The Adoptee's Search for Identity

Who am I?

Although many in our society continue to refer to adoptees as "adopted children" their entire lives, our adopted children do grow up into adulthood. When they do, and often long before they reach the age of majority, our adopted children want to know who they are. They want to know how to synthesize two heritages into one identity. Many who aren't already communicating with their birth families want to make contact once they are adults. Nearly all want their original birth certificates, which most states seal and then amend with a new birth certificate. Many adoptees who don't want to search for their birth families still want the right to have what the non-adopted have and take for granted: accurate and truthful records of their birth.

Many adoptive parents of children with special needs already have their child's original birth certificate on file. Many older children entering adoptive families, or internationally born children, have records that the American child adopted as an infant doesn't receive. Some special needs kids grow up having contact with their extended birth family members, or siblings separated by adoption, or who remained in foster care while they went on to be adopted. Nevertheless, we believe that access to the original birth certificate for every adoptee ought to be a given. Ethically and therefore politically, we believe it's wrong to withhold truthful information from the adopted person simply because he or she is adopted. We support the right of all adoptees to have access to the same information all other Americans have: their names at birth, and the names of their birth parents, and the documents and records giving accurate representations of their medical, birth, and social histories. Until adoptees have the same rights as the non-adopted, we all labor under the shadow of injustice.

The purpose of this site is to promote the adoptions of waiting children, but it would be incomplete without statements about the future of waiting children, because all waiting children, whether they are adopted or not, grow up into adulthood. Some of the best links we know of dealing with adoptee issues are The Adoptee's Right to Know and Bastard Nation. These sites deal with these issues far better than we ever could, and we urge every adoptive and prospective adoptive parent to visit these sites, along with Voices of Adoption, in order to come to an understanding of adoptee issues, including adoptee rights and the adoptee's search for identity.

From Chapter 13 of Adopting and Advocating for the Special Needs Child, by L. Anne Babb and Rita Laws.

Several years ago, one of the largest studies of adopted adolescents ever undertaken in the United States found that 65 percent said they would like to meet their birth parents. The majority also said they wanted to know who they looked like and why they were adopted (Benson, et al., 1994). Other research has also supported the finding that the adoptee's search for identity, often including an actual search for and connection with her birth family, is a normative aspect of growing up adopted.

Once a child understands conception and childbirth, he or she is also ready to come into a full understanding of adoption. Children adopted at older ages will probably already have understood a great deal about adoption. Children who lived with and became attached to their birth parents carry that attachment with them and sometimes later forget what life with their original parents was like. They may idealize the absent parent and long to return home. Others want to reject everything they know or remember about the birth family and deny any connection, often out of a fear that they will become what their birth parents were.

Children adopted from other countries or races may immerse themselves in their original culture, even assuming the dress, customs, or traditions of the country. Conversely, they may completely reject the country of origin and embrace America and all things American. No matter what path the adoptee takes in building his or her identity, the adoptive parent must learn about adoption from the adoptee's perspective. This can be done through reading the works of adoptees such as authors Jean Paton or Betty Jean Lifton, or poets such as Penny Partridge. Joining a national nonprofit organization dedicated to adoption equity, or attending an adoption search and support group can also be a tremendous help not only to the adoptive parent, but to the adolescent or young adult adoptee. Support groups for adopted children and adolescents such as those sponsored by agencies like Holt International can help the adoptee to see that her identity struggles are not unusual and that she is not alone.

Adoption experts agree that adoption threatens the adoptee's sense of self. With no history and no sense of rootedness, he struggles to understand who he is, and where his future lies. Everyone experienced with adoption also suffers some loss of identity. Original parents are parents, yet they do not parent the child they lost to adoption. Adoptive parents are parents also, yet they did not produce the child and have no part in the child's innate abilities and heritage.

When adoptees have incomplete or no information about their birth families, they often tell us that they feel an incomplete sense of self. Many special needs adopted children have only negative information about their birth parents and extended families, information that does not tell about Uncle Joe, who attended Duke University on a football scholarship, or Aunt Emily, who had perfect pitch. They only know about Mom, whose alcohol addiction led to removal of the adoptee and his siblings from the home; or about Dad, who was in prison when the adoptee was born. Adoptees who have only negative information about their parents may develop a negative self-image. Adoptive parents can help by trying to give the adoptee help and understanding in seeking positive, balanced information about the family of origin.

Adoptees and the Search

Adoptive parents whose children search for their birth parents often interpret the search as a threat to the parent-child relationship. Most adoptees who search say they love their adoptive parents and do not seek to replace them. They seek, rather, to regain a part of themselves that they feel is "missing," even if what is missing is information rather than a relationship.

In her work with adult adoptees in search, Anne learned that more than half never told their adoptive parents that they were searching. They were afraid that their adoptive parents would disown them, castigate them, or be very upset and threatened by the search. Many adoptive parents actually did threaten the adoptee with abandonment if they searched!

Adoptive parents of special needs kids, in particular, can have a hard time if a teen or young adult searches for the very parent who abused or neglected the child. Many such adoptees do search and even establish relationships with birth parents who are still dysfunctional or even imprisoned. One of Anne's friends searched for and found her institutionalized mother and visited her regularly in the state psychiatric hospital until her mother died some ten years later. She never told her adoptive parents about the relationship but said that the few glimpses of her mother's real self during that decade gave her a sense of wholeness and understanding that she'd never before experienced. In her book, Mother, Can You Hear Me? adoptee Betty Allen describes a similar experience of finding her misdiagnosed mother in an institution.

We believe that adoptive parents must do the best they can to encourage security in their adopted children and themselves while they are raising minors. Once a child reaches adulthood, parents should have some faith in themselves and in the loving bond they have established with their kids. With some children there will be a stronger bond than with others; but our experience shows that consistent reliability, trustworthiness, and love always bear some fruit, even in the most wounded or disordered adoptee. Adoptive parents must learn to let go of their adopted children and of their own need to control or possess the adoptee. All adoptees have two families, even if one family did not raise the child and did not provide reliability, trustworthiness, and love. The original family provided our adopted children's roots, and when we reject those roots we reject part of our children. We adoptive parents must often work on our inner selves before we can grow gracefully into our children's adulthoods.

When an Adoptee Returns to the Birth Family

Under what circumstances might a child return to her birth family? We have known some situations in which older, disturbed children experienced one failed adoptive placement after another, went into residential treatment or independent living, and then returned voluntarily as adults to the birth family. In a few other cases, states finally admitted that they could not keep the adolescent in any facility and actually returned the child to the birth family. We have also met adult adoptees who grew up in abusive foster or adoptive families and reestablished relationships with their birth family in adulthood.

There are numerous cases in which the child welfare system failed children by never delivering on their implied promise that child protective services would give them a better life or home. Many American children grow up in foster care, group homes, or institutions, without ever being adopted, "aging out" of the system. In many such instances, the child grows up and returns to the birth family. In some cases, before becoming adults, children once removed from their parents are re-placed by the state--or by themselves--into the home of a birth parent or birth family member. There are even federal Policy Interpretation Questions (PIQs) relating to whether birth parents can receive federal adoption assistance payments if they re-adopt the child for whom their parental rights were once terminated (they can't).

Sites to See

Adoptee's Right to Know is an excellent site about the need for adoptee access to original birth records, adoptee search, and civil rights issues, along with a wealth of other information.

Voices of Adoption is for everyone who wonders how adoption affects those who live it every day. An award-winning, beautiful site.

Plumsites for Public Interest offers a treasure trove of adoption related sites, particularly for all that is adoptee-related.

Adoptee Related WWW Library, just what it says. Any prospective adoptive parent or adoptive parent ought to, in our opinions, visit at least these sites and have a good look at them.

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