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Though parents may try to ignore a child's blackness, the child himself cannot. Establishing a sense of identity, hard for many adopted children, is even harder for the T.R.A. youngster. One black Montreal teenager, brought up by whites, refers to Negroes as "them" and to whites as "us." Similarly, Bill Kirk, who was adopted at age three by Ontario Sociologist H. David Kirk and is now 17, reports that "I think like a white man, and when I get out into the world, that is maybe going to hang me up a bit."
Common Fear. To deal with these problems, adoptive parents—most notably those in Montreal's Open Door Society, a pioneering organization in transracial adoption—sometimes sponsor seminars on black history or meet to discuss mutual difficulties They may encourage their children to get together regularly with black youngsters, to study their heritage and to remember their natural parents. For example, Kirk's 18-year-old daughter Debbie, a Puerto Rican, spent a month working at a day-care center in Puerto Rico. She explains: "I wanted to see the people that I was from—the culture, the language and society."
Besides the special problems of mixed adoptions, interracial families must face all the other dilemmas common to conventional adoption. How and when should they tell a child about his origins? How can a youngster learn to master what psychiatrists say is a common fear —that his natural parents abandoned him because there was something wrong with him? How should adoptive parents respond to a youngster's curiosity about his biological family?
Psychoanalyst J. Cotter Hirschberg of the Menninger Foundation favors telling kids the facts between ages four and seven, "when the strength of the family is at its greatest" for the child. He urges mothers to tell about adoption only when they feel comfortable and do not see it as a guilty secret. In addition, he advocates letting children express their feelings freely, especially "their anger at having been separated," and he believes they should be helped to understand that their natural parents gave them up because they could not look after them. As for the common longing to seek out natural parents, American experts are shifting from the old view that reunion is always bad to the idea that it can be helpful in some instances. In other cases, it helps children just to be reminded of their natural parents. Judy Meredith, for example, tells her youngsters on their birthdays, "I bet your mommy is thinking of you today."