Raising a Black Adult: What Starts in Your Home Now

I was 49 years old when I sat in my birth mother's living room for the first time. We talked for hours. I did most of the talking because I had 49 years of things to say and she is more of a listener. By the time I left I had something I had been trying to build by myself my entire adult life, a real foundation rooted in people who looked like me, who claimed me, who weren't surprised by a single thing about me.

I was almost fifty years old before I had that. Think about what that means in terms of the years I spent without it.

The gaps I carried into adulthood, the years spent trying to find my own roots, understand my own history, build my own community, those gaps were formed in childhood. In a house in Lincoln, Nebraska where race was never discussed and Black culture was simply absent from daily life. My parents loved me deeply and the gaps were not the result of anything mean-spirited. They were the result of not knowing what they didn't know.

You are reading this. That already puts you somewhere different.

What your child is growing into

I think a lot of white adoptive parents are focused, understandably, on the child in front of them right now. The toddler who needs a nap, the seven year old who needs help with homework, the twelve year old who is starting to pull away. But you are not just raising a child. You are raising a Black adult who will one day walk into a world that has a set of assumptions ready for them the moment they arrive.

Your Black child will at some point be followed in a store. They will be talked over in a meeting. They will be complimented on how articulate they are in a tone that makes clear how surprised the person is. They may be stopped by police for reasons that have nothing to do with what they have done. They will need to know how to move through all of that without losing themselves.

That knowledge does not come from nowhere. It is built over years of conversation, preparation, and cultural grounding that starts at home before any of those moments arrive.

What the foundation actually looks like

A Black child who knows who they are, who has a real relationship with their culture, their history, and their community, enters the world with something to stand on. A child raised without those roots enters it without that anchor. I know which one I was and I know how long it took me to build what should have been there from the beginning.

The foundation gets built in small moments. The music playing in your house, the books on the shelf, the people you bring into your child's life and keep there consistently, the conversations you have regularly about what it means to be Black, what they can expect, and what they deserve.

It also starts with how you talk about race in your home right now. Your child is watching whether you take it seriously, whether you are learning, whether you are willing to make changes. They will carry all of that into adulthood.

When I finally stood in that pavilion at my family reunion in Syracuse, New York surrounded by cousins and aunts and people whose faces reminded me of my own face at different ages, I understood something I had been trying to figure out for decades. That feeling of just being somewhere without having to perform or explain or edit yourself, that is what a foundation feels like from the inside. Your child deserves to feel that long before they are 49 years old.

The work you do now matters more than you know

The conversations you start, the community you build, the identity you help your child root themselves in before the world starts defining it for them, that is an investment in the adult they are becoming. Every year you wait is a year your child is building without the materials they need.

I spent 30 years in education as a teacher, principal, district leader, and principal coach watching kids try to navigate a world they were never prepared for. The ones who moved through it with the most steadiness were not the ones who had the easiest lives. They were the ones who had been given something solid to stand on before they needed it.

You can give your child that. It starts today and you already started it by being here.