In another study comparing transracial adoptees and ethnic non-adoptees, researchers discovered that acknowledgment of differences in physical appearances and culture was critical to positive mental health regardless of adoption status [2]. Acknowledgment can come in various forms. For some families, the best way to make the child feel at home is by “normalizing” or recognizing the child’s different looks but treating this as a standard within the family. Although this destigmatizes differences in appearance, parents risk contributing to “color-blindness” – the faulty concept that one’s skin color does not matter in today’s society [17]. This is problematic specifically in families with White parents; while the parents can ignore the implications of race due to their racial privilege, their children of color would be disadvantaged to ignore the role that race will play in their life.

 

In other families, ethnic socialization highlights visible differences within the family and teaches family members how to cope with racial discrimination and foster a multicultural identity [2]. The amount of socialization that a transracial adoptee receives is determined primarily by the adoptive parent’s level of racial awareness and is known to contribute to greater levels of self-esteem, subjective well-being, and perspective-taking abilities; greater ethnic socialization is also associated with stronger parent-child relationships and lower externalizing behaviors which reflects research on the inverse relationship between family dysfunction and psychological adjustment [2].