In the United States all adoptions must present for the court’s approval. The standard of “best interests of the child” governs child placement in the probate and family court systems. This general standard is used for all chil-dren, whether contested custodial petitions between bio-logical parents or the adoptions of children who are of racial and cultural groups other than those of the adop-tive parents are involved. Contrary to the recommenda-tions of child development experts, in many TRAs and TCAs, there may be little attention paid to maintenance of continuity of the child’s relationship with caregivers or the developmental importance of expediency in decision making about adoptions (Goldstein and Goldstein 1996). Because the child’s long-term psychological well-being should always be the primary concern, the court asks for the recommendations of mental health profes-sionals and social service agencies for their best clinical judgments in these matters. The forensic child expert may be called on to answer questions concerning the effects of TRA and TCA, the return of the child to the birth parent (Kermani and Weiss 1995), or continuation of foster placement. The request may be made by the court, a parent(s), or the child’s or parents’ attorney to assist with adoptions. There could be a request for assis-tance in custody cases; for example, the adoptive parents of transracial or transcultural adoptees may divorce and contest custody or biological grandparents may contest custody. The evaluator should clarify what questions are being asked and determine if he or she is qualified to pro-vide the answers. As with any forensic evaluation, the child should never be evaluated without consent of the custodial parent or authorization of the court, unless privilege and confidentiality are waived (American Acad-emy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry 1997).
History of Prospective Adoptive Parents
Foremost in the expert’s history gathering is the consid-eration of the adoptive parents’ motive for adopting
transracially or transculturally. Have they ever been fos-ter parents, and if so, for how long and with how many children? If they are experienced foster parents, what has factored into their desire to adopt this child? Will they continue to be foster parents? If so, have they considered the ramifications for the prospective adoptee? Have any other foster children been of a race or culture other than that of the parents? Many adoptive parents will have had children; some will be childless. In the former case, are their children biological? Are they stepchildren in the home? Are they adults? If the prospective adoptive par-ents are childless, to what extent did the couple try to conceive? Is there any desperation in their quest for par-enthood? Was an ethnic child their first choice or default option? What are the couple’s ethnic origins, racial atti-tudes, educational backgrounds, and life experiences that may have prepared them for the vicissitudes encountered in parenting a child of a different race? Do any of the fol-lowing apply for the adoptive parents: attendance at inte-grated schools, churches, or clubs; residence in multicul-tural neighborhoods; employment in multiculmulticul-tural workplaces; travels; volunteer work outside of their com-munities? Some Caucasians are naive about the random but predictable microtraumas that African Americans experience daily (Pierce 1989). Will they—can they—be sounding boards when their child reports these experi-ences at the end of a school day? Will they be overprotec-tive, effectively stifling their child’s ability to eventually cope with these stresses independently? Will they be pre-pared for the stares, the questions, the insensitive remarks, and the outright insults that will predictably be experienced? If the prospective adoptive parents are racially naive, to what extent are they willing to alter their lifestyle to accommodate a child of a different race?
These are questions for all prospective parents of chil-dren from diverse cultures.
In many transracial/transcultural adoptions, there may be little information available regarding the mother’s prenatal care, the complications of the child’s birth, pre-maturity, low birth weight, abuse or neglect history, or other pertinent medical or family history. The parents may be unprepared to understand the significance of these residual medical and/or psychological factors on the child’s health status. They may be completely shocked to find that their child has both physical and psy-chological problems stemming from the preadoption condition. Adoption specialists are finding that they are dealing with children returned to adoption agencies for replacement. This phenomenon, called disruption, seems more related to children who have been adopted from Eastern Europe (Seelye 1998).
History of Birth Parent(s)
Biological parents of transracial adoptees may either have relinquished their child for adoption or had their parental rights terminated. If the latter, it could have been for rea-sons having to do with child abuse or neglect driven by an underlying substance abuse problem or psychiatric ill-ness. Like any other person(s) who has ever given up a child for adoption or not fought to block the child’s adoption or fought and lost, the parent(s) may be plagued with guilt or resentment against the judicial or child wel-fare system. This may especially be true if child protec-tive services has removed the child from their custody. In a case in which the birth parent is contesting the TRA of her child, foremost in the history gathering is determina-tion of the reason the child was removed or given up.
Would the parent be contesting the adoption if it were inracial? Did the parent exercise any permissible visita-tion rights and pay any designated porvisita-tion of the child’s support while in foster care? If countertransference issues impede the psychiatrist’s ability to collect data in a nonjudgmental fashion, it would behoove him to seek appropriate consultation.
History of the Child
There is a double challenge in assessment of a transracial adoptee. Naturally there are adoption and abandonment issues, but there is also the sensitive issue of race. As with any child or adolescent evaluation, the first task is to establish rapport with the patient. This task can be pains-taking if the forensic expert is viewed as an agent of oth-ers and vested with powerful authority to influence the adoptee’s life arrangement. Establishing the ground rules is part of this process, especially rules having to do with the purpose of the consultation and confidentiality rules (when there is no confidentiality, it is important to dis-close this fact to teens). It is important to ascertain why the adoptee does or does not want to be there. Demar-cating the examiner’s relationship with parents, school, and the court at the outset is important. Unlike the ther-apeutic setting in which there is the luxury of time to allow the adoptee’s agenda to unfold in an evaluation, the forensic expert’s agenda must be imposed.
The race issues do not need to be plunged into imme-diately, but they cannot be skirted or apologized for.
Inquiring about the child’s feelings about adoption in general can set the stage for approaching the subject of TRA. The examiner need not consider herself an expert in TRA; she need only be willing to be a student of the adoptee and his families. An open admission of ignorance goes a long way in establishing the doctor-patient rela-tionship as long as the patient perceives sensitivity,
hon-esty, and lack of arrogance and judgmentalness on the part of the examiner.
Attention must be paid to the quality of bonding that has developed between child and parent(s) as well as sib-lings and the potential psychological damage that could result from the disruption of such bond(s). In the case of newborn adoptions, which may be relevant to TRAs if a child was removed from a biological mother determined to be a substance abuser, the California Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry (1994, p. 3) recom-mends that
all newborn adoptions be finalized within the first four months of life, conforming with known develop-mental needs of the infant. Although adoption final-ization at birth would be most preferential for the infant and adoptive parents, it is understood that bio-logical parents need a reasonable amount of time to appropriately resolve their ambivalence about giving up their child, but this time period should not exceed this four month time period, to insure the psycholog-ical attachment of the parent and child, and to miti-gate the possibility of developmental difficulties.
Although this position is congruent with conven-tional wisdom, there is no longitudinal research data on the outcome of children who have had early attachments disrupted with the intent to reattach to loving, nurturing adults (Griffith 1995). Psychological pain ensues when the bond is broken between child and psychological par-ents, but we just don’t know how resilient children are in the above circumstances.
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