What White Parents Should Know About Transracial Adoption

An Adoptee's Perspective on Its History, Nuances, and Practices

By: Melissa Guida-Richards, Paula Guida - foreword

Narrated by: Stacy Gonzalez

The White Fragility for transracial adoption - practical tools for nurturing identity, unlearning White saviorism, and fixing the mistakes you don't even know you're making.

If you're the White parent of a transracially or internationally adopted child, you may have been told that if you try your best and work your hardest, good intentions and a whole lot of love will be enough to give your child the security, attachment, and nurturing family life they need to thrive.

The only problem? It's not true. What White Parents Need to Know About Transracial Adoption breaks down the dynamics that frequently fly under the radar of the whitewashed, happily-ever-after adoption stories we hear so often.

Written by Melissa Guida-Richards - a transracial, transnational, and late-discovery adoptee - this book unpacks the mistakes you don't even know you're making and gives you the real-life tools to be the best parent you can be, to the child you love more than anything.

From original research, personal stories, and interviews with parents and adoptees, you'll learn:

• What parents wish they'd known before they adopted - and what kids wish their adoptive parents had done differently
• What White privilege, White saviorism, and toxic positivity are...and how they show up, even when you don't mean it
• How your child might feel and experience the world differently than you
• All about microaggressions, labeling, and implicit bias
• How to help your child connect with their cultural heritage through language, food, music, and clothing
• The five stages of grief for adoptive parents
• How to start tough conversations, work with defensiveness, and process guilt

PLEASE NOTE: When you purchase this title, the accompanying PDF will be available in your Audible Library along with the audio.

©2021 Melissa Guida-Richards and Paula Guida (P)2022 North Atlantic Books

Critic reviews

"A powerful, worthwhile addition to the growing body of work on race and parenting."—Publishers Weekly, starred review

“Melissa Guida-Richards lays bare a painful truth: That loss is central to adoption. For those who are adopted transracially and transnationally, the disappearance of culture, familiarity, and language carry added complexity. With grace and sensitivity, Guida-Richards offers clear, insightful guidance for adoptive parents to help their sons and daughters navigate the isolation, racism, and longing they inevitably feel.”—Gabrielle Glaser, author of American Baby

“Melissa Guida-Richards offers a generous summary of the multifaceted and often-controversial practice of transracial adoption. Part confession, part guide, and part intellectual invitation, Guida-Richards offers expertise with patience and wit. This is a book of experiential knowledge from a transracially adopted person who has thought deeply about the subject. A book that is a true gift to those with enough courage to face it and themselves.”—Jenny Heijun Wills, author of Older Sister. Not Necessarily Related.

How I can relate to my Asian adopted daughters life

Nothing. I need a hard copy of the book to highlight and re-read. It is a terrific tool for adoptive parents

Great for adoptive families

I really enjoyed this book, & there is great value in hearing adoptee voices for adoptive parents, but I didn’t agree that adoption is a form of human trafficking, comparing it to true human trafficking is offensive. I felt she added a lot of her own personal political views & bias opinion at times, over facts.
Overall there is plenty of gems for adoptive families to learn from to better help understand their children, and the struggles their face.

Helpful, Honest, Enlightening

As a potential adoptive parent in the foster care system, this book introduced sound perspectives of both adoptee and adoptive parents’ perspectives. I especially appreciated the list of resources in the last chapter, as we continue the journey.

Wonderfully written

I love this book! it gave me a lot of information no other books on transracial adoption have so far. I have always had friends of color and know a lot of this information but I haven't seen it in books about transracial adoption.

Wish this book was released a decade ago

Melissa lifts the most vulnerable voice on adoption (the adoptee) with compassion. She tells it like it is, and as a transracial adoptive parent it would have been so helpful to have learned all this in advance. This book should be required reading for anyone thinking about adopting!

Adoptive parents in SA.

This is an amazing resource for white parents with transracial children. The initial first few chapters came across as the author using the platform to vent. It was also written from an US context. But once you get into the chapters where input and guidance are giving it is really good!

I wanted to like it...

I really wanted to like this book and honestly, there were some incredible points, acknowledged pitfalls, and information. I write this understanding the real possibility of this be weaponized against me...but as much as I tried, I couldn't finish this book. The author has an incredibly hard story which has caused her real, valid trauma for herself. This as a whole, had the potential (which was met to a degree) to give incredible insight. However, it did create space for it to lean heavily towards the author's personal biases. I understand the why behind it...however, it did present a very real obstacle on a subject that was already sensitive. This wasn't the point of no return for me, it just made it a harder read, as I was forced to pickup each statement, trying to understand what was an incredibly valid statement, and what was a personal prejudice of her own. I could have done this, as much of the content on privilege, maintaining culture, the why's behind adoption, internal corruption in the process, and a larger need for birth parent reconciliation were all great topics. However, when abortion is contended as a helpful alternative to adoption...I'm heart broken over this and couldn't continue anymore. I wanted to like it. There ARE valid points within it and valid hurts and experiences that the author has gone through. I was just hoping for a book that would be able to walk through the stumbling blocks and best practices of parenting through adoption, without having to vet many statements made.

Good to hear her perspective

With the preface that we are white parents that adopted transracially (expressed no racial preferences or exclusions and were matched transracially) through the foster system 10+ years ago, I am continually looking to be a better, more informed parent. When I read the cover and reviews, I suspected I might not like some of what I was about to hear, but truly wanted to get her perspective.

While I am glad I did as it definitely opened my eyes to a few things, the author was also predictable in her presentation of white adoptive parents. The author clearly has a great deal of trauma and unfortunately I think this is not uncommon among adoptees of any racial family mix - adoption is messy and hard in almost any circumstance for all involved and transracial adoption makes it materially more difficult for everyone. However, I am not sure any adoptive parent could please her no matter what they did or how hard they tried. A partial theme of this book is shaming white parents for both their motivations and actions, placing them in a precarious situation. The scandalous and sensationalized tone is accentuated by the narrator, particularly when describing adoptive parents or racial topics - I found myself part way into the book visualizing the narrator using chastising fingers-in-the-air-quotes every few minutes for dramatic effect.

It is worth noting, the perspective is much more focused on agency facilitated international adoption vs. domestic adoption through the foster system. She describes the entire adoption system as a corrupt business multiple times, even though ~50%+ of the roughly 135,000 adoptions each year in the US are through the Government run foster care system (~40% of those are transracial) at a loss actually funded by the tax payers. It glosses over the painfully persistent realities that there is not a neat 1:1 ratio of parents and children of the same race waiting to be simply matched up and that some groups are chronically over or under represented on all sides of the triad with Government judging the risks of an imperfect match possibly being better than no match at all.

Her political views come out in the book on many non adoption issues. She also appears to have a distain for wealth, but I found it humorous that she wants to get hers and advertised multiple times that she and other adoptees should be paid for simply sharing their perspectives.

Again, I am grateful for her perspective and the courage to lay it out there. I am glad I listened to the book and would recommend the book to current and potential parents with thick skins looking to get a sense for how painful the process can be on the adoptee, but don’t expect to feel good at the end of it. I do think it could keep some families reading it from going down the more challenging path of trans racial adoption and rather opt for a same race adoption or no adoption at all. The problem is what really happens to the roughly quarter of a million non-white children in the US foster system in the mean time?

This is a rant. Not an informative book.

I don't know how this book has made it to the top of recommended reading lists for prospective adoptive parents. This book is an angry rant against adoption by someone who cannot be pleased. I know adoption is complicated and not some butterflies and rainbows ideal scenario. But this book is just not helpful. I really cannot understand how so many people have read this and thought it is. The author is very clearly against adoption despite claiming she is not. She is making sweeping assumptions about people who adopt. I am on the third chapter and not wasting my time any longer. I went into it with an open mind, ready to make heart adjustments as needed, but this author did not come at this book in the same way and the entire thing is biased.