What are some of the societal issues that adoptive families have to cope with today?
Many of us today have become, through adoption, biracial or multiracial families. This situation is comparatively new; it certainly wasn’t a common feature of the adoption landscape before the Korean War. Of course, non-adoptive families today are also substantially more likely to be biracial or multiracial than was once the case, so there are fewer tensions surrounding this issue than would have been the case in the past. Adoptive families are frequently also nontraditional in other ways; for instance, they may be headed by single parents, or by two parents of the same gender. People who belong to unconventional families (parents, children, members of the extended family) have to deal with the fact that other people will react to that unconventionality-sometimes negatively, sometimes positively. Legally, too, adoption is much more complex than it was a generation or two ago. Many years ago, adoption law reform focused on making the adoptee a full part of the adoptive family, for insta
