The final adoptee I spoke to this week is Ethan. Ethan was adopted as a baby, and knows very little about the circumstances of his relinquishment. He never spent time in foster care. He was adopted into a family with no other children, but his family later adopted another boy.
She often felt as though her adoptive parents only wanted her youngest sister, and that she and her older sister were never really wanted. She often felt left out, and treated unfairly. Her adoptive family was also not supportive when JJ brought up reaching out to find more about her biological family, and she told me that they made her choose between them, or her biological family members. Because of this, both JJ and her older sister left home at young ages, and no longer feel welcome back. Their adoptive mother will also not allow them to contact their younger sister. Today, she has very little contact with them at all.
Callie’s story had some similarities. Callie was adopted into a family that had several, older biological children, and each one of them made her feel unwelcome, and unwanted, often by telling her that she was not part of the family, and never would be, and for a long time, Callie distanced herself from everyone in the family. She feels as though her adoptive parents were not properly equipped to deal with a child who came with PTSD, as well as untreated, high-functioning autism (Callie was later diagnosed with Asperger’s), and that caused a lot of tension between them. Callie was also adopted with her older brother, who was later removed from the home due to severe behavioral issues. After her brother’s removal, Callie says that life started to improve for her, and she began to thrive. Although her adopted life was not ideal, and she faced her share of hardships with fitting in with her new family, Callie remains optimistic, and believes that had she not been adopted, her life would have turned out much worse. She informed me that she and her brother had gone into foster care from an abusive background, and unfortunately, also faced numerous instances of abuse while in foster care. She told me that both she and her brother are doing much better, now that they are older and on their own, although her brother struggles with some substance abuse issues.
JJ, the youngest adoptee that I spoke to this week, was adopted at the age of twelve, though she spent several years off and on in foster care, between the ages of five and twelve years old. She and her two sisters were all adopted together into a family that already had biological children.
Other adoptees who were adopted as older children, such as JJ and Callie, may have experienced living with several foster families, moving to different towns, and changing schools multiple times, and this has quite an impact on how they form relationships and friendships.
According to the Considering Adoption website, adoptees deal with feelings of grief, separation, and loss for their biological parents and birth families, even if they never knew them. They may also feel these emotions when thinking about previous foster families, friends from old neighborhoods, schools, and other people and places that had become familiar to them. While some adoptees, like Ethan, may have been adopted as babies, and never really experienced moving from family to family, they can still grieve the separation from their birth families, and feel strong feelings of grief, often times wondering what might have been if they hadn’t been adopted.
Those numerous challenges would certainly shape your life to be much different than the life of someone who has never experienced such an abundance of challenge. An abundance of trauma. Adoptees face more traumas, and more challenges, than many other people, and it affects their lives in ways that we are just beginning to understand. ...
I (30F) was adopted at birth and it was a private adoption so I was never able to find out any information on my birth parents.
I (30F) just found out who my birth parents are. I have posted on this sub twice this week if you want to go take a look.
it's almost my birthday and i think y'all know what that means. time do have my annual pity party. so, FUCK my bio mom, my adoptive Nmom, my stepMIL and my MIL. none of these people give a SHIT about me, and now they don't give a shit about my beautiful, sweet little baby girl either. well, fuck em.
I’m trying to see how common this is. I was adopted by a severely traumatized/mentally ill single woman when I was 13 months old. She physically, emotionally, and mildly sexually abused me when I was a child for years. I’m not the only one who was adopted into a crappy situation, right? I feel like abandonment has taken over my life.
I am 61. Sealed birth records. Born in Florida 1960. Ancestry...found my half-sister today. We talked. She's nice. Now I know who my father was and that I have/had 5 siblings.
So, to give a bit of a background info let me introduce myself.
At one time, there were basically three categories of adoptable children:
Adoptions may be divided into 2 types:
PL 96-272, the Federal Adoption Assistance and Child Welfare Act of 1980
While she can understand the impulse to wait until kids will understand the hows and whys of their adoption, she believes that dishonesty within the adoptive family has far more grave and permanent consequences than does a temporary misunderstanding or oversimplification of the concept of adoption.
Baden acknowledged when we spoke that late disclosure of an adoption is often a result of parental secrecy, which can be a side effect of the lingering shame, grief, or trauma of being unable to reproduce biologically.
What Happens When Parents Wait to Tell a Child He’s Adopted. A new study suggests that learning about one’s own adoption after a certain age could lead to lower life satisfaction in the future. A predictable sequence of events nearly always ensues after I mention to someone that I’m adopted.
Denise Cuthbert, a professor at Australia’s Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology who has researched the history and sociology of adoption, is familiar with the phenomenon Baden describes.
Brodzinsky also raises the question of whether an early disclosure of adoptee status should be understood merely as a symptom of a more open, communicative parent-child relationship—which, as Brodzinsky notes, also leads to more positive mental-health outcomes. It could be the open family environment, and not the timing of adoption disclosure, that actually determines an adoptee’s outcomes later.
At one time, there were basically three categories of adoptable children:
Adoptions may be divided into 2 types:
PL 96-272, the Federal Adoption Assistance and Child Welfare Act of 1980