Harold Grotevant Discusses Dynamics Between Teachers and Adopted Children

Content

In a recent episode of the podcast Creating a Family: Talk about Adoption & Foster Care, Dr. Harold Grotevant, the Rudd Family Foundation Chair in Psychology at UMass Amherst and professor emeritus in the College of Natural Sciences's Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences, joined Dr. Abbie Goldberg of Clark University to discuss the dynamics between teachers and adopted children, namely teachers' understanding about adoption and potential misperceptions. During this conversation, Grotevant shared his inspiration to pursue research and outreach in this area:

"Over the years, both in our research and just in making presentations to the community and so on, a lot of times I'd be talking with adoptive parents and the topic of schools would come up: the challenges that they might be facing in the schools where their children were learning; sometimes challenges with school personnel who didn't seem to get it—who didn't seem to really understand adoption, or who made assumptions about that. And one of the missions of our...adoption research program is to do outreach to the community and make the research that's been done available in a broader kind of way."

— Dr. Harold Grotevant on Creating a Family: Talk about Adoption & Foster Care

Click here to listen to the full podcast.