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Many American families adopt children from other countries. Some of these families believe it’s important to keep their adopted children close to their native cultures. KSMU’s Xiaowen Tan reports.
Dr. John Prescott is a professor of music at Missouri State University. He adopted two Chinese children. One is from Chongqing province and the other from Xinjiang. Prescott said he and his wife try to teach his kids about Chinese culture in several ways. “One of the ways we do that is through the use of musical activities and learning how to perform Chinese traditional music, both vocal music and also instrumental music”, he said.And another way is through celebrating Chinese traditional festivals.“We do celebration of Mid-Autumn Festival and have moon cakes, and provide a lot of ceremonial Chinese music for that. And then we celebrate the Spring Festival every year, the Lunar New Year with a big party”, he said.Prescott said the reason his family does this is to help their children know themselves better when they grow up. “Children who are taken out of one culture and raised in another, if they don’t have any exposure to their original culture, then when they grow up to become adults, they feel very displaced, and they feel like they don’t belong in either culture”, he said. Emily Mathews, the Missouri director of the adoption agency All Blessings International, said the parents of internationally adopted kids connect with other families who have adopted from the same countries and they get together for various activities. “It’s important that the child knows where he or she was born and if everyone will return to their country for any reason that they know, or maybe connected with their birth parents later on in life, that they know about their culture and where they came from”, she said.Mathews said the adoption agency encourages parents to teach their kids about the countries they were adopted from. It also offers different events helping parents to do just that.For KSMU news, I’m Xiaowen Tan.
