Children Should Be Placed with Adoptive Parents

This report will be discussing the views on parent adopting children of difference races and colour. It will also be explaining the word used to describe for parents adopting children of different race and colour. Additionally, the report will also mention the history and meaning of ‘trans-racial adoption’ and the arguments that surround this topic. The terminology used for parent to adopt a child of another race or colour is trans-racial adoption (TRA) or inter-racial adoption.
The meaning of TRA is to place a child from a race or ethnic group with adoptive parents of another race or ethnic group. The question within society has been arisen whether children should always be placed in a home where the parents are from the same race or colour, which is where issues of whether TRA is practical in the long run. The most heated controversy throughout the history of TRA, has been to do with black children being adopted by white adoptive parents.
Andrew Morrison states from his 2004 Journal “Trans-racial Adoption: The Pros and Cons and the Parents’ Perspective” that black families rarely adopt white children as there are considerably more white parents who are generally looking to adopt. Up to 40% of children who are up for adoption are black, and social workers often refuse to accept the idea of black parents adopting white children In the public record, the first publicly recorded documentation in the United States that white parents adopted a Black child shows that such an adoption took place in 1948, in Minneapolis, Minnesota.

Until the 1950s, TRA was almost unheard-of; the prevailing policy and practice of adoption agencies discouraged such adoptions. The justification for these policies and practices was the prevailing belief that race matching would increase the chances of a good parent child relationship. Although TRA of Native American children had occurred frequently over the past century, formal placement of Native American children with white parents was particularly prevalent in the late 1950s (Andrew Morrison, 2004)