Research shows us that racism has a significant impact on the physical and emotional health of people of color. When you are raising a child of color through transracial adoption, foster care, or kinship care, you must be aware of the ways that racism plays out in your child’s everyday experiences – even if it doesn’t directly impact you. How can parents and caregivers prepare adopted, foster, or kinship kids for racism and protect them from the additional trauma of racism?

Defining Racism

Understanding racism, its roots, and its impacts on people of color is a life-long undertaking. It’s impossible to grasp everything from one book, podcast, or article. When parenting a transracial adopted, foster, or kinship child, you should approach this learning with an open heart and mind that is willing to learn and keep learning. However, prepare for challenging thoughts and biases you may have never acknowledged. The conversations are complex, layered, and quite challenging to untangle when you don’t have the same lived experience as those from whom you are trying to learn.

Racism is a system of advantages for people of white identity that simultaneously creates disadvantages for people of non-white identity. The real-life of racism plays out in three ways:

  1. Individual racism – how ideas, thoughts, and beliefs about people based on their race, color, or culture play out in interactions that person has with others.
  2. Cultural racism – the idea that whiteness or actions associated with whiteness are more valuable or centered as the standard to the rest of culture.
  3. Institutional racism – the systems, practices, and policies that, while they may not mention racism, create disadvantages for those who are not white and favor those who are white.

Though these three types of racism seem distinct and well-defined when written out, it’s crucial to try to understand their interwoven and tangled nature. We encourage you to listen to this podcast. The guest experts provide several excellent examples of just how interconnected and cyclical these types of racism are for those who do not identify as white.

Defining the Traumatic Impacts of Racism

Categorizing the impacts of trauma from racism can also be incredibly complicated. For example, we cannot trace one type of racism directly to one type of physical impact. Instead, there is a cumulative impact from an individual’s experiences with racism, how they’ve internalized those experiences, and how that person’s generational history impacts those experiences.

The Physical and Emotional Impacts of Trauma

We know that when the human body is under threat, body functions experience direct impact at that moment. For example, the heart rate goes up. Breathing deepens and speeds up. Eyes dilate. Digestion and other body functions slow down. The body is preparing to respond and act in self-protection.

However, the impacts of those threats or fears continue even after the danger is eliminated. They are ongoing, take time to metabolize, and often leave damage behind. The body’s physical responses are also stored as memory in the human body. Those memories inform how that body responds the next time a threat is perceived.

How Trauma Impacts a Child’s Development

When your child faces a threat, their body releases a flood of hormones that tell the brain it’s time to protect themselves again. These responses – and their impacts – are genetically wired into your child’s body. This hard wiring is from your child’s previous experiences and generations of programmed responses to threats.

Additionally, a child with a history of trauma is hard-wired to always be on the lookout for harm or threat. That frequent “wash” of hormones (like cortisol and adrenaline) leaves damage in your child’s body. The human body cannot healthily sustain those consistent floods of hormones. Kids who live in a constant state of hypervigilance also struggle with healthy attachment, emotional regulation, challenging behavior, and academic challenges.

However, research also tells us that people who have experienced trauma are more at risk for specific diseases linked to these hormones. Researchers have connected over 35 diseases to these stress responses. They include diabetes, kidney disease, cancers, heart disease, obesity, etc. We also know these diseases are disproportionately present in minority communities where racism is an everyday experience for many.

Racism is Trauma

Understanding what constitutes a threat to the human body can help you understand how racism is traumatic for your child of color. Living with a sense of hypervigilance because of the color of their skin is exhausting and damaging for anyone. Your child may have witnessed physical abuse between persons of different races and internalized it as racially motivated. They may have heard harmful messages of hate speech or lived in a community where racial violence was common. When your child is the only person of color at home, in the classroom, or a faith community, their body and brain may be hard-wired to stay alert.

When you layer in the internalized racism that many kids of color experience, it’s no wonder that your adopted, foster, or kinship child may struggle to answer questions about who they are and where they belong. These are internal questions that all kids grapple with as they build identity. However, children raised by parents of not the same race also face other layers to grapple with. These invasive questions and comments, and others like them, are incredibly stressful for your child.

• Where are you from? No, where are you really from?
• Why are your parents white?
• Oh, you’re so lucky they adopted you!

As one of our guest experts pointed out, when researchers conducted the Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACEs) study, they did not list racism as one of the traumatic experiences. But we have evidence and experience these many years later that tell us differently. These internal tensions, stresses, and hypervigilance experienced by people of color on an ongoing basis are traumatic. Racism is another kind of trauma.

How Can Parents Protect Their Kids from the Traumatic Impacts of Racism?

1. Educate yourself and share it with your family.

Keep digging into the study of racism and the messages that abound in culture. Learn how to stand against faulty messages and elevate the healthy ones. Enrich your life with information and experiences of various races and cultures. Seek ways to be involved in communities where you are the minority and listen with a heart to learn. Please bring your family along for the experience! You can get their buy-in to the learning by keying in on what interests them.

2. Be willing to do the self-work.

Take what you are learning and self-reflect about your wrong perceptions, biases, racist beliefs, and areas of misinformation. Prepare yourself, though, because this self-learning and self-reflection can be painful. Your willingness to do the work will tell your children they are worth it. The intentional choice to join your child’s experiences gives them the confidence that they are not alone.

3. Celebrate your child’s racial and cultural heritage and community.

Celebrating a child’s origins gives your child the message that their race and culture are beautiful and valuable. Celebrate all the holidays you can! Learn to cook popular foods from your child’s community. Read books and watch movies with lead characters of the same race as your child.

4. Look for ways to honor your child’s individual being.

Your child comes to you with a rich racial or cultural heritage, but they also have things that make them unique. Help them find their niche or strengths and give them opportunities to shine. In doing so, you can buffer them from the stereotypes many have of races or cultures (harmful or laudable).

5. Surround your family with diversity!

Layer positive messages and examples of the richness of all races and cultures by creating a circle around you of diverse people. Join a church where many races worship together. Find medical professionals and other service providers of multiple cultures. Seek movies and other media that center minorities’ stories of overcoming and achieving. Provide dolls that represent several races. Diversify your home library across all your kids’ ages and stages of ability.

6. Be active in policymaking.

Look for ways in your community to influence policy. Whether at work, in local politics, or in your school district, consider how you can impact agendas and bring equity for all people. It’s not enough to only endorse what might benefit those of your child’s race. Look for ways to communicate your belief that no group of people should be marginalized or voiceless. And by all means, VOTE!

Strengthening and Supporting Your Transracial Adoptee

Protecting and Healing is Within Our Reach

The traumatic impacts of racism on our kids can be challenging to untangle and navigate. We often don’t fully understand just how deeply racism impacts our kids, especially if they’ve joined our family after many years of different kinds of trauma. Racism isn’t often a trauma we think of when learning how to parent in trauma-informed ways.

However, we can learn how to protect our kids from the impacts of racial trauma just as we understand how to lead them to healing from abuse or neglect. Our consistent, patient, and intentional attention to the effects of racial trauma will tell them that they are precious and they matter. When we are protecting our kids from the trauma of racism and reaching for healing together, our kids can thrive.

Image Credits: RDNE Stock project; Mikhail Nilov; Norma Mortenson