The Importance of Adoption Competence in Education

You’ve bought the new backpack and the box of pre-sharpened Ticondarogas; the Chlorox wipes and the blue ballpoint pens; a six-pack of folders in the precise colors specified on endless school supplies lists, and two reams of paper, and the graphing paper notebook, and everything else your child needs for academic success in the classroom this upcoming school year. There are new school clothes hanging up in the closet, and new shoes by the front door, and you printed up a sign for the kids to hold in their ‘first day of school’ pictures. You’ve added the upcoming school year calendar to your phone, set up accounts on the half-dozen new apps the school district insists on using to communicate with you, signed up for volunteer hours at the school, and you feel ready for the new year. 

But if you are an adoptive parent, there is one last item on your back-to-school list to check off: making sure your child’s teacher is adoption-competent, and that their classroom is welcoming for adopted and fostered children. While educators are now being trained to create trauma-informed classrooms, most teachers, unless they have a personal connection to adoption, have no idea that adoption should be considered a traumatic event and adopted children need pedagogy that includes their experiences in order to make the classroom both safe for them and conducive to learning, because kids can’t learn in environments that cause them distress or make them feel like they do not belong. 

What are you advocating for?

• Understanding why assignments that address genetics, inherited characteristics, human development, or family heritage are problematic for adopted and foster kids
• The importance of children having complete control over their own adoption story, including how it is told, and when, and to whom
•  How media stereotypes about adoption do not reflect lived experiences for adopted people and can be harmful if perpetuated in a classroom setting, including bringing in media that reinforces those stereotypes 

 At parent-teacher conferences last year, I made a comment about how uncomfortable it is for my foster son to be given writing prompts about his ethnicity and heritage – we have very little information about either, and that lack of knowledge really stings him. His teacher’s defense was to say that so few students are affected that she didn’t see the point in changing the prompts. – Maren, foster mom

The most recent government data on foster children suggests that there are more than 400,000 children in foster care in the United States, and 5 million Americans alive today are adopted people. How many students need to be affected before we start modifying assignments to be more inclusive for every student? 

Lesson plans that do not acknowledge adoption/foster experiences don’t just exclude large numbers of students, they can also trigger unresolved grief and traumatic responses in children, which can negatively impact their learning. Many teachers are not aware of how difficult these assignments can be for some students, or the negative impact they can cause, in part because the cultural discourse surrounding adoption paints it as a uniformly positive event that always betters a child’s life. This is why it is so important to advocate for children whose families are non-conforming to assumed stereotypes in any way, and to encourage teachers to find ways to modify coursework to create a healthier classroom environment for all of their students without sacrificing the educational goals intended.

Academic work that makes assumptions about genetics and family of origin permeate every grade level of school. From  ‘create your family tree’ assignments to projects that expect children to have baby pictures and know the circumstances surrounding their birth and early years, these lessons, which are based on one specific family configuration that assumes all students grow up in their family of origin with a mother and a father, not only exclude adopted children but also those in foster care, those growing up in both official and unofficial kinship adoption, as well as other children who, for a vast array of reasons, may not have access to the information required of them to complete the coursework as assigned.

I thought I was prepared for all the ‘family tree’ nonsense, but then my kid brought home a ‘star of the week’ form, something their teacher did to give kids a chance to feel special and share a bit about themselves. Which is very sweet, but it asked for baby photos, which I don’t have for my daughter, who was adopted at five, and it wanted all sorts of information about the time and day she was born, her parents’ names – with spaces for a mom and dad only – and cultural/ethnic heritage info. It was impossible to convince the teacher that this assignment meant to make my daughter feel special and celebrated made her feel horrible and othered. – Sara, adoptive mom

What can you do to make your child’s classroom more trauma-informed and adoption-competent?

1. Be an advocate, not an adversary, by addressing the issue before it arises. By the time your child brings home a problematic assignment, it’s really difficult for teachers to pivot: their time is finite, the demands on that time are infinite, and while the topic of the lesson might be problematic, there are real, underlying skills the assignment was designed to develop and that teachers are required to teach. It can also put them in a defensive position. You don’t want to be on opposite sides, fighting about the problem; you want to get them to understand that you are both on the same side, fixing the problem together. Get ahead of the issues before they becomes problems by speaking up early in the academic year. 
2. Give your child’s teacher grace by having a private conversation with them.  Nobody loves being called out publicly: it’s the fastest way to turn a teachable moment into a test of wills, and nobody wins when that happens. Meet privately with your child’s teacher early in the academic year, before they bring home a problematic assignment,and help them understand why adoption competency matters.  
3. Extend your knowledge to the school’s social worker. Adoption competency is not taught as part of the curriculum in most social work degree programs, so bring them the information they need to allow them to educate themselves and provide the best co-curricular support possible for adopted and fostered children. 
4. Do the groundwork for them. Teachers are busy – they don’t have time for homework from parents. It isn’t enough to just offer them a huge, curated list of adult resources, and unfair to assume they have the time to read it all and get up to speed in adoption competency while managing a full classroom. Bring the resources necessary for them to understand how assignments that make assumptions about family life can cause active harm or interrupt student learning, and why adoption competency matters in the classroom. Create a cheat-sheet – a front and back PDF that covers the basics, including correct adoption terminology, that they can refer back to when necessary, and for K-5 classroom teachers, curate lists of books for children that address adoption in healthy ways, so that every child in the classroom has an opportunity to understand what adoption is, and is not, and the topic can be normalized for them.  
5. Offer to be a continuing resource for them.  Adoption education isn’t a one-and-done conversation; building adoption competency means ongoing learning. Let your child’s teacher know that you are always there to answer questions, without judgement, and that you want to help. Work with them to create an environment for them that feels private and safe so that they can ask the questions they need to ask in order to learn without feeling foolish or defensive.
6. Remind them that the only person who gets to decide how, and when, and to whom to share their story is the adopted child.  This means redirecting questions from other children, not calling attention to a child in the classroom because of their adopted status, not asking intrusive questions, and not making broad assumptions about their adoption.It also means reviewing assignments to make sure they do not exclude adopted children.  Remind teachers that adoption is a traumatic experience even when a child is placed with loving adoptive parents and even if their family seems well-adjusted and happy.

How can you address pushback from educators while advocating for your adopted child? 

Scenario One: “The assignment given is a necessary part of the curriculum, so I can’t change it.”

We got the ‘draw your family tree’ assignment in second grade, and my kid decided to fill it out by drawing her own extra branches on the tree for her birthparents, birthgrandparents, and her two half-sisters. Her teacher sent it home with a note asking her to redo it ‘correctly’. We declined and let her take the zero grade. I loved it, sent her birthmom a scan of it, and framed it to hang in her room. That's a zero grade we can support!  Leah, adoptive mom

The key to advocating for change is to work with teachers to understand the point of the assignment: not what students are being asked to do, but why they are being asked to do it. Ask, what elements of this assignment match curricular goals, or provide students the necessary skills they need for academic success, and how could those goals and skills be met with a less sensitive topic? For example, write your autobiography assignments are meant to get kids writing by giving them a topic that teachers assume should be the easiest to write about – themselves. The point of these assignments isn’t really about the topic; it’s about helping students build confidence and gain mastery in their writing and communication skills, and if that is the real point, the exact topic doesn’t matter as much.  

Start with the knowledge that your child’s teacher is not deliberately designing assignments meant to harm the children they teach and remind yourself that people whose lives have never intersected personally with adoption simply don’t know what they don’t know, and this is an opportunity to build their knowledge, not get combative with them about what they are doing wrong. Life is filled with teachable moments, even for teachers. 

Scenario Two: the assignment modification offered is as potentially harmful to the child as the original assignment. 

When I pushed back on a social studies assignment that would have forced my kid to disclose a lot of very personal information about his origin story and adoption in the guise of teaching about world geography and culture, his teacher’s response was to tell him that if he didn’t feel comfortable telling his story he could just make something up. What kind of lesson is that for a kid? – Adam, adoptive father

When advocating for adopted and foster children, remind educators that if every child in that classroom cannot do the assignment as written unless they employ deception or are forced to disclose difficult or traumatic memories and life experiences, the problem isn’t the student, it’s the assignment. Point out how easy it might be to encourage students to pick any culture or country that interests them, their own or another they have no connection to at all, allowing them to follow their natural curiosity while retaining agency over their personal information. 

Scenario Three: you are told it isn’t fair to modify assignments for the entire class when almost nobody is affected by them. 

 At parent-teacher conferences last year, I made a comment about how uncomfortable it is for my foster son to be given writing prompts about his ethnicity and heritage – we have very little information about either, and that lack of knowledge really stings him. His teacher’s defense was to say that so few students are affected that she didn’t see the point in changing the prompts. – Maren, foster mom

The most recent government data on foster children suggests that there are more than 400,000 children in foster care in the United States, and 5 million Americans alive today are adopted people.  This might be the time to ask your child's teacher questions like, “How many students would need to be affected before we start modifying assignments to be more inclusive for every student?”

Being adopted is traumatic, being in foster care is traumatic, and lessons that do not acknowledge that don’t just exclude large numbers of students, they can also trigger unresolved grief and traumatic responses in children which negatively impact their learning. Many teachers are simply not aware of how difficult these assignments can be for their students, or the negative impact they can cause, in part because the cultural discourse surrounding adoption paints it as a uniformly positive event that betters a child’s life. This is why it is so important to advocate for every child, and to encourage teachers to find ways to modify coursework to create a healthier classroom environment for all of their students without sacrificing the educational goals intended.

This is also the time to point out that adoption isn’t a recognizable trait you can see on somebody, and that it is impossible to judge how many children in a classroom may be negatively impacted by assignments that are not vetted first to be more in keeping with an adoption competent curriculum.

Next Steps For Adoptive Parents

  One of the basic tenets of our Activism in Adoption Speaker Series is the need to continually develop the knowledge necessary to be an advocate and ally for adoption constellation members. For adoptive and foster parents, part of this advocacy is developing a toolkit of resources for your children’s teachers, to make sure their classrooms are as inclusive as possible for all of their students. Join us at Activism in Adoption to learn more about how to become a better advocate for birthparents and adopted people - we have more than 35 sessions streaming now to help every member of the adoption constellation expand their own toolkit of adoption competency.