Modern Family and Cross-Cultural Adoption

I just watched my first episode of Modern Family, "The Future Dunphys," which aired on April 3. If you haven't seen it, my summary will probably be helpful. If you have seen it, my summary will be underinformed.

For the next few days, you could also watch the episode yourself on Hulu:

Here goes: Cameron and Mitchell are a two-dad family who have adopted Lily, a five-ish year old girl who was born in Vietnam. Lily's class has been discussing heritage. One of Lily's classmates explained that, because his parents are Italian, he is also Italian. Lily figures that, since her parents are gay, she must be gay. She tells this to Gloria, Mitchell's stepmother. Gloria is personally mourning her son's loss of his Colombian heritage, and so challenges Cameron and Mitchell to teach Lily about her Vietnamese heritage. They're woefully unprepared, so Gloria has them take Lily to a Vietnamese restaurant. Lily isn't really interested in her Vietnamese culture, and she only identified as "gay" because she wanted to be closer to her parents. They explain, "The three of us are a family even though we grew up in different places... We're a family because we love each other."


Strong Points

Cameron and Mitchell do try to provide Lily with access to her heritage.

When they realize she's not interested, they stop forcing it on her. It's important for them to make it continually available, but to let Lily be in charge of deciding how big a role it will play at any given moment in her life.

One character suggests that sometimes, parents obsess over their childrens' lives because they can't get their own lives and thoughts in order. This might not actually be true - but it does seem realistic that Gloria's own internal grief about cultural issues in her own family impacts the way that she instructs Cameron and Mitchell.


Challenges / Weak Points

Cameron and Mitchell haven't put much effort into learning about Lily's Vietnamese culture; they could only provide her with the most generic of information about Vietnam. Six hours later, and Lily has expressed that she hates Vietnam, and Cameron and Mitchell eagerly leave the restaurant. It's possible that they might consider the "cultural education" part of their parenting responsibilities finished. They shouldn't.


Questions for After the Show

On a scale of 1-10, how important is it, to you, that a child adopted cross-culturally has the opportunity to learn about and experience their birth culture?

On a scale of 1-10, how important is it to you that the same child takes the opportunity to learn about their birth culture each time they're presented with it?

Is there a difference between the two answers? How would that difference play out in real-life parenting?



The episode is still available on Hulu, and probably will be for the next five days or so. Check it out. www.hulu.com/watch/474727


Afterthought

A friend's comment on the Facebook page made me think a bit more deeply about this episode and my review. Here's a little more of what I'm thinking.

Mitchell and Cameron were glossing over Lily's heritage - in fact, they didn't really know anything about her heritage. That wasn't good. One of the things that's frustrated me the most as I've trained prospective foster/adopt parents is when they suggest that a child won't have a heritage beyond that of their adoptive family, or that a child won't or shouldn't want to learn about their heritage. I've been much more impressed by families that actively incorporate their child's heritage into the family. In the course of working as a social worker, I've also learned about my own heritage - My skin is white, sure, but I've learned to value my roots as a Polish person. I wish that Cameron and Mitchell would learn much about Lily's culture, and incorporate it into the family's daily life. It didn't go that way in the episode. The way that it happened seemed to be that a friend pressured them into taking Lily to a Vietnamese restaurant, with the expectation that a conversation with a waiter and a bowl of pho would make Lily understand what it means to be Vietnamese. The problems with that were that, Mitchell and Cameron have no idea about Vietnamese culture, the meal was at the insistence of a friend - not on their own volition or Lily's volition, and a one-off stop at a restaurant isn't so much incorporating Lily's culture into their life, but just trying to expose her to it, briefly. Also, Lily wasn't interested. In that instance, I wonder if their best course of action was to back off at that point, educate themselves more fully, and then bring it back to Lily - making sure that they're prepared to provide her with a real understanding of her culture, and to make experiencing her culture part of everyday life, rather than making it an addendum to life. I don't know if they're going to do that.

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