Unsettled adoptive identity: Understanding relationship challenges in adopted adolescents' identity narratives

Adopted adolescents create identity narratives conceptualizing their connections to their families of adoption and birth. Previous work with a sample of adoptive adolescents identified a sub-group who reported negative experiences regarding adoption as part of their navigating of adoptive identity processes (the "Unsettled" group). The current study examined interviews with adolescents in the "Unsettled" group to elucidate these negative experiences, specifically through identifying the relationship challenges linked to adoption. Participants included 30 adopted adolescents (18 females, 12 males) from a longitudinal study of adoptive families. All the adolescents (M age = 15.2 years) were domestically adopted in infancy by heterosexual couples who were the same race as the adolescents (29 White, 1 Mexican American). Thematic analysis revealed six themes reflecting adolescents' relationship challenges as related to adoption, both in terms of interpersonal interactions and how relational experiences influenced adolescents' thoughts and feelings of past, present, and future selves: (a) Negative experiences in relationships with adoptive family members, (b) Negative experiences in relationships with birth family members, (c) Difficulties in the adoptive kinship network, (d) Negative thoughts and feelings toward the self as an adopted person, (e) Negative views toward adoption as a form of building a family, and (f) Negative connections between adoption and future relationships. Multiple subthemes were also identified that built upon topics within the adoption and family systems literature, such as communication among family members, navigation of birth family contact, and adopted adolescents' perceptions of loss. Also identified were four profiles across themes. Implications for mental health providers and adoption professionals are discussed.

The Search for Origin of Young Adoptees-A Clinical Study

In the current area of social media propagation, the adoptees' search for the birth family is increasingly reversed: more and more adopted adolescents are contacted directly by their birth parents, even if they did not search for them. This study explores the impact of these new forms of contact between adoptive family members and birth family members, through the qualitative analysis of clinical protocols of five adoptive families that sought counseling in a clinical setting devoted to international adoption. The interpretative phenomenological analysis revealed three themes. Two of them shared by the parents and their children: the feelings of anxiety and intrusion, as well as the feelings of guilt and debt. The last theme concerns only the parents: feelings of endangered family relations and can be divided into two sub-themes: feelings of threat by the birth family, feelings of an undermined parental role. Nevertheless, these new kinds of confrontations with the children's origins bear a potential of renegotiating adoptive family relationships and positive effects on mutual feeling of filiation. Exploring the impact of the search of adoptees by the birth family enables professionals involved in adoption to improve preventive and supportive work in the adoption process.

Adoptive Parenting Cognitions: Acknowledgement of Differences as a Predictor of Adolescents' Attachment to Parents

OBJECTIVE

Adoptive parents' acknowledgement of differences is defined as the propensity to think that adoptive and nonadoptive families are different in important ways. Few studies have examined the implications of such cognitions for the parent-child bond.

DESIGN

Structural equation modeling was utilized to examine the relation between adoptive parents' acknowledgement of differences and adolescents' later attachment to their parents in a sample of within-race domestic infant adoptions. Data from 189 adoptive families were drawn from two waves (middle childhood, adolescence) of the Minnesota/Texas Adoption Research Project, a longitudinal study of openness in adoption.

RESULTS

Levels of acknowledgement of differences displayed by the adoptive mother and adoptive father during middle childhood positively predicted adopted adolescents' feelings of attachment towards the respective parent 8 years later. This relation depended on adopted adolescents' attitude toward adoption-related communication during middle childhood as well as the adoptive family's level of openness during middle childhood.

CONCLUSIONS

Acknowledgement of differences in adoptive families has positive implications for the parent-child bond.