e-mail
I’ve written in previous blogs about the heartbreak I feel when I hear adoptive parents of internationally-born children state that their child has no real knowledge or understanding of his/her birth mom. It bothers me to the core. I almost always speak up, but today I was almost rendered speechless. While my kids were napping earlier this afternoon, I read a blog entry authored by an adoptive parent of a son born in Russia; long story short, he and his wife decided they would never tell their child he was adopted.
Still with me? Picking your jaw up off the floor? Yeah, I was too.
I can’t begin to describe the many, many, many reasons I feel it is vitally important and completely necessary to be entirely open with your child regarding his or her adoption. Let’s forget the issues of self-identity that will arise (not might, mind you, but will) should a child one day find out–perhaps even accidentally–as an adult (if not earlier) that he or she is adopted. The blogging parent’s belief was that his child was “safe” from such knowledge because his son would not be searched out by his birth family (which could very easily be true, but that’s not the point at hand). Sure, it’s probably safe to say that Beauty’s birth mom will never try to search for her–especially given the international adoption status, her financial means, and the cost involved–but even still, there’s always a chance. Granted, Beauty is a different case since she has two Caucasian parents while she has a beautiful Guatemalan skin tone. If you saw us out and about, yes, you would probably assume she is adopted. I’ll admit that the blogging dad’s son does look remarkably like him; he reasonably could “pass” as his biological child. But does that justify what I feel to be is an unethical decision to grow and subsequently maintain a parent/child relationship rooted in deception? Uh, no. Not even close.
I believe that as a parent–especially of an internationally-born child–it is imperative to raise your child with a respect for and cultural awareness of his or her background and birth country. I actually believe it’s more than imperative; I believe that it’s virtually the only way to raise your child with a healthy self-identity and a positive view of adoption. To me, hiding such information from your child reads as “being adopted is something of which you should be ashamed, something you should hide”. How healthy is that?
In a perfect world, all adoptions would be ethical and open, but the truth is that we live in an imperfect world. Agencies can be deceitful, adoptive parents can lie to their child, any number of situations can occur that renders an individual adoption story unethical. But to knowingly remove your child’s cultural identity because he or she could pass as your biological child? It’s building a life of lies from the word go. As adoptive parents of internationally born children, our responsibility is to raise ethical children who are proud of who they are and where they’re from. However, this can only be done if we as parents deeply value honesty and raise our children accordingly.
[...] This past week I had a discussion with a social worker who conducts home studies for a local adoption agency. We had a great discussion and one topic that came up was the situation where adoptive parents are not forthcoming with adoption information with their child. To me, it seems really obvious that adoptive parents should be as open as possible (using age appropriate language) with their children. However, there are obviously a lot of other people who don’t see it that way. The extreme end of this is when adoptive parents completely withhold the fact that a child is adopted. I really cannot even wrap my head around that. Not at all. Courtney discussed this topic in her recent blog entry. [...]
[...] recently read a blog posting about parents that had decided not to tell their Russian born son he was adopted. My jaw dropped [...]