When you choose adoption, you want to give your child the best life you can imagine. Naturally, how your child will feel about being adopted could be on your mind.
Adoptees can have a beautiful life filled with love, and with open adoption, birth parents can maintain a lifelong connection with their child.
You can read about how adoptees feel when you click here, get help from an adoption specialist here or keep reading to learn more.
How Do Adoptees Feel About Being Adopted?
Adoptees can feel many different ways about being adopted, as the subject is complex and different for everyone. But many adoptees often say they feel lucky to have committed parents who take the best care of them. They’re likewise grateful to their birth parents for making a positive choice for them when they chose adoption, giving them two sets of loving families.
How Adoptees Feel
Adoptees feel the same happiness and love as children who are raised by biological family, but they may have additional questions and complex feelings because of the adoption process.
If you have read a lot of stories of adoption, then you may have noticed a wide variety of feelings and attitudes toward it. Although this can be partly attributed to individual experiences, here are some things to consider as you read adoptee stories:
Type of Adoption
Adoption comes in many forms, including:
- Infant adoption
- Foster care adoption
- International adoption
- Stepparent adoption
- And more
Each type of adoption comes with its particular set of benefits and struggles, and this can have a huge effect on an adoptee’s experience.
For example, foster care adoptions often happen after years of being in and out of the foster care system. Children can experience both good and bad things at home and in foster care, which means they may have complex feelings and have likely experienced an unsafe home environment at some point.
Or in international adoption, children may have more struggles with language acquisition and cultural adjustment, as international adoptions have historically been more likely for older children and are naturally cross-cultural.
Openness in Adoption
In addition to type of adoption, adoptees can be affected by whether their adoption is open or closed.
In closed adoptions, children are told few to no details about their adoption story and birth parents, and their adoption may even be hidden from them (although in many cases this comes to light as an adult). Up until fairly recently, closed adoptions were the standard. That means older adoptees are often discussing closed adoption when they talk about their adoption.
More recently, researchers, adoptees and adoption professionals have changed the world of adoption, and most adoptions are open now. That means that many younger adoptees know their birth parents and why they were placed for adoption. They may even have letter exchanges, phone calls or in-person visits with their birth parents.
How Children Feel About Open Adoption
Researchers, adoptees and adoption professionals have advocated for open adoption because of the struggles that often come with closed adoptions.
Particularly in closed adoptions (where they do not know their birth parents), children may struggle with difficult feelings like guilt shame and anxiety, and they’ll have many questions about their identity. This can be caused by unanswered questions like:
- Wondering why they were placed for adoption, and in some cases, a feeling that they did something wrong if they don’t know the story
- Wondering who their birth parents are and where they are now
- Wondering about their racial identity, culture or heritage
- Wondering about medical history and hereditary diseases
- And more
Open adoptions can still have challenges, but more questions can be answered, which can bring a sense of peace, understanding and belonging to a child. In other words, the advantages far outweigh the drawbacks.
