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some sw's are really obsessed with looks - some of it makes sense in that the children can look as if they belong, but as i am mixed race - dark eyes/hair and married a blonde / blue eyed man, one of my birth children is blonde / blue eyed, one dark eyes / hair and the other somewhere imbetween. our ad is dark like one of my children, but any colour would have fitted into our "rainbow" family.Our sw was quite relaxed about it all which was good.

HiI would have thought that you would be snapped up as you say there are not many of us around. I am also mixed race from both my parents, British/Asian. It was obvious when I was a child but not now as an adult. The reality is that your are of dual heritage regardless of looks with all the experiences and knowledge that go with it. Glad things are looking brighter for you. I would be interested to know what view your SW took, did she think you should only be matched with white children?

Welcome to the wonderful world of adoption and the ethnic/cultural minefield! We have been told we are too Asian for a white child by one child's SW. My husband had a Chinese Grandmother and our adopter daughter an Indonesian Birth Father. I agree that the colour of skin seems to be so, so important. We have just had yet another disappointment solely down to ethnicity. As a middle aged white woman I am becoming very aware of racism thanks to Social Services. Over the last year since we were approved I have gone round and round the question of ethnicity and really don't know where I stand I am so dizzy. I also don't know if we should be making enquiries about white or mixed race children and if so does the mix have to be white/asian. I have concluded that we should play the numbers game and enquire about children we are interested in regardless of the mix and see what happens. Glad to hear things are looking brighter and would also be interested to hear from others of mixed race the advise they have been given by their SWs.

oh very interesting........i would of though you would be an ideal candidate having a spectrum of both cultures and diversity within that.Good luck hope you find a match soon.

welcome to the boards.have you looked at be my parent or children who wait.my advice is to ask about any children you feel who could fit into your family.im part of a mixed race family and i have to say all our children have some link to us in skin colour or background.but as someone else has mentioned.im white and hubby is mixed race (black/white)birth children one is dark skined and one is very very light(often took for white)our adopted children reflect this in that some ore dark and our youngest hobbit is very light.but they fit our family just right.make it clear to your worker that you are open to all that will match with you.either dark or fair.good luck

Thank you for everyone's interest. I had been quite shocked by the attitude of some SWs.Fortunately we are now pursuing a very positive link where the SW of the children dont think we are too white for their children who are of mixed race. I am thankful for more reasonable people.

Hi imaginary poppy. I spent ages thinking I had to find a child whose complexion fitted in with myself so that he/she would look as though they belonged to me. But I ended up adopting the complete opposite. I knew he didnt match my colouring and I had to put up with a lot of negative comments from people, but I liked reading about him. Sometimes its also about the childs personality and not just about looks. Good luck with your search.

Hi SunriseWe really havent been looking for children that match us looking wise - if we did we would only look at "white children" becuase i am pretty white looking people often dont know im mixed race. We are both very open to children of any ethinicity - my reason for the topic was really the strange Politially Correct SWs and really being so PC that it becomes an almost reverse racism. In a way why is the black or brown half of some one so much more important than the white in some cases. I have read about transracial adoption and the pros and cons - surely it comes down to parental perception and training into this to issue and now we know about the problems we can educate adopters. I feel that as I expereinced racism as a child and as a teenager and sometimes as an adult that i am well able to help our children cope with it. i wonder if the tide is starting to changeanyway as surely transracial adoption is better than FC or childrens home??

Hi EveryoneMe and my hubby are just starting out on the adoption journey, and reading your posts is incredibly enlightening, and I wonder how our VA will pigeon hole us.I'm white and hubby is white/black Carribean but his mum (white) was only married to his Dad for 2 years and never had any contact with him until hubby met him for the first time in his memory when he was 24. She remarried a white guy soon after and had a son with him who is 13 years younger than hubby, so all our family are white. We live in a promenantly white (hubby was 1 of 2 mixed race kids in his secondary school!) rural community, hubby's little bro came home from school when he was seven to tell us - 'Rory has an older brother but he is white not brown!!!'It's lucky that we are now in contact with hubby's Dad's side of the family otherwise it would be a really interesting situation!

It is all about how society sees people of colour. I am white and my DH is black and our DD's are mixed race from the same background as us, but to society they will always be seen as black. The fact that they are 50% white seems to be forgotten, and the 50% black is what's seen.Also it's interesting that Barack Obama is mixed 50/50, but is always refered to as the "first black president" not as the "mixed race president". He had a white mum and white grandparents who brought him up and never met his Dad's side of the family until he was quite grown up, but he will always be "black"

Inverse racism, yes. We (white British) were immediately greeted by SWs from at least one LA at a recent Exchange Day with "we don't have any white kids".What about if we are happy to adopt mixed / other ethnicities? And what about those adoptive parents who do it internationally - how can LAs be so immediately against different ethnicities???The desire to keep to the same ethnicity would, sadly, have been far more of an issue in the 1960s-1970s. I suspect that evidence from research, say, of a black child growing up in a white family then is being used to inform practice now, as research of those children who are now adults is used to base SW practices nowadays. This is regardless of the fact that Britain is now far more multi-cultural Britain, and of course families reflect this increasingly too. Not so for adoptive children though?!It seems that it's only in cases where children are the most difficult to place that SWs will consider parents who will "promote" rather than necessarily "reflect" the child's ethnicity. As to what happens when a sibling pair are half-siblings of different ethnicities, the mind boggles. No boxes and all boxes can be ticked.It seems a crazy variable to apply, especially when it just holds up the process. Pot luck as to how important it appears to be, as this seems to vary from SW to SW.blueberry2

Some interesting points Blueberry.Whilst I do think it is best to place black or mixed children where there is at least one parent who resembles their colour, there are however, quite a lot of mixed children in care who present as white, ie blondish afro hair and sometimes blue eyes. These children tend to be left in care as most black/mixed couples want a darker child. What happens to these children or those as you rightly pointed out who are white with a mixed race sibling? I think SS have to change the rules for these, in their words, "difficult to place" children.What's the alternative for them - Alife in care because they are too white!!

Our 2 half-siblings were placed earlier this year. We are both white (one British, one other European), the children have the same white Scottish BM, one white Scottish BF and one oriental BF. They were considered hard to place for other reasons and our LA took the pragmatic view that matching those other criteria got priority and that we were able to promote AD's heritage because we have a diverse network and a multi-cultural family. I think it would have been very difficult to find an ethnic match for AD without moving her quite some distance, and I think they have benefitted from staying in the same town. It is interesting how the context changes someone's colour. Here in a rather white part of Scotland she looks much more oriental than when we visit my family in a big town with a lot of oriental and oriental/white mixes - most people on the tram looked more oriental than her.Making her feel good about the way she looks is one of the things we have to work on with her, but it isn't a bigger thing than some of the other issues.

colour is such a strange thing really in mixed race children. My two birth children are biologically half white british and half hong kong chinese. my son has not an oriental bone in his body, he doesn't remotely look oriental (though does look like his dad strangely), was blonde as a baby (had a few questions re paternity from some people there!!) and now, as an adult the only thing singling him out as mixed race is his surname. my daugther though looks more mixed something, not neccessarily chinese though. but put her in Hong Kong and you can tell its half chinese but where we live, with a large white population, you'd be hard pushed to place her ethnicity except, again, becoz of her surname. my AS, 100% ethnically chinese, ironically DOES look mixed race! strange. but all three live with me, a white british woman, in the UK, in a predominantly white area and yet have still managed to preserve their chinese heritage and identity.

I read a book a while ago about experiences of adoption which was researched in the 1960s. I am not surprised the experience wasn't good for some black and mixed race children as the adoptive parents were quoted as saying really racist things or saying things like "we don't mention it and hope he doesn't notice". !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! I am not 100% sure but I think the book was Adoption: A Second Chance by Barbara Tizard. I don't know if it's still available (I got it from the library, where I used to live).

And colour can change overtime as well!My brother is white, his wife black caribbean, and their first child looked very white when she was born. She is now 8 and sort of medium brown - she darkened a lot around the age of 4.