I MET OVER FIFTY TEENS WHILE I was researching this book. Many people who were not teens and who heard I was writing a book about adoption called to talk to me. A birth father wanted to know if I had talked to his daughter because he was looking for her; birth mothers wanted me to tell their children how they felt; foster children, adoptive parents, adopted adults, and more teenagers than I could possibly find the time to see called. Teens whom I had interviewed years ago called to tell me what was going on in their lives. Teens whom I had only recently interviewed called to ask me if I was still working on the book and wanted to know when it would be published. Everyone had a particular interest in some aspect of adoption.
I asked teens twenty-nine questions that covered many topics. Sometimes they stayed within the subject of the questions; sometimes the questions were a stimulus for long conversations about their present life, their past, and their expectations.
I couldn't predict how they would answer all the questions I asked, but after about ten interviews, I was quite sure how they would answer at least some of them. The teens had many feelings and ideas that they had arrived at independently, but which they held in common.
Most importantly, they wanted to know their original names, why they were given up for adoption, and their general social and medical histories. They wanted to either meet their birth mother or see her, and to be in control of any meeting with birth parents. They didn't want birth parents to take the place of their adoptive parents; they just wanted knowledge of their beginnings.
Teens usually didn't know how to search for information, even where to start or whom to call first. They had vague ideas that some-where there would be an accurate record or their birth and original name: in a hospital, in a welfare office, in a lawyer's office. Most thought social welfare offices held their personal background information in secret, and resented the system that refused to give them this information. They looked on their need to know about their birth as personal and private, and generally hadn't thought much about the fact that there are many teenagers with similar needs. And they didn't see themselves as having the power to make changes in the system.
They did not think that being adopted in any way restricted their social opportunities; they didn't feel any social prejudice against adoption even when adoption was trans racial. The fact that they were adopted would not in any way restrict their employment, social opportunities, or family life. They would adopt children themselves.
In other ways they were all different in their need for information, emotional responses to families and friends, and degrees of independence, ambition, and ability. Some had few concerns about the process of adoption; others had many. Some poured out their feelings about the problems society caused them; others couldn't see what the drama was all about. All were interesting, informative, and eager to share their ideas. They were especially eager to share with other teenagers who have thought their thoughts, lived with their worries, and shared their feelings.
Adopted teenagers contribute significantly to changes in attitude toward adoption because the social atmosphere that affects the next generation is established by what we do today. The first step toward positive change is to help teens understand themselves, to become more aware of what they think and why. Perhaps this book will help teens toward reaching the goal of knowing how they feel, and what they want and need.
As well, the voices of the teens in this book will help parents and care workers to better understand what adoption looks like from the teen's point of view. With that information, parents and care workers will be better able to help construct a world in which adoption is a positive and sustaining aspect of teen life—a process of creating a unique and emotionally fulfilling family.
Throughout this book I have spoken of adoption generally, as if adoption occurred at infancy and the child went into a home with two parents. While this was true for the teens I interviewed, there are, of course, many other adoption stories. Adoptions occur at all ages of a person's life and can happen even in adulthood. Stepparents adopt their partner's children, aunts and uncles adopt. Single people adopt and same-sex couples adopt. These are seldom mentioned or given positions in reports, books and on TV, but they are important. A great deal of what the teens had to say to me will apply to the children in those adoption stories as well. I recognize the diversity of adoption families and I hope that the teens' stories here will be useful to teens whatever their adoption experience.
The experience of adoption continually changes. Adoptive parents can now wait as long as ten years for a child. Adoptive parents are taking more initiative in finding an agency, contracting a home study, financially supporting a birth mother through pregnancy and delivery, and adapting to continually new and challenging changes in society's attitudes about adoption. Private agencies are now available to help parents look for children and to help birth parents place their child, as are books which can help guide adopting parents through the process of finding a child. While there is interesting research on fertilization techniques to help couples who have great difficulty conceiving a bio-logical child, the techniques are still, for the most part, abysmally unsuccessful, as well as time-consuming, financially draining, and emotionally painful. Adoption is still a possible and positive experience for many.
The ways in which we look for a child to adopt, look for parents to adopt a child, and look for information at all stages of the process, will continue to change as social attitudes and technology change. The concerns around secrecy and open adoption continue to evolve as well.
With the increasing necessity for identifying numbers—social insurance numbers, employment numbers, registration numbers in schools and universities—individuals will find their lives tabulated and stored as information in many different places. With the increasing developments in technological access to information, the facts about our existence are recorded more and more often.
It still comes as a surprise to me that when I type my name on an Internet search I find myself—name, picture, list of books. That experience will become more common, I believe, as technology invents more ways to disseminate information. Everyone will be able to type in their name and find their life achievements (and possibly credit problems) listed on a Web site. With this ability to find information will come new challenges. A birth mother could transfer her picture to a Web site with pertinent information about where and when she had given up her child. A searching child who only has to be old enough to know how to search could contact that mother. This makes efforts at secrecy seem inadequate and useless. In the future we will have to deal with issues around adoption and connecting with birth parents much earlier in a child's life than in the past.
Conversely, an adopted child could put her information on line and a birth mother or other relative could easily find her. This process is open to anyone, including parasites who leech onto the hopes and fantasies of unconnected adopted children hoping to make money from them, or behave in other unsavoury and predatory ways. Still, for children who were never told or who don't know who their birth mothers are, the Internet will be an efficient and affordable way to find their background.
Adoption agencies that continue to try to hide identifying information about birth parents will find it more and more difficult as our society becomes technologically adept. In North America today, adoptive families currently looking for birth parents find the process much easier than it was even fifteen years ago. Data is available on a Net search that would have taken years and much travel to find in the past. Of course, in less technologically sophisticated countries it is more difficult to find information. Families who adopted from less-developed countries where there is no central data or registration office that can send information via e-mail may hit stonewalling, blocks to information, lack of access, and no information at all. “The orphanage burned down” can be a dead end for a searching adopted child or family in a country where there is no central data storage. Storing information in data banks ensures that all the orphanages can burn down and the information will still be available. Countries where central data banks are not available will probably have them in the near future.
Travelling is easier now and may be even more so in the future, so families will find international adoption an increasingly attractive option. More parents will adopt children of races different from their own. This may be only slightly ahead of changes in the mosaic of the common culture.
Increasing interaction between cultures and more immigration of diverse races will result in more intermarriages. With intermarriage comes cultural acceptance—if you don't accept your daughter-in-law, you don't get to see your grandchildren. These marriages will produce racially diverse children and families, which will become more common until they are obvious and accepted in mainstream society. Interracially adopted families will then blend into the new society, and find them-selves less of a curiosity in the grocery line-up.
With increasing opportunities to travel, families who have adopted internationally may find it easier to visit the country of their child's origin and become familiar with the culture. The child's experience of being part of the majority while the adoptive parents are the minority can be emotionally insightful for both the adopted child and the adoptive parents. Parents will understand their child's world view much better. As well, it is very difficult for parents to accurately convey the culture of their adopted child if they have few friends and little contact from that culture. A trip to the country of the children's origins will at least show them that there is a valuable and well-established world that will accept them because of their appearance.
Adoptive families need to learn how to create strong bonds of love and loyalty, the way all families need to know how to create such bonds. They must do this in a North American culture which continually tests family bonds with divorce and remarriage. Children today, from biological and adoptive families, are experiencing the disruptive change of divorcing parents and will continue to do so. Families need to become more aware of the diverse nature of “family.” What is it that unifies a family, makes it whole? What can be done to maintain family strength and loyalty? The concept of a family, biological or adoptive, must survive difficult times—such as when a parent leaves the family and begins or joins another one—which threatens the very idea of its unity. Socially and personally, families need to be committed to a sense of what family means, and adoptive families need to be even more conscious of what they believe a family should be, and what their commitment is to it. They may have to decide what it is about their family that is important and how they can maintain and sustain it.
Our North American formal education rarely teaches us how to be emotionally mature and wise. Maturity and wisdom which come with experience are necessary in being a good parent, being happily adopted, and being able to engage in intimate and sustaining relation-ships. I have, over the past thirty years, been grateful to my adopted sons, my stepdaughter and my biological daughter for the joys and les-sons they have brought to my life and to their contributions to my sense of family.