Many adoptive parents tell their children that they will help them search for their birthparents when they turn eighteen. However, more and more adoptive parents are reaching out to their children’s birth families earlier.
Sometimes it is the adoptive parent who desires medical history, information their children may want in the future, or simply a chance to thank the birthmother and reassure her that her child is well and happy. Sometimes a birth parent makes the first contact.
In other cases, it is the child or teen adoptee who indicates a strongly felt need or desire for information. Some children can articulate this at a young age. Some begin to ask questions as they enter the “tween” or teen years. Some children do not verbalize their curiosity at all, but their behavior indicates that they are struggling with identity issues.
One not-uncommon pattern described by two adoption workers is running away. Some counselors believe that adoptees sometimes run away to “search for their true identity”—perhaps not consciously searching for birth family, although they may, but searching for their identity apart from their adoptive family. Most will return to their adoptive parents’ home. Some will repeat the cycle—needing both to “find themselves” and to be reassured by their adoptive parents.
Other adoptees have trouble separating from their families as young adults. Some counselors believe this reflects adoptees’ worry that, lacking a genetic relationship, their place in the family will somehow end when they no longer need parental care.
Some adoptive parents whose children exhibit troubling moods or behavior believe that a birth family reunion, or at least information, will help with the above behaviors.
The authors of Children of Open Adoption and their Families say that research shows children who have contact with their birth family, either through visits or correspondence, have better mental health overall than those who do not. They say that the children who have always had access to their birthparents have their questions, if any, answered quickly so they do not become fixations. They are secure in the knowledge that they are loved by their first families as well as their parents.
Perhaps surprisingly, adoptive parents interviewed in the above book say that their bond with their children has been strengthened. The birth mother or family member is seen as an important relative, with whom the adoptee may share physical traits and/or talents, but not as a parent. The adoptive parents say that if anything, their role as the parent of their children is clarified.
I don’t have personal experience with this yet. I have met an adult adoptee who is searching for her birthparents now but says she would not have wanted to know them as she was growing up. She thinks it would have been confusing.
I would love to hear from readers who have experienced a reunion involving children or teens placed for adoption, whether they have experienced this as adoptees, adoptive family members, birth family members, or someone else close to the participants.
My next blog will discuss preparation for a meeting with birth family members and adoptive children.
Families.com’s blogger Nicole (our scrapbooking guru and past frugal living blogger) has shared several entries on this blog related to her search for and reunion with her birthmother (although she was an adult at the time). To read one of these entries, click here. You can also go the subtopics in this adoption blog (to the right-hand side of the page) and open the “search” or “reunion” categories.
Please also see this related blog:
Chinese Birthparents Found: More to Come?