My daughters are still too young (seven and four) for me to know exactly how they think of skin color. But I’ve jotted down things they’ve said through the years.
For those new to my blogs, my husband and I are white, we have a nine-year-old biological son and two half-sisters from Korea, ages 7 and 4. I assume the girls are fully Korean. We have no birthfather information on the younger one, and she was so much lighter-skinned than her sister that we wondered if she was half-European/American. But overall she now looks much like other Korean children I see. The older girl’s record indicates two Korean birthparents. However, her hair is brown, not black, and has a bit of a curl to it.
Our older daughter was nearly a year old when she arrived. She seemed to adjust and bond well. She arrived right before Christmas. We received a photo Christmas card from an adoptive family which included three Korean young adults. Meg carried that picture around for about three weeks. Perhaps it contained the only “normal-looking” people she’d seen in a while. (However, she showed no reaction to seeing Asian people at the Asian supermarket two weeks after she arrived.)
She did spend a great time of her time on my lap that first year engaged in trying to press and hold my nose down to a flatter position. Once that year—she was probably about 18 months old—she saw a poster at her eye level in the library of an Asian woman. She became very excited. She pointed at it exclaiming, “Nose! Nose! Nose!” over and over.
When Meg was three, we often visited my parents. They had two high wooden stools for the children to use at the big family table. One chair had a slightly darker stain than the other. Meg always insisted that her brother have the lighter chair and she have the browner one, “because I’m darker”. (She was very into matching and order at this point in time anyway. She would even have given her brother the bigger cookie because he was bigger.)
When Meg was 3/12, her little sister arrived. I let Meg choose a baby doll to hold when I had to hold the new baby. (She had been given an Asian baby doll when she arrived, and my son had a dark-skinned baby doll. ) At the store that day, there were only black and white dolls, no Asian ones. Meg chose a white one, but her deliberations seemed to focus on which dress came with each doll.
Grandma brought a doll for the new baby which had dark skin and hair. Meg asked her Grandma to bring her a similar doll, “but with yellow hair because yellow is my favorite color”. I have tried to have dolls of all different colors and nationalities around the house, and donated many dolls of varying races to the kids’ preschool. I tried to avoid Barbies altogether, but when an older neighbor girl moved she brought over a box full of them for my daughter. So after she had three blonde Barbies I went ahead and bought the Korean one.
When Meg was six someone must have said something about her darker skin, I don’t know what, because I overheard Meg say matter-of-factly, “It’s because I have more melatonin.” I had previously explained that her skin was darker because she had more pigment-making melanin (not melatonin). Soon after I explained this, I think she was about five, she said to her friend that her mother sunburned easily because “something is wrong with her skin and she doesn’t make enough pigment”.
However, Meg really has always seemed fascinated by Barbie, Tinkerbelle, Cinderella and Goldilocks. She went through a phase in preschool and kindergarten of drawing herself with blonde hair. Toward the end of the kindergarten year, she began to draw both herself and her blonde best friend (she has two best friends, one blonde, one Asian) with dark hair. I told the little girl’s mother and explained that I was actually very happy Meg was drawing her daughter with dark hair. I figured that she wanted to be like her friend and it was a step forward that she was drawing Paige to look like herself rather than changing her own image to look like Paige. The mother, who has a transracially-adopted sister herself, was entirely supportive.
Regina, by contrast, has from babyhood seemed to recognize and prefer pictures and dolls representing Asians. “This one,” she’ll say, emphatically pointing. “That’s like Reggie!”
When Regina at almost four years old wanted to be “Dora the Explorer” (the Nickelodeon character) for Halloween, I was glad. We have lots of pink T-shirts, she even owns a purple backpack and a stuffed monkey. We’ll get off easily and cheaply in the costume department this year, yay!
Then we discovered that the party shop sold a Dora the Explorer wig. Regina and her sister decided they had to have it. I informed my girls that I was not going to pay $20 for a straight, black, bobbed wig for a girl who had perfect straight, black, bobbed hair! Then I discovered the wig sold with the Dora costume had tightly curled black ringlets, even though the Dora character on TV and toys has straight hair. Have we so sold the “Goldilocks” idea to the next generation that they figure if they are going to sell a black-haired wig, it had better have curls even if the character it represents doesn’t? Needless to say, I’m not buying it.
In my next blog, I’ll share some things my son and other children have said about skin color, and share some of my favorite children’s books on the subject.
Please see these related blogs:
Care of African American Children in Transracial Adoptions: Different Skin Colors
Would They Have Done That to Me?