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Transracial adoptees family situation
affects many aspects of the adopted child’s life, do these children have
identity formation difficulties during adolescence and are there any
significant differences between adoptees and birth children?
Transracial Adoptees and Families
I. Attachment Issues
A. Trust versus Mistrust
B. Age of child at time of placement
C. Need of Attachment
II. Development Issues
A. Identity versus Role Confusion
B. Age of child at time of placement
C. Need of Attachment
III. Identity Issues
A. Forming an Identity
B. Biological Birth Information
C. Racial Identification
D. Adoptive Parent Information
Applin I
“Adoption and Identity”
Being introduced into a new family is only one of many obstacles that lies
ahead for those who enter into transracial adoption. With all of the
information that is out there would adoptive parents advise others to pursue a
transracial adoption? (Simon, 3). Do children who are adopted lose their social
and racial identity, their racial attitudes, and their sense of awareness about
racial issues? Transracial adoption have supporters and non-supporters with
feelings that parent-child relationships work best between biological “likes”,
and fears that adoptive parents are not able to love and nurture biological
“unlikes” (Simon, 1). There has been a great deal of research conducted about
adoptees and the problems they face with identity formation. Many researchers
agree on some of the causes of identity formation problems in adolescent
adoptees, but others have concluded that there is not a significant difference
in identity formation in adoptees and birth children. The following paper will
bring out some of the research findings, which have been conducted, and will
then attempt to answer the following questions: Do adoptees have identity
formation difficulties during adolescence, and if they do, what are the causes?
Has it been shown that there is a significant difference between identity
formation of adoptees and birth children? In order to find the answers to these
questions, looking at the attachment, development and identity will need to be
looked at altogether.
Of adopted children tested, the National Adoption Center has reported that
fifty-two percent of adoptable children have attachment disorder symptoms.
There is uniqueness in being in an transracial-adopted person. Most obvious is
that the children grow up in a family in which they do not look like their
parents or other members of their family.
Applin II
Their history is a part of them throughout their life because it is so visibly
apparent. The adoptive family may ignore or make little effort to incorporate
into the family the cultural heritage of the adopted child (Adamec,136). This
decision to leave the culture behind, outside the family, does not suggest that
the child is neither accepted nor loved or cherished as their own. However,
when the adoptive family also adopts and embraces the cultural identity of the
child\'s birth culture, it enriches not only the adopted child but also the
entire family and extended family as well. Another factor is attachment is the
child’s age when they were adopted. The older the child when adopted, the risk
of social maladjustment was found to be higher (Simon, 188). Most children when
adopted at younger ages have a better chance to adjustment normally, than
children adopted over the age of ten. An infant learns to trust quicker, than a
ten-year old child does, but all of this depends on each case. Developmental
theorist Eric Erikson, discusses trust issues in his theory of development.
Erikson\'s first stage of development is “Trust versus Mistrust”, which states
“if needs are dependably met, infants develop a sense of basic trust” (Myers,
149). For an adopted child, placing the child early in a key ingredient to
successful attachment of child to parent and vice versa (Cox, 1). Such an
attachment, which is strong among the majority of families throughout the
paper, is an important precursor to positive identity and psychological health,
both of which are commonplace among the adolescents. Attachment can occur
between adoptive parents and their older child, and it “usually is assumed that
the bonding process will take time and the older the child, the longer the
process will take” (Adamec, 60). This usually takes place in the first
Applin III
stage of Erikson’s developmental stages, but with older children, this can
still take place, but will vary in the time it takes to attach between parent
and child.
Although Erikson has eight stages of development, the one, which forms a
child’s identity, is in the “Identity versus role confusion” stages (Myers,
149). In this stage, which is the child’s teen years into their twenties,
“teenagers work at refining a sense of self by testing roles and integrating
them to form a single identity, or they become confused about their identity” (
Myers, 149). Adopted children do not have a biological example to follow,
unless they keep a relationship with their biological family, and this can hinder
the identity issue for adolescents. This is where the attachment to their
adoptive parents is so important, so the child does not have any trust issues
and they bond with their adoptive parents more quickly. With all of the issues
surrounding transracial adoption, adoptive parents have to understand, is that
no everyone is suited for transracial adoptions.
Families have to care a great deal about the heritage of the child they are
adopting. Adoptees should never have to choose between their ethnic heritage
and the culture of their new family, whether the child is an infant at the time
of adoption or an older child. This becomes very important to the “child the
older they become” (Cox, 1). The adopted child will have questions that will
arise, and “identity formation can be changed” or stopped during this period in
the child’s life, if they cannot find the answers to their questions (Simon,
169). As with many children, the adopted child may tend to adopt the identity
of their parents. All adolescents go through a stage of struggling with their
Applin IV
identity, wondering “how they fit in with their family, peers, and the rest of
the world (Horner, 83). During the stage of adolescence, young people seek
their own identity,
through linking their current self-perceptions with their self-perceptions from
earlier periods and with their cultural and biological heritage (Baran, 23).
Children who are adopted, have difficulty with this because they do not have
all the information they need, in most cases, to develop a sense of whom they
are. Identity formation can often be impaired by the lack of knowledge the
adopted child has of their past and heritage. Often an adopted child grieves,
not only for the loss of their birth parents, but also for the loss of part of
themselves. The adopted child is likely to have an “increased interest in his
or her birth parents”, which does not mean that they are rejecting their
adoptive parents (Simon, 169). Psychological studies have found that
transracially adopted children appear to handle the identity issues, all
adopted children face, better than most because, researchers theorize, they
cannot pretend to be like everyone else (Adopting Resources, 1). They deal with
adoption issues before the turbulent teenage years. For an adolescent, finding
an identity, while considering both sets of parents is a difficult task. The
adoptee does not want to hurt or offend his adoptive parents, and he also does
not want to ignore what is known about his biological roots. In most of the studies,
the researchers are in agreement about one fact; vital to the adopted
adolescent\'s identity development is the knowledge of the birth family and the
circumstances surrounding the adoption. Without this information, the
adolescent has difficulty deciding which family, birth or adopted, he
resembles.
Applin V
During the search for an identity in adolescence, the child may face an array
of problems including hostility toward the adoptive parents, rejection of anger
toward the birth parents, self-hatred, transracial adoption concerns, feeling
of rootlessness (McRoy,
498). Adoptees satisfy their curiosity in various ways and to various extents.
They have to find “the balance of both their heritage and culture of their new
family”(Cox, 1).
Instead of the usual struggles over separation and the establishment of a
cohesive sense of self and identity, the adopted child must struggle with the
competing and conflicting issues of good and bad parents, good and bad self,
and separation from both adoptive parents and images of biological parents. If
all adoptions were open, the adoptee would have the ability to know about the
traits of each family. He would have an easier task of forming an identity for
himself, rather than struggling with the issues of whom he can relate. If the
adolescent has some information about his birth parents, such as ethnicity,
socioeconomic status, and religion, the following can happen: From the bits of
fact that they possess, adopted children develop and elaborate explanations of
their adoptions. At the same time, they begin to explain themselves, and they
struggle to develop a cohesive and realistic sense of who they are and who they
can become\" (Horner, 81). It has been shown that if the adoptee has even
a small amount of information on his or her birth parents and adoption,
identity formation will be easier, than an adoptee that has no information
about the circumstances of the adoption. The adoptive parents can also play a
key role in aiding in identity formation of the adopted adolescent. The
negativity of adoptive parents about the circumstances of the adoption,
Applin VI
can be sensed by the adoptee, thus causing the adoptee to believe that there is
something wrong with being adopted, this can cause identity formation problems
( Adamec, 136).
While many researches have concluded that identity formation is inherently more
difficult for adoptees, some “recent comparisons of adopted and non-adopted
youth have
found no differences in adequacy of identity formation, and revealed higher
identity scores for adoptees” (Simon, 117). Factors such as the subjects\' age,
sex, personality variables, family characteristics, and motivation to search
for birth parents accounted more for quality of identity formation than did
adoptive status (Simon, 27-28). Transracial adoptees seem to obtain their
identity as well as birth children of families.
Wondering about oneself and one’s identity, trying to determine who one is and
will become, is a natural part of the transition from child to teenager to
adult. “Adolescence is a difficult time for all children, adopted or not (Cox,
1). Add in the complication of not resembling your parents, other members of
the family, and having only memories of their cultural familiarity, makes it
that much harder to find out “who you are” and “where you belong” (Cox, 1). The
research does show that the more an adoptee knows about their birth family, the
circumstances surrounding their adoption, the easier it will be for him to form
an identity during adolescence. It allows the adoptee to construct a view of
what their birth family is like, and it also allows a chance to relieve some of
the internal pain, which is caused by closed adoptions. Most of the research
supported the notion that adoptees can have identity formation problems, but
also with support can find ways to build their own identity. This is why it is
so important for the children to properly attach
Applin VII
to their adoptive parents and get extra help through their development stages.
There have been no significant differences between adoptees and birth children,
unless the adopted child was older and already had problems before entering the
adoptive familiy. People should not shy away from adopting transracial
children, but go into the adoption with all the facts and with their eyes wide
open.
Works Cited
Adamec, Christine. Is Adoption For You?. New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1998.
Baran, A., Pannor, R., & Sorosky, A. “Identity Conflicts in Adoptees”.
American
Journal Of Orthopsychiatry 45(1), (1975): 18-26.
Benson, P., McGue, M., & Sharma, A. “The Psychological Adjustment of United
States
Adopted Adolescents and Their Non-adopted Siblings”. Child Development 69(3)
(1998): 791-802.
Cox, Susan Soon Keum. “Attachment Issues in International Adoption.” 1998.
Online
Posting. Pact, An Adoption Alliance. 2001.
%2attach-intl.html.>.
Horner, T., & Rosenberg, E. “Birthparent Romances and Identity Formation in
Adopted
Children”. American Journal of Orthopsychiatry 61(1) (1991): 70-77.
Myers, David G., Psycholoty, 2001. 6th ed. New York: Worth Publishers. 2001.
Simon, Rita J., & Howard Altstein. Adoption, Race, and Identity. New York:
Praeger,
1992.