Cross-cultural parenting

Source: Sun Times

August 24, 2007
When Judy Stigger's daughter Kathy was 8, Stigger took out all the congratulatory cards she'd received when she adopted her. She wanted Kathy to get a sense of the outpouring of love there'd been.





Instead, she was staggered to see pain wash across Kathy's face as she asked, "Mom, was I supposed to be white?"



Catherine Nelson and her daughter Grace, 6, an adoptee from Vietnam.
(Rich Hein/Sun-Times)
Until then, Stigger hadn't noticed that all the baby faces on the cards were white. Stigger's face was white, too. But Kathy's was black.

"I was dumbstruck that I hadn't noticed that before," Stigger says. "How was I going to equip her for a world where sometimes she wouldn't see her face coming back at her, where other families didn't look like hers?"

Stigger and her daughter are part of what's called all sorts of things: cross-cultural adoption, inter-country adoption, "conspicuous families." And it's increased steadily over the past decade, according to U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services. More than 20,000 such adoptions are taking place each year from places such as Russia, Guatemala and China, adding to the more than 200,000 foreign-adopted children already living here.

Now Kathy and her brother Aaron are grown, and their mother is much less naive. Today Judy Stigger works as the director of international adoption for the Cradle in Evanston, and she's sharing what she's learned with new parents.

"They need to understand that race and ethnicity still matter," Stigger says. "Love is not going to be enough. Where your child came from is part of them, whether that's a neighborhood in Chicago or an orphanage in China."

Parents need to expand their social circle, Stigger says. She had black kids, so she made black friends -- and now describes herself as a black mom. "You need to have people over to your house who look like your kids,' " she says. "You need the expertise of those parents, who will notice things that you might not.

"And if those friends have kids, their kids will hang out with your kids, and a lot of issues get taken care of while they play. Because they talk about this stuff. Even figuring out how to do your kids' hair -- that's how you learn."

Greg and Lynn Battoglia started the process before they'd adopted 20-month-old Claire from Colombia. From Oak Park, they began developing lists of Colombian restaurants and started buying books. Greg struck up a conversation in a bookstore with a man whose wife turned out to be adopted from Colombia. The Battoglias spent a month in Colombia while completing paperwork, and now they regularly meet with a group of adopted families.

"Yesterday we went to a festival to celebrate Colombian Independence Day," says Lynn. Claire is much too young to remember any of this. "It's definitely for her benefit, but it's for all of us," says Lynn.

"I don't think we want Claire to feel like, 'I was born in Colombia, that separates me,' " Greg says. "That's just another dimension of her personality. We don't want it to be a barrier, we want it to be a binder."

Cross-cultural families will find support from parents' groups, culture camps and organizations like Adoptive Families Today, Hands Around the World, Chicago Area Families for Adoption and more specialized groups. Linda Yang is the executive director of the Xilin Association, a Chinese culture school in Naperville with other locations throughout the Chicago area.

"Out of 300 students, about 40 of our students are adopted," Yang says. "We are helping parents to maintain the kids' birth heritage, with culture, with language, with all kinds of activities. The kids get to know more people in their same culture, and there's also a class for parents.

"No matter what, these kids are different. Sooner or later, these questions will be coming up."

Yang says the more informed children can be about their background, the more secure they'll feel in their identity.

Michele Harbeck Haley sends her two daughters to Xilin, and has visited China three times with her family. "They feel very at home in China, and I do, too," she says. "I'm not sure if it's because the people look like my children. It's obviously a wonderful place. We've visited both the towns they were from and both the social institutions. And we met the foster family that cared for my youngest daughter."

Harbeck Haley is thankful that Xilin provides Asian role models for her girls, and she tries to provide the rest. "We cook Chinese, go to Chinese restaurants, have a lot of Chinese art in our home, celebrate the Chinese festivals," she says. "Twice a year I give a party at their public schools for the Chinese New Year and Chinese Moon Festival. It's just part of our life -- what we feel is important as a Chinese-American family."

That's the key, says the Cradle's Stigger. She advises cross-cultural families: "Think of this as an identity for yourself and your family, not just for your child. Become a multiracial family, and once you figure that one out, the rest will follow."

Stigger had to figure it out on her own. "The angels on the Christmas tree used to be all white," she says. "Now they're black -- they're made in China, but they're black."