ABSTRACT
Since 1953, over 100,000 Korean children have been adopted by American families (U.S. State Department, 2002). Korean children were the largest number of foreign-born children who were placed in American families until 1995. Even though the number of adoptions of Korean children has significantly decreased compared with the 1980s, 1,770 Korean children were still placed in American homes in 2001 (U.S. State Department, 2002). International adoptions, particularly from Asian countries such as Korea and China, have raised concerns in the field of child welfare. A strong argument against international adoptions concerns the development of a child’s ethnic identity. If children are uprooted from their cultures, their sense of ethnic identity may become confused or conflicted (Friedlander, 1999). Ethnic identity develops as a result of cultural socialization within and across multiple contexts. Therefore, many adoption agencies often provide various cultural activity programs and encourage the adoptive families to participate in those programs. Some adoptive parents considerately accept the differences of their child’s own ethnicity and tend to those activities actively, while others emphasize universal human identity and do not think it is necessary to teach Korean culture to their children.
