“How Much Did You Pay For Her?”: Decision-Making Criteria Underlying Adoptive Parents' Responses to Inappropriate Remarks

Previous research finds that parents in transracial, international adoptive families experience outsider remarks as challenging to family identity. Yet, research also finds that in the face of these identity-disconfirming remarks, parents manage to produce identity-affirming responses. In the current study, we extend these findings by examining the decision-making criteria underlying parental responses and by ascertaining how these criteria change across time. Framed by the concept of discourse dependency, we report on the results from a written survey completed by a volunteer national sample of 245 parents with children adopted from China. Parents were from 38 states, tended to be female (84.1%), White (95.0%), ranging in age from 31 to 65 years. We found that parental decisions about how (and whether) to respond were relationally and interactionally contingent. Decision making criteria changed across time, with experience, and as children developed. Most often, parents made changes to better manage the adopted child's privacy boundaries. Applying Social Constructionism, we discuss our results in terms of the positionality of the family implied by outsider remarks, and the identity-work accomplished via changes to parental responses. We conclude with practical implications for improving family communication and directions for future research.