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The story every mother in America needs to read.As featured on NPR and the TODAY Show.All moms have to deal with choosing baby names, potty training, finding your village, and answering your kid's tough questions, but if you are raising a Black child, you have to deal with a lot more than that.Especially if you're a single Black mom.

Objective This study explores White middle‐class adoptive parents' experiences with parenting Black children (M age = 12.3), attending to how intersections of children's race, gender, and developmental stage informed and nuanced parents' approach to racial socialization. Background Scholarly debate regarding the adoption of Black children by White parents centers on parents' ability to facilitate positive racial identity development. Limited work has explored how White parents' approach to racial socialization is shaped by Black children's gender and developmental stage, particularly as children grow older and encounter intensified racialized stereotypes. Method Twenty‐five White parents (11 lesbian mothers, seven gay fathers, seven heterosexual mothers) were selected from a larger sample of 128 adoptive families because they adopted Black (including biracial/multiracial) children, and were interviewed as their children entered adolescence. Thematic analysis was used to analyze the qualitative data. Results A typology emerged that captured parents' racial awareness and racial socialization approach: Minimizing and Reluctant, Worried and Fumbling, Aware but Cautious, and Reflexive and Purposeful. Additional cross‐cutting themes centered on the role of the sociopolitical climate, gender, and developmental stage in racial socialization. Conclusion Contemporary adoptive parents of Black children are often constrained by their own White racial frame, but some parents, especially those who are younger or have monoracial children, are able to translate awareness of the complexities involved in raising adopted Black children into meaningful action and understanding.

There areas increasing numbers of multiracial families created through marriage, adoption, birth, and a growing population of multiracial persons. Multiracials are a hidden but dominant group of transracially adopted children in both the United Kingdom and the United States. This paper introduces findings from an interpretive study of 25 transracially adopted multiracials regarding a set of experiences participants called \"being raised by White people.\" Three aspects of this experience are explored: (1) the centrality yet absence of racial resemblance, (2) navigating discordant parent-child racial experiences, and (3) managing societal perceptions of transracial adoption. Whereas research suggests some parents believe race is less salient for multiracial children than for Black children, this study finds participants experienced highly racialized worlds into adulthood.

Objective: To examine how parents of transracially adopted children think about and practice ethnic-racial socialization. Background: Previous research has highlighted how some parents are color-blind and others are color-conscious, yet these 2 categorizations fail to cover the range and fluidity of adoptive parents' approaches to ethnic socialization. Method: Semistructured interviews were conducted with 34 parents of children with Asian, Latino, and Black ancestry. Parents were recruited through adoption agencies and support groups, personal contacts, and snowball sampling and were asked about attempts and concerns in ethnically and racially socializing their children. Interviews were recorded, transcribed, and coded for common themes using the grounded theory method. Results: Some parents downplayed race/ethnicity, but our findings elucidate their range of motivations from \"protecting\" their children from a racialized society to prioritizing other goals. More parents attempted to ethnically socialize but did so in varied ways, such as buying consumer items or forging relationships with people of their children's ethnic group. Compared with \"color-conscious\" parents of Asian and Latino children, \"color-conscious\" parents of Black children were more likely to emphasize preparation for bias. Conclusion: Adoptive parents can vacillate between minimizing the impact of race to talking about steps taken to ethnically socialize children. Some parents note a profound change in their perspective at some point after adopting their children. Implications: Delving into more than 2 approaches to ethnic socialization and identifying changes over time affords a deeper understanding of parents' perspectives and behaviors and helps researchers interpret the mixed results found in past studies.

Research on divorce during the past decade has focused on a range of topics, including the predictors of divorce, associations between divorce and the well-being of children and former spouses, and interventions for divorcing couples. Methodological advances during the past decade include a greater reliance on nationally representative longitudinal samples, genetically informed designs, and statistical models that control for time-invariant sources of unobserved heterogeneity. Emerging perspectives, such as a focus on the number of family transitions rather than on divorce as a single event, are promising. Nevertheless, gaps remain in the research literature, and the review concludes with suggestions for new studies.

This study examined attitudes toward transracial adoption held by 104 African American master of social work (MSW) students. Consistent with previous studies, the students considered transracial adoption to be a necessary practice for the well-being of children but expressed concern about the racial and ethnic identity development of transracially adopted children and the parenting ability of White parents in raising those adopted children. Implications for social work research and practice are discussed.

As transnational adoption grows, many American children await adoption in the United States. Because many of these children are children of color (and often black), we ask: What role does race play in parents' decisions to adopt abroad rather than adopt domestically? In-depth interviews with 41 parents reveal that parents adopt abroad for many reasons. Regarding racial motivations, although some parents were open to children of any race and several actively sought nonwhite children, many had limits—they did not want to adopt African American children. We look at how parents articulate the role of race in their decisions, and the implications for domestic adoption and broader race relations in the United States.

Successful family-based weight loss interventions for African American adolescents are rare. Parent-adolescent interactions supporting adoption of healthier nutrition and physical activity practices are not well understood. African American caregivers' and adolescents' perspectives on how they worked together to achieve weight loss need further exploration. This study describes the relationships experienced by adolescents and caregivers during the 6-month, evidence-based FIT Families weight loss trial and explores differences between families whose adolescents were successful and unsuccessful with weight loss. Exit interviews conducted with 136 adolescents (age 12–16 years; BMI percentile ≥95) and their caregivers (primarily mothers) were taped and transcribed verbatim. Content and thematic analysis was conducted to explore differences between groups stratified by weight loss. Five adolescent-caregiver relationship patterns emerged which describe dyads working together, working alone, working against each other; caregiver support and caregiver working on self. When relationship patterns were compared between groups stratified by weight loss, three themes emerged: motivation, support, and persistence. Families that achieved the greatest weight loss referred more often to working together to reach weight loss goals, attributed their success to adolescent self-motivation, with engaged caregiver support which allowed families to persist in change efforts. Family relationships involving adolescent autonomy, engaged parental support, and persistence despite challenges, clustered differently among adolescents who were successful at weight loss compared to those who were not. Interventionists trained to reinforce effective adolescent-parent interactions will advance behavioral interventions for families who have typically benefited least in prior interventions.

This article considers whether the disparate socioeconomic circumstances of families in which white, black, and Hispanic children grow up account for the racial and ethnic gaps in school readiness among American preschoolers. It first reviews why family socioeconomic resources might matter for children's school readiness. The authors concentrate on four key components of parent socioeconomic status that are particularly relevant for children's well-being--income, education, family structure, and neighborhood conditions. They survey a range of relevant policies and programs that might help to close socioeconomic gaps, for example, by increasing family incomes or maternal educational attainment, strengthening families, and improving poor neighborhoods. Their survey of links between socioeconomic resources and test score gaps indicates that resource differences account for about half of the standard deviation--about 8 points on a test with a standard deviation of 15--of the differences. Yet, the policy implications of this are far from clear. They note that although policies are designed to improve aspects of \"socioeconomic status\" (for example, income, education, family structure), no policy improves \"socioeconomic status\" directly. Second, they caution that good policy is based on an understanding of causal relationships between family background and children outcomes, as well as cost-effectiveness. They conclude that boosting the family incomes of preschool children may be a promising intervention to reduce racial and ethnic school readiness gaps. However, given the lack of successful large-scale interventions, the authors suggest giving only a modest role to programs that address parents' socioeconomic resources. They suggest that policies that directly target children may be the most efficient way to narrow school readiness gaps.

Although many children adopted from the public child welfare system have special needs, little is known about the experiences of African American adopted children with disabilities and their families. The purpose of this study is to explore different categories of disabilities, including chronic health issues; emotional, mental, or behavioral (EMB) disorders; and intellectual or developmental disabilities (IDDs) on adoption outcomes in a sample of African American children. Data were from the Post-Permanency Round II Survey collected in 2008. A random sample of 412 adoptive parents or legal guardians self-reported their children’s disability diagnoses and family caregiving experiences. Hierarchical regression modelling was used to investigate the relationship between child disability and child and parental outcomes. Results indicated that chronic health issues ( β  = .10, p  < .05), EMB disorders ( β  = .16, p  < .01), and IDDs ( β  = .12, p  < .05) were positively associated with parental burden. In addition, asthma ( β  = .10, p  < .05), from the larger physical health issue category, was also associated with parental burden. However, none of the disability categories was significantly related with caregiver commitment or adoption dissolution. Future research should disentangle the definitions of special needs or disabilities.