Two years of infertility. One decision to stop asking ‘why isn’t this working’ and start asking ‘what puzzle are we actually supposed to be solving?’ And one month between matching with their son Theo’s birth mother and the day Theo was born.
One month to prepare for a commitment that would define the rest of their lives as a family.
Meredith and Adam are white. Theo is Black. And they want to talk about it, because they think too many adoptive parents who find themselves in a transracial family treat it like a topic to navigate carefully rather than a reality to embrace wholeheartedly.
‘We have to make sure we’re providing him a connection to his history and his culture, not just our family’s history,’ Meredith said. ‘Because our family history now includes his.’
That sentence is worth sitting with.
Transracial adoption is not the same thing as same-race adoption with a different skin tone.
It sounds obvious when you say it out loud. But the implications run deeper than many families anticipate.
Transracial adoption asks something specific of the parents: a genuine, ongoing, not-optional commitment to centering the child’s racial and cultural identity as a core part of who your family is. Not as an add-on. Not as a special occasion. As the actual fabric of daily life.
For Meredith and Adam, that looks like this: Theo has a Black pediatrician, a Black barber, and a Black swim instructor. He is surrounded by what some adoption educators call mirrors, people who look like him, who share his heritage, who reflect a future he can see himself in. His parents built this intentionally and systematically because they understood from the beginning that it wasn’t optional.
Good intentions are a starting point, not a destination.
Every adoptive parent in a transracial family has good intentions. That’s a given. It’s also not enough.
The education Meredith and Adam received through the home study and adoption preparation process gave them a framework before Theo arrived. The videos, the conversations, the prompts that asked them to think carefully about what it would mean to parent a child whose racial experience would be fundamentally different from their own. All of it landed differently once they were holding him. But it had prepared the ground.
Families who skip education or treat it as a box to check often find themselves unprepared when the moments that matter most arrive. The first time your child experiences racism. The question is why they look different from you. The teenager who needs to connect with their birth culture and doesn’t have a foundation under them.
These moments come. Education helps you meet them.
Your family history now includes his history.
We keep coming back to this sentence because it reframes everything.
Transracial adoption is not about absorbing a child of another race into your existing family structure. It’s about genuinely expanding your family’s identity to include theirs. Their heritage becomes part of your story. Their culture becomes part of how you move through the world together. Your family is richer, more complex, and more interesting because of it, if you let it be.
Meredith and Adam are letting it be. And Theo, surrounded by mirrors and by parents who take his full identity seriously, is thriving because of it.
Read Meredith and Adam’s Full Story
Questions about transracial adoption and what the education process involves? Watch our Free training here.
