Free Term Paper on Transracial Adoptions
Thesis:
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
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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
Trans racial-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.
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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
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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
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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.
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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,
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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
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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.
Horner, T., & Rosenberg, E. “Birthparent
Romances and Identity Formation in Adopted
Children”. American Journal of
Orthopsychiatry 61(1) (1991): 70-77.
Myers, David G., Psychology, 2001. 6th
ed. New York: Worth Publishers. 2001.
Simon, Rita J., & Howard Altstein.
Adoption, Race, and Identity. New York: Praeger,
1992.