoption awareness, and the identity journey for adoptive families.

This workshop will introduce attendees to a framework for conceptualizing the oppression experienced by birth/first parents, adoptive/foster parents, and adoptees/foster youth, as well as learning tools to support a positive self-concept in the face of societal myths about their stories.

Panel discussion: Searching for origins/reculturation

Speakers: Amanda Baden, Hari Prasad Sacré, Janice Reul, Lynelle Long, Patrick Noordoven, Lucho Huisman & Erben Oosting

For this panel discussion, we will explore the various ways in which intercountry adoptees reclaim their roots and birth culture, examining the effects on identity and the challenges that may arise in the process. The different panel members, Amanda Baden, Lucho Huisman, Hari Prasad Sacré, Lynelle Long and Janice Reul will engage this topic from their own personal and professional experience and individual and systemic viewpoints. Our panellists have different perspectives in relation to this topic, ranging from expertise and experiences of adoptees, psychology, caregiving, pedagogy to language emancipation.

Panel discussion: Transformative Justice (Wednesday, March 20, 2024)

Panelists: Amanda Baden, Elvira Loibl, Mark de Hek, Nicole Immler, Sophie Withaeckx, Patrick Noordoven, Sam van den Haak & Erben Oosting

This panel discusses the topic of transformative justice in relation to the practice of intercountry adoption. Within the concept of transformative justice, all different perspectives are considered to obtain recognition and restoration for past injustices. In our case, we apply this to the injustices within the adoption system. Our panellists will operate from both individual and systemic viewpoints. The different panel members, Amanda Baden, Elvira Loibl, Mark de Hek, Sophie Withaeckx, and Nicole Immler, will approach the idea of ​​transformative justice from psychological, pedagogical, ethical, sociological, legal, criminological and adoptees' perspectives.