Adoptive Parents' Framing of Laypersons' Conceptions of Family

Abstract

Extending previous research (e.g., Baxter et al., Citation2009) by examining adoptive parents' sense-making of laypersons' conceptions of family, and following Owen (Citation1985), we conducted a metaphoric analysis of twelve focus groups—69 parents with adopted children from either Vietnam or China. Adoptive family as battleground emerged as the primary metaphorical frame that adoptive parents use to make sense of laypersons' remarks about their families. A battlefield with lines drawn between dueling ideologies about family comprises this battleground. Demographers' and scholars' plural views oppose laypersons' narrow conceptions of how families “should be.” Parents understood laypersons' remarks as saying (directly or indirectly) that their adoptive families violated the traditional view of family in terms of: racial dissimilarity between members, construction of family via adoption, and adoption of a child born outside the United States. Laypersons' traditional view is both reinforced and constituted by racist, biologically normative, and nationalist beliefs, which, when instantiated in talk (e.g., racist remarks), represent assaults on transracial, international adoptive families. Our results suggest racism, biological normativity, and nationalism remain dominant in U.S. family ideology. As an implication, we suggest changes to pre-adoptive education to help adoptive families discursively cope with their stigmatized social position.

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