Oxford Dictionary defines belonging as “a feeling of being happy or comfortable as part of a particular group and having a good relationship with the other members of the group because they welcome you and accept you.”

Growing up, there was one foundational human question at the center of my complexities with adoption: Do I truly belong anywhere?

Adopted by parents with wonderful intentions, I was lovingly enfolded into my family. Yet an existential fear lived in my body and soul: If I did not belong in the family I was born into, do I really belong anywhere at all?

That pathway was deeply layered. Not only was I not born into my family, but I was also a different race. Even when we felt deep togetherness, the world constantly reflected back that we didn’t match. Within our home, there was warmth and acceptance; alongside it lived the quiet dread that there might be a reason for them to send me back. Belonging felt like shaky ground—as though someone could suddenly decide I didn't fit, and like my mother of origin, walk away without me.

The High Cost of the "Gateway"

As a child, I didn’t understand that heavy energy, but it fueled my entire world. In my small, sports-focused New England town, I realized early on that cheerleading was my gateway to inclusion. I drilled my jumps to perfection and pushed my tumbling to the max. It worked: after cheering in junior high, I made the varsity squad as the only freshman.

I thought I had arrived. Making varsity gave me instant community, but it didn't give me authentic belonging.

As the only Black, bi-racial, transracially adopted girl on the squad, I didn't look like anyone else, and my family wasn’t like the other girls.  We were a rural farm family, not an “in-town” family. My mom handmade our clothes and baked from scratch, while the other girls wore brand-name labels and brought store-bought treats. In a society where brands signaled cool, I wanted what they had.

Having a built-in group did not guarantee an anchored sense of self. What is crystal clear today, when belonging is fragile, young people will seek it by any means necessary:

• Imposter Syndrome: Transactionally, I earned my spot. Relationally, I was drowning. I constantly felt like a fraud who had to overcompensate, stay hyper-vigilant, and make it look effortless. That emotional tax drained energy away from schoolwork and kept my nervous system on high alert.

• Risky Behaviors: Being the youngest and the only girl of color, I felt immense pressure to match the older girls to stay "cool." That meant drinking young, attending parties, and navigating compromising situations with boys. I usually found my way out—anchored by the moral compass my parents gave me—but the danger was real and most of the adults around me didn’t understand it and couldn’t protect me.

• Shame and Emotional Isolation: I knew the risks I was taking were wrong, which created crushing shame. I desperately wanted social acceptance, but sharing my reality at home felt like it would threaten my family standing. Lacking a safe outlet, I held it all inside.

The Data Behind the Pressure

My reality is not an isolated one. Research consistently reflects the quiet pressure carried by transracially adopted children and youth:

• Racial and Cultural Isolation: In the United States, approximately 40% of all adoptions are transracial, yet the vast majority of these children are raised in predominantly white communities and attend predominantly white schools. Studies show this mismatch frequently leads to prolonged identity confusion and heightened hyper-vigilance in social settings.

• Elevated Risk and Mental Health: Research published by the American Academy of Pediatrics highlights that adopted adolescents face significantly higher odds of externalizing behaviors, anxiety, and depressive symptoms compared to non-adopted peers—often stemming from unresolved grief, attachment disruptions, and the exhaustion of trying to assimilate.

• The Power of Racial Mirrors: Sociological research on transracial adoption confirms that access to adult racial role models and peers who share the adoptee's racial background directly correlates with higher self-esteem and significantly lower levels of distress.

What "Belonging by Any Means Necessary" Looks Like

When kids do not have authentic spaces of belonging, survival instincts take over:

• Working overtime, to assimilate into majority groups that misunderstand, scrutinize, or exoticize them.

• Engaging in unsafe behaviors, early substance use, risky social circles, or compromising relationships to buy social collateral.

• Becoming a chameleon, sacrificing core values, boundaries, and identity to avoid rejection.

• Suffering in silence, hiding struggles and close calls out of fear that honesty will invite parental disappointment, judgment, or abandonment.

How Parents Can Anchor Their Children

Helping transracially adopted children find healthy belonging requires proactive, intentional scaffolding:

1. Cultivate Mirrors

It isn't enough for your child to look out at a world of difference; they need to look across and see people who look like them. In addition to cultivating authentic close relationships with people of color, seek out diverse neighborhoods, mentors, community programs, and activities where your child is not the only person of color in the room. When I finally found an under-21 dance club with kids who looked like me, my shoulders dropped. For the first time, I felt an innate, effortless ease. There were still challenges but integrating into a community of other young people who looked like me gave me a sense of belonging I needed.   

2. Decouple Behavior from Belonging

Explicitly and repeatedly tell your child: “There is nothing you could do, say, or break that would make you lose your place in this family.” Children wrestling with abandonment fears need overt reassurance that boundary-testing and mistakes will be met with accountability and guidance, never exile. Sadly, I still hear today some parents joking that they could send their adopted child back.  

3. Build a Safety Plan

Make it safe for them to call you when situations go sideways. Establish a no-questions-asked pickup policy for risky social environments, reserving the debrief and coaching for the next day. If a child knows the truth will bring curiosity and safety rather than rage or isolation, it can limit secrets that can put them in danger.

Belonging as a Lifeline: A Note on September

This conversation about belonging and adoption isn't simply about social comfort, it is fundamentally about emotional survival.

September is National Suicide Prevention Month, and within our community, we mark Adoptee Suicide Prevention Awareness. The data in our field tells a sobering truth that many outside the adoption triad never see: research, including prominent studies published in the journal Pediatrics, shows that adoptees are approximately four times more likely to attempt suicide compared to their non-adopted peers.

When you look at that statistic through the lens of lived experience, it is not a mystery. It is the cumulative, heavy weight of unexpressed grief, rootlessness, and the exhausting tax of feeling like an imposter in your own life. When young people believe they must perform perfection or resort to risky behaviors to earn their place—and then carry crushing shame when things go wrong—they retreat into deep emotional isolation. When they feel they have no safe harbor to speak the truth, despair rushes in to fill the silence.

Belonging should never have to be negotiated, bought with our children’s safety, or carried as a solitary burden. By building communities where they are celebrated for exactly who they are—both inside your home and in the wider world—we don't just help them navigate adolescence. We give them an emotional anchor, and we let them know they are worth fighting for, every single day.

The heaviest things kids carry this fall won’t be in their backpacks. 

Coming off the magic of Together on the Journey Family Camp, the transition to late August is always a bit jarring.

At camp, our community exists in the rare comfort of absolute belonging. Nobody in our sacred community had to explain why they didn’t match their parents, justify their family connections, or explain their family tree.

Heading into this school year, children step back into spaces where they are visible and where there are questions.

National data shows that over 70% of all kids cite peer belonging and fitting in as their number one school concern. But for transracially adopted youth, research highlights an even heavier load:

• The “Public vs. Private” Tax: The constant cognitive effort of deciding what to share when peers, teachers, or other grown-ups ask invasive questions.
• The Transracial Paradox (Dr. Richard Lee): Leaving the safety of home to enter hallways where the world treats them solely through the lens of racial stereotypes and difference.
• Structural Blind Spots: Being handed assignments (like genetic family trees or baby photos) that often treat biological nuclear families as the default.

School checklists tell you what physical items students need. They don’t tell you how to pack for the impact of microaggressions or emotional fatigue that comes with experiencing the world as a transracially adopted person.

August Practice: The Backpack Audit

Use these prompts to help name what might be coming up as you head back into the classroom this year.

1. Name the Weight: “What are the words you think of when you picture school this year?” Let them name the anxiety, excitement, or hesitation without trying to immediately fix it.

2. Map the “helpers”: Help children identify the specific adults who make them feel looked after and cared for — perhaps a counselor, art teacher, or bus driver. Practice how to ask for help from grown-ups before a crisis happens.

3. Create the Boundaries: Rehearse exit lines until they feel grounded.

• “That’s personal.”
• “Why do you ask?” (Flips the spotlight back to the asker.)
• “That’s my story to share, and I’m focusing on class right now.”

Boundaries in the Classroom

Save this framework to your phone or print it for your fridge:

When 70% of kids are already bracing for social pressure, we know transracially adopted children need to walk into classrooms prepared for the intrusions that will come. As parents, you can help them pack their emotional backpacks with clarity and care, ensuring they know they never have to carry the weight alone.

With you on the journey,

April Dinwoodie, Executive Director, Together on the Journey

Every Fourth of July, many adoptive families celebrate independence while the systems governing adoption continue to deny foundational freedoms for adopted persons. In many states across the country, original birth certificates remain legally sealed. When the state blocks an adopted person's access to their own origins, human identity is forced into a fragile compromise. True freedom is the sovereign right to explore, question, and expand identity on one's own terms. As adoptive parents, you must be the gateway to that truth, even when systems deny it.

This month also reminds us of the absolute necessity of protective, racially mirrored spaces as an urgent matter. The tragic disappearance and death of 18-year-old Nolan Xavier Wells off the Mississippi coast—the only Black youth in a majority-white friend group during a holiday weekend—shattered my heart. It must also serve as a severe and wrenching reminder.

Many Black and brown children adopted into white families are routinely integrated into white-only spaces because it is convenient for the parents. This is unsafe. Being the "only one" in a majority-white environment is emotionally activating, psychologically exhausting, and physically hazardous. Without a surrounding community that reflects and validates their racial reality, children are stripped of basic protections. This isolation can directly impact behaviors, and force coping mechanisms for survival.

If you are a white adoptive parent, your love alone cannot insulate your child from a violent world. Safety demands intentional action.

• Do your own deep racial identity work. Examine your implicit biases and systemic privilege. You cannot advocate for your child in the world if you are blind to race at home.

• Meticulously craft an authentic community. Be the architect of their social world. If your neighborhood, social circle, or school lacks deep diversity, you must move. Your children need racial mirrors, mentors, and extended family who can teach them what you cannot.

• Believe and protect. Validate every instance of racial harm or discomfort your child brings to you. Make it your business to fiercely defend them and remove them from unsafe environments.

• Enforce physical boundaries. Never let anyone outside of a hair care professional touch your child’s hair without permission. Hair touching is a gateway to objectification and harsher physical violations.

• Hold space for grief. Give your children the explicit freedom to mourn what they lost when they were separated from their families of origin.

This is the urgent, non-negotiable work we practice at our upcoming Together on the Journey Family Camp (July 30 – August 2). Camp is an intentional sanctuary where youth are entirely enveloped by people who look like them, free to express their grief and joy without explanation. It is where parents must push past their own discomfort.

As the calendar turns from May into June, the rhythm of our households naturally shifts. We move away from the multi-layered reflections of Mother’s Day and step into a month dominated by the imagery of Father’s Day.

For many families connected by transracial adoption, a traditional calendar grid rarely tells the whole story.

Speaking as an adopted person who has lived the lifelong journey of navigating adoption, I can tell you firsthand that Father’s Day seldom fits into a neat, perfect little box. June invites us to notice the fathers and father-figures who shape an adopted person’s life through presence, absence, consistency, or complexity. While fathering is often less openly acknowledged in adoption spaces than mothering, it plays a massive, undeniable role in our identity development and core sense of belonging. Belonging deepens when every single influence on who we are becoming is respected and named without hierarchy or erasure.

Navigating the Tenderness of Fatherhood

Because fatherhood moves in many directions, June can surface silence, unanswered questions, or mixed emotions. From the adopted person’s perspective, Father’s Day can bring up a simultaneous wave of curiosity, grief, loyalty, pride, and confusion, especially around our original.

I have noticed the instinct of caregivers is often to try and resolve these feelings for children. But June asks you to resist the transactional fixing and instead, you are called to practice true  inclusion, curiosity, and care.

To hold space for the full truth of fathering, it helps to start by checking in with your internal parenting:

• Examine Language: Do you speak differently about fathers of origin than you do about mothers of origin? If you notice you are, do you understand why? 

• Acknowledge the Absence: Remember that absence is still a form of influence. Acknowledging a birth father’s place in a child's history, regardless of how much information you have, signals to a child that no part of their narrative has to be hidden.

• Validate, Don't Fix: The goal isn't to tie the day up with a perfect bow, but to build a bridge. Adopted children need to know they can hold love for the adoptive fathers walking beside them daily, while safely wondering about the fathers who came before.

Finding the Bridge at Camp 2026

Building these bridges and navigating these tender conversations isn't work meant to be done in isolation. You cannot hold the complexity entirely on your own within the walls of your house; you need a community to help.

This is precisely why the Together on the Journey community gathers.  Camp is the physical space where the quiet, internal work you do at home becomes a tangible and even more connected reality.

For adoptive fathers, camp offers invaluable, necessary relationships. It is a space where men can step into space with other fathers who are navigating the exact same joys, questions, and responsibilities. It’s a place to unpack assumptions about fathering, gain real-world tools, and stand together as allies for children.

Claim Your Space This Summer

The countdown to Athens, Ohio is officially on, and spots are nearly filled. Don’t wait, let’s walk this journey together.

Most Mother’s Day cards are written for a world of "one." One mother, one bond, one uncomplicated story. But my life has always been a story of "many."

Before I reached the arms of the mother who raised me, I was held by Helen, my mother of origin. Next, a foster mother held and looked after me. For those first few precious months, she was the steward of my safety. When it was time for me to leave, she didn't simply hand me over; she left detailed notes of my routine and wrote in those notes that I was very hard to give up.

In the adoption community, we often talk about the "two mothers" - the mother of origin and the mother of experience. But this May, I want us to look at the whole ecology of care. I call May the "mother of all months" not just because of the emotional tension, but because it forces us to recognize that for an adopted person, care comes from many hands.

Auditing Your Mothering Landscape

To move beyond the standard Mother's Day narrative, I invite you to think about mothering not as a static identity, but as a cultural practice that needs to be "customized" for the child entrusted to you. Ask yourself:

• What is my "Mothering Heritage"? We often parent the way we were parented. But does the child in your home—with their unique history, culture, and trauma—need a different kind of mothering than the one you received?

• Am I the Bridge or the Destination? You are the steward of connections, not the person erasing them. Are you helping your child maintain the ties to their "many hands," or are you asking them to choose just one?

• Who Validates My Motherhood? If you rely on your child to validate your role through their gratitude or performance on Mother’s Day, you are placing a weight on them they weren't meant to carry. Own your celebration so they don’t have that extra expectation.   

This May, I am holding space for the original mother I miss in my bones, the foster mother who held me in those first few months, and the mother whose heart and confidence sustained me.

When we embrace the "many," we stop competing with the past and start building a more honest and healthy future where there doesn't have to be only one mother or mother figure.

Register for Together on the Journey Family Camp 2026

"I wish my parents had more tools in their parenting toolbox." I said this in a recent podcast, and it’s the reason TRJ Family Camp exists. We are down to our final few spots!

Featured Presenter: Bryan Post We are thrilled to welcome back Bryan Post! Bryan will lead sessions on his "Love-Based Parenting" model. If you’ve struggled with the "Great Behavior Breakdown," Bryan’s trauma-informed approach is the tool you’ve been looking for.

Register today—only a few spots remain!

Don’t Miss Our May Parent Session!

Join us for our monthly space of support and connection.

What: TRJ Parent Support & Connection Session

When: Wednesday, May 13th | 7:30 PM – 8:30 PM EST

Where: Online via Zoom

Sign Up Here