Agreed. However, adoption is often thought of as a benevolent act as opposed to a selfish one which is why I made the distinction. I think most people would agree that none of us are being particularly benevolent when we create/birth biological children.
2 Likes
I’d love to hear more of your story but totally understand how personal it is.
I was fortunate enough to have my own kids but my sister was not. She never was able to adopt and I’m sure it was because they didn’t make enough money but she would have been a wonderful mother.
Meanwhile my D met kids who graduated from foster care while working on a project who could have by their own admission benefitted at any point with some added love to their lives even if it was just an outside advisor looking at their homework and teaching them to make a simple meal.
And genetics do play a part–something you may consider “nurture” turns out to be a “nature” trait. I know of cases like that too. Mom is great–dad was a high octane problem. And a baby no matter how cute may suffer with problems unknown to you–like the babies adopted from overseas that may have suffered from neglect. You don’t really know.
Adoption for the most part unless within a family, was usually closed in the past (and often secret then). There were good reasons for that and then it became popular for “open adoptions”.
I’m guessing that adoption can become much harder now emotionally than it was years ago. There are more factors–drugs, money, availability of infants, cost etc that didn’t exist 20-30 years ago. Now a person can look up genetic line that never would have happened. There is social media making “finding your family” the “thing”.
I don’t know. But I do think it’s an interesting topic and would love to hear more.
1 Like
It is interesting that the article focused solely on women who have issues associated with adoption as @parentologist notes. At the very end, the article notes that only a very small fraction of kids that were adopted from Korea participate in Korean adoption groups and Joy’s sisters had no interest in finding their birth mothers. So does that mean that the article is highlighting an issue that may only apply to a subset of adoptees?
Another thing that was not explored is how some of these kids would have fared if they remained with their birth parents. Would they have thrived or ended up in foster care at some point? If, as noted above, they remained in China would they have been a factory worker with limited prospects. If the child has mental health challenges, would they have a better shot at getting appropriate treatment with the adoptive parents than with the birth parents?
While the article suggested that the parents only needed a small amount of money to keep their babies, what about after that? Kids with single moms in poverty generally do not do as well as kids living in less difficult circumstances. One of the women in the article found out that her bio siblings did not all live with the birth mother for their entire childhoods but were shuttled from mom to aunts and/or grannys. Did they feel like they were more loved or supported than the adoptee did?
The article also states that kids are taken away from their families and placed in foster care or made available for adoption due to neglect and insinuates that it can be for minimal reasons. I thought that family reunification was the goal of most foster care programs and that parental rights were terminated only in extreme cases.
Obviously, the goal is for a kid to have a permanent biological family. But if that is not possible, what is the answer? Keep kids in foster care limbo or have them adopted, even if the family is of a different race?
I recall people talking about kids that appeared to be somewhat neglected about calling family services on the family and cautioning them that they better be darn sure, as putting a kid in the system, without evidence of chronic neglect, was not a good thing.
I don’t know the answer, but there are no easy fixes. The adoptive parents I know are fantastic people. I know adopted and biological kids with mental health challenges, behavioral issues, and parent alienation. Interested to see what everyone here thinks.
7 Likes
I’ll talk more about our story, later in this thread, however, I did want to just say that from my perspective, there is never a good reason to raise a child with a lie - keeping an adoption secret from the child, is a lie. I think being secretive about a child’s adoption, is the worst way to start a family.
We lost friends early in our parenting journey because they (the friends) were raising their son to believe he was of their flesh (they said would tell him the truth when he turned 18) - I chose not to participate in that deception, and rather than have to keep the secret for 18 years, we cut off contact.
2 Likes
My sorority sister recently began writing about her experiences as a child born in Hong Kong who was adopted by Chinese immigrants living in the U.S. The truth was hidden from everyone, including her. That secret deeply affected her. Keeping secrets rarely works out well.
4 Likes
Hmmm. I was in a writing workshop with a woman who had that exact experience and has been writing about it.
That would probably be the one. She has embraced her second career of writing wholeheartedly. It’s a small world, isn’t it?
1 Like
Yes!
1 Like
So many secrets and lies often involved in adoption! I have a psychotherapy client who was really the progeny of her oldest sister, but raised by her grandmother until it all came out when she was 13 or 14. She was told but given no help at all adjusting to the realignment of her whole world. She’s 40 now and her biological mother who had a really hard life died a few months ago, living in a nursing home after suffering from advanced complications of AIDS. My client was the one who had to make all the arrangements for her oldest sister/bio mother although there are several living siblings in the middle-she’s the youngest in the family.
I had a quick-and-dirty homestudy. I certainly did my best to prepare myself for an international/transracial adoption but it occurred to me that I could have brought my daughter home for distribution as body parts and no one would be the wiser. And I know of some spectacular adoption failures: people adopting older kids and freaking out if they didn’t instantly fall in love with the dog in their life. People who couldn’t last long enough for the toddler to get over jet lag. Alas, the secondary market in placing these lost kids is totally unregulated and there are some very sad stories of multiple placements and kids falling between the cracks.
Any adoption starts with a terrible burden on the adoptee: whatever the reason, a child has to reckon with the fact that whoever created them biologically was not prepared to parent them. Some kids adjust and some have a terrible time depending on a zillion different things: resilience, circumstance, dumb luck. And at different times in the life cycle, sadness and/or crisis may arise. Or not.
I consider myself so, so lucky to have had the good fortune to be able to be a mother. And however my daughter reacts to anything, I think the burden is on me to at least tolerate her behavior toward me if my feelings are hurt and do my very best to offer my assistance, should she choose to accept it.
Again, IMHO.
7 Likes
Well said!
That’s horrible! My cousin’s daughter who was adopted as an infant, knows all about being adopted. Her parents even got her book about adoption.
If you’re going to adopt a child, you need to go into the process with your eyes wide open and do all the research and be aware of everything. The kids I know who were adopted, were all adopted as infants or very little kids. From what I can see, they’re happy and well adjusted. My cousin who adopted a daughter has been great throughout the years about answering her daughter’s questions, and making sure that her daughter knows she is well-loved and not making adoption into a negative thing. I guess it depends on each individual situation.
Adoption can rear its head at different times in an adoptee’s life. I believe that it’s the adoptive parent’s job to roll with the punches when their kid (young, schoolage, adolescent, young adult, gpwn and flown, whenever) has any kind of reaction–whether it’s everyone talking about a baby’s resemblance to family members, any reference to medical history, whatever.
It’s complicated and adoptees and/or their parents may not want to go down the rabbit hole of these experiences even with very close friends. In many ways I feel freer to talk here because none of you (well, maybe one, maybe two, lol) know me in real life or close virtual relationships.
3 Likes
True.
It really is different for everyone.
D has a colleague who is in the process of adopting a baby and they have the kid’s full medical history. The birth family provided it. And my cousin’s daughter looks enough like her parents, that people are surprised she’s adopted. I get that these positive experiences may not be representative of all adoptions, but then again, everyone has different experiences. The people we know who adopted, went into experience with eyes open and did all the research and did their homework, which I think is very important.
Those are good points! It seems like everything in life is harder these days due to social media…
Yes, biological family is ideal, but you can’t always have the ideal. Keeping kids in foster care is not always a good thing.
Same here! None of the adopted kids I know have mental health challenges or behavior issues, as far as I know. But, they’re all nice kids with nice parents. It’s great when adoption turns out well!
That said, I realize everyone has different experiences and it’s too bad there isn’t more support for adoptees who may be struggling. It’s hard.
Just because your cousin’s daughter resembles her adoptive parents right now does not mean that she always will, nor that a physical resemblance is the same as a genetic connection. It just isn’t. Likewise the medical history: they may have it now but think about what we know about medical history now vs 20 years ago. There is no way to know if the relationship with birth family will persist. And it’s not like the mom can say, oh, and this is what happened with my grandmother/brother/Uncle Harry. This was their doctor.
For sure there are adoptions anyone would call successful. But life has three dimensions. Life is complicated even without adoption.
@natty1988 I hope you don’t think I am picking on you! I appreciate that you are willing to stick your neck out and comment on your personal experience with close friends and acquaintances.
2 Likes
I used to know a family (patients of mine) who had an interesting history with adoption in that the grandmother, mother, and young daughter were all adopted, so 3 generations. The adoptions were each classic for their time. The grandmother’s adoption was closed and she never got to meet her birth family. In the middle generation, the adoption was still closed but always honestly discussed, and the woman eventually found and met her birth mother. And the young daughter was adopted in an open adoption. The adoptions were all domestic and same-race. In each case, the adoption had been pursued due to infertility, but I would say that the adoptions were smoother from an emotional perspective than many I have seen, with less mourning for the lack of a genetic tie, if that makes sense. I remember the mom saying that when she found out she would need to adopt, it seemed unremarkable to her and that in a way she felt that “adoption runs in our family” and it gave her a special bond with her mom and daughter.
4 Likes