A new study has shown that many adopted children, with both same- and different-sex parents, experience stigmatization in preschool.
The study, by Abbie Goldberg, an associate professor at Clark University, surveyed 35 gay male couples, 40 lesbian couples, and 45 different-sex couples that had adopted children in public or private preschools.  Of the respondents, 20 percent of the lesbians, 4 percent of the gay men, and 26 percent of the straight respondents reported “difficulties with their child’s school related to their adopted status,” reports EdWeek. Of the same-sex couples, 25 percent of the lesbians and 12 percent of the gay men reported difficulties with the school related to their sexual orientation.
The problems that the parents cited include both overlooking the effects of adoption and attributing everything to adoption status; portraying adoption as “rescuing a child”; classroom materials and projects that don’t acknowledge all family compositions; and not being aware of microaggressions.
What to do about this? The problem, as with all issues of bias, has no simple answers. A couple of places to start include Welcoming Schools, which has a number of resources about many different types of families, and the Child Welfare Information Gateway, which offers adoption resources for teachers.
Kudos to Goldberg for research that looks across boundaries of sexual orientation but does not ignore it. This is not her first time doing so. Last year, she published a study of the considerations of same- and different-sex adoptive couples in choosing pre-schools for their children. She’s also done quite a lot of work on same-sex parents and their kids specifically—finding, for example, that having same-sex parents is unrelated to child adjustment and that young adults with lesbian moms and male donors are generally happy with their relationships to their donors.
