The bittersweet reality of being adopted

Lorraine

What effect does being surrendered for adoption do to the individual so surrendered?

Being adopted approximately doubles the odds of an adolescent being diagnosed with a behavior or emotional problem. Yes, the vast majority of adopted people grow up to be fully functioning, well adjusted individuals, but a 2008 study at the University of Minnesota has found that a small minority of those kids--about 14 percent--are diagnosed with a behavioral disorder or have contact with a mental health professional as adolescents--roughly twice the odds that the non-adopted face.


This is consistent with what previous adoption research has found for many years. Yet for just as many years, that research was dismissed cavalierly as a result of adoptive parents' higher income and education levels, thus people more likely to seek professional help for a troubled, trouble-making child. But that assumption is flawed, says the lead researcher, Margaret Keyes, a psychologist at the University of Minnesota Center for Twin and Family Research.

The researchers assessed 514 internationally adopted adolescents and 178 domestically adopted adolescents (aged 11 to 21) and compared them with 540 non-adopted kids of the same age. Children who had been adopted scored higher than non-adoptees on continuous measures of behavioral and emotional problems, the team found. Adoptees were about twice as likely to have had contact with a mental health professional and of having a disruptive behavior disorder, according to the study.

Yes, most adoptees are doing well. Yes, most do not fall into this troubled group. But some do, at a higher incidence than the non-adopted. The causes are unclear--Keyes said it is possible due to substance abuse before adoption, or unstable conditions before the adoption. I am not, for one, going to say that these conditions are not likely with children who have to be relinquished; if their mothers could care for them, they would. If the conditions were stable, favorable, if the mothers did not feel overwhelmed, their mothers would keep them close. If I felt I could have kept my daughter, I would have. Was she troubled? Yes, by many demons; adoption was only one issue in her life, but it was there.

While previously most adoption research relied on questionnaires filled in by parents, Keyes and her team spoke directly to adoptees themselves. Working with three large agencies in Minnesota, they interviewed adoptees from age 11 to 21, as well as parents, mental health professionals and teachers. Participants who had a non-adopted sibling in the same age range were used to compare behaviors.

Behaviors often exhibited included attention- deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) as well as oppositional defiant disorder (ODD). Children adopted from in the United States were more prone to behavioral disorders than those adopted overseas.

Some 40,000 children worldwide annually emigrate from more than 100 countries through adoption, a trend increasing rapidly in the U.S. since the 1970s. But these foreign adoptees are far more likely to internalize their problems, suffering more commonly from depression or separation anxiety disorders. Domestic adoptees, on the other hand, tend to act out.

We write about this because the bill that would give mothers more time (eight days!) to consider whether to give up their child has been coming under such hot and heated criticism from a place such as the Church of the Latter Day Saints (LDS).  We have seen the bill Jane is working on and has written about bashed on other blogs, most specifically blogs run by LDS, the church that is also the main funder of the National Council for Adoption, which steadfastly opposes giving adopted people the right to know their true identity. 

They do this, one must suspect, because they feel that they will lose adherents to their faith, if they are discovered to be born to non-Mormon parents. I never had any thoughts about Mormonism one way or another--it was just another religion--until the closed hearts and minds of LDS on this issue became so crystal clear. As we have written before here, the Mormon Church enthusiastically promotes adoption if the mother is unmarried.*

At one point several months ago I was invited to be part of a blog that was part of "adoption.com" for birth mothers run by a Mormon; it promoted the idea that giving up your child led to a kind of jaunty cheerfulness about one's future. As I could not agree with this sentiment, which I consider false, I was barred from posting in the site in no uncertain terms in a couple of days.

While our primary goal at First Mother Forum is allegiance to the concerns of first/birth mothers, I want to point out that staying with one's original family--growing up with people you look and act like--is better than growing up with genetic strangers, aside from abuse, of course. Reams have been written about this. I think of what I was posted on a wall in New York City where people post anonymous comments: I'm sad I was adopted but also glad. I read it this way: Sad because I had to be adopted; glad because I had good parents. But adoption for the adoptee is a bitter-sweet reality, no matter how good the home. For first mothers, the reality is more always bitter than sweet, no matter our reasons our children were adopted. I will never forget the awful afternoon I signed the relinquishment papers, and I think I speak for most birth mothers here.

I write about this today to inform mothers considering adoption to consider carefully what they are doing, not only to themselves, but to their children. I write to counteract the liberal ideologues who believe that adoption is always a good thing, who believe that "rescuing" children from poverty is always better than letting them grow up with their own people, I write to encourage families to find ways to keep their children. --lorraine

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*(See: Mormon Myths and Adoption Records; Mormon Opposition to Open Records; and Mormons on Meeting your (Birth) Child. 

On another Note, Adoptive Mother Rosie O'Donnell, whose opposition to giving adoptees their rights is well known, is the featured celeb tonight on Who Do You Think You Are? It baffles me how she can participate in this and display the emotional interest in one's roots that the show so clearly demonstrates, yet she and her brother, Danny O'Donnell in the NY Assembly, are so very opposed to unsealing New York's sealed birth certificates. Of course, I have set my TV to record it; I expect to want to be throwing things at the television and Rosie when I watch it on Saturday.

Jane will be back in a day or so with more on the Oregon bill.