It's a question every couple from a Western country who adopts a child in China has to face: when to tell the youngster about the place where they were born?

For inter-racial adoptions, the differences in physical appearances are obvious.

China passed a law on adoption in 1992, when 206 orphans found homes in the United States. Since then, US parents have adopted the highest number of children from China. Last year the figure was 7,906, a record, and 95 per cent of the adoptions were girls. That brought the total to about 50,000 in the past 13 years, according to US immigration statistics.

Now, with many of the earliest adoptees teenagers, experts are keeping a close eye on their development.

Jay Rojewski, a professor at the University of Georgia in the United States, conducted a major study on Chinese adoption five years ago.

It resulted in the book, "Intercountry Adoption From China: Examining Cultural Heritage and Other Postadoption Issues," which is considered one of the most authoritative in its field.

"The issue of race is not necessarily a problem or challenge for families when children are young," Rojewski said. "Ways of addressing racial and cultural differences between child and family were a big part of our 2001 study.

"They may affect families more during adolescence when issues of belonging and self-identity will become more important to the adoptees.

"Research and information sharing will be important for families during adolescence, given the fact that when Chinese adoption dramatically increased, many adoptees are just now becoming teenagers."

The efforts of various groups and organizations to ensure children who are adopted from China are able to maintain some sort of link to their home country is a striking factor of this particular type of adoption.

"This sensitivity to culture for Chinese adoptees is different from the experience of many Korean and Vietnamese adoptees in the 1960s and 1970s, when parents would try to eliminate culture differences," Rojewski said.

"An interesting aspect of Chinese adoption is the efforts of parents to maintain connections with other families who have also adopted children from China.

"Play groups, annual festival celebrations, local and national organizations all point to a very different experience for families and adopted children from those earlier situations.

"Some people have likened this to a social movement of advocacy and sensitivity to culture and race."

This sensitivity was seen 10 years ago.

Jane Liedtke had already lived in China for several years when she returned to her home in Illinois with her newly adopted Chinese daughter, Emily.

"When I moved back to the United States with her, I noticed a lot of people at the time who had adopted children from China did not necessarily have a connection with China," Liedtke said.

"Some people had lived in China and did have a cultural connection with the country. But there were others who had never even been outside the US, let alone to China. I was concerned at how these children would be able to reconnect with their culture."

She set up the Our Chinese Daughters Foundation, which offered cultural camps at Illinois State University and featured a range of activities such as Mandarin lessons and Chinese cooking sessions.

The initiative not only allowed the youngsters to learn more about their homeland, but also gave parents a chance to develop a better understanding of a country many knew little about.

But when Liedtke decided to move back to China with her daughter, the camps seemed doomed until she had the brainwave of setting up the organization in China.

Since the foundation began in Beijing in 1998, hundreds of families in the United States have taken part in visits aimed at giving their children first-hand knowledge of and experience in the country and culture where they were born.

"Kids need to come back at some stage to learn what it means to be a Chinese person and get a sense of self," said Liedtke, who lives in Beijing with Emily, now 13.

"One mother told us that the minute they got off the bus from the airport, the first thing her daughter said was: 'Don't worry, Mom, I'll make sure you don't get lost.'"

One of the biggest challenges for families is helping their child understand why they may have been abandoned by their birth parents.

Liedtke said that bringing them back to China to visit was a way to help them come to terms with their situation.

"Parents have to explain to kids about the economic or social situation in China, how some people can't just have as many kids as they want, or that even if their parents had kept them, the conditions they would have lived under might have been at the poverty level," she said.

"A lot of parents take their children to the orphanage where they came from, it shows them there was a place that cared for them before.

"Some families will go to the place where their children were found if they had been abandoned. Some leave a note where they were abandoned to their birth parents, with a photograph of themselves."

Liedtke said her organization carried out a lot of preparatory work with the families and the children before they visited China for the first time to help them cope. Issues covered included how busy and crowded some places are, and the conditions they may find when they return to their orphanage.

"The challenges that they face are the same faced by every foreigner who comes here, but to them it can seem worse as they are foreigners in their own homeland," Liedtke said.

Jean MacLeod, of Detroit, Michigan, who has two adopted daughters from China, is among the hundreds of parents who have returned to China for one of the foundation's culture-focused travel programmes.

"A China trip gives kids the context, the images, the experience and the confidence to answer intrusive adoption questions, and to feel ownership in a place that was only a name on a map before they visited," MacLeod said.

"Re-discovering the country of their birth gave them back an important piece of themselves."

(China Daily July 10, 2006)