Here’s a question that seems to come up a lot on adoption boards and email groups often. How important is it for a child that was adopted transracially to have a sibling of the same race as them?

Is it valuable for example, for an Asian girl, with white parents and white brothers, to have sibling who is also Asian?

This is a question that my husband and I gave a lot of thought with our first adoption, because at that point, we honestly believed that our family would be complete when our daughter came home from Vietnam. (Ha! If we only knew!!) I knew that I could do a good job raising our Vietnamese daughter. I knew I could teach her to be proud of who she was and where she was from. And yet part of me always wondered how she would feel when she looked at our family photos and she was the one who stood out as “different”.

So how do I feel about this topic? I have several things I know are true. For one, I would never recommend a family to adopt another child if the only reason that they were doing so, was to have a same-race sibling for another child. No child should ever be adopted for any reason other than that the adoptive parents have a true desire to love and parent another child.

That being said, I do think that it is beneficial to a child to have someone in the family of the same race... someone that “looks like them”. I know that for my kids, they take comfort in the fact that while our family is a rainbow, no one is the “odd-man out “.

Shortly after Maggie came home from Vietnam we decided that we did want to expand our family through adoption again. Because Maggie was Asian, we did lean towards other Asian countries to adopt from (Vietnam was “closed” to adoptions at that point). We ended up bringing Amanda home from Korea a few months later. The girls are the best of friends, and while their ethnicities are different, they love that they pass as twins and have “the same eyes and the same hair”.

We have five Caucasians, two Asians and four African Americans in our immediate family. Often when my kids are out in the world they may be the only child of color in their classroom or at a birthday party, but when they are at home, they never have to feel that way. Again, we never would have adopted our children for that reason alone, but now that our family is formed the way that it is, I think it is a good thing.

However, I know quite a few families who have only one minority-race child in the family that are happy and well-adjusted. I think that if you live somewhere that is very diverse or if you have diversity in your extended family that that could also help.

So, I do not think that this is one of those questions that has a right or wrong answer. It is an issue that every adoptive family will have to think about and decide what is best for their own family and situation. I have seen it work out well both ways.

Let me know what you think! I’d love to hear from other transracial families and from adult adoptees. To other adoptive parents…do you think it is important for your transracially adopted child to have a same-race sibling? Why or why not? To the adult adoptees…did you have a same-race sibling growing up? If you did, do you think it was good for you? If you didn’t, do you think it would have been good? Why or why not?

I’m looking forward to feedback on this one. :)