REVELATION OF ADOPTIVE STATUS
A long-standing and basic working assumption in the field of adoption
placement has been that the telling of “the adoption story”
to the child is one of the central and most critical tasks confronting
adoptive parents. Both the recent literature and the reexamination
of practice on the part of some agencies have revealed that the
optimal timing, content, and manner of handling revelation are still
unresolved issues. Little question, however, seems to have been
raised that the need to resolve these issues in some way is one
of the primary and unique responsibilities of adoptive parenthood
which sets it apart from biological parenthood and that the kind
of resolution arrived at by adoptive parents may well have great
implications for the adoptee’s future psychosocial adjustment.
In the light of these assumptions, our findings concerning the
revelation practices of our one hundred adoptive families and the
bearing of these practices upon subsequent adoption outcome are
rather challenging. We discovered first of all that the way parents
dealt with revelation was by and large a reflection of a more basic
underlying orientation to child rearing in general. Families which
tended to take a sheltering approach to the general upbringing of
their children—e.g., supervising closely, not encouraging
the development of autonomy and independence, etc.—were also
likely to de-emphasize the adoption component in their children’s
lives. They tended to postpone revelation, to give minimal information
about the child’s biological background, to decrease the visibility
of the adoptive status, and, in effect, to simulate a biological
parent-child relationship. On the other hand, parents with a less
protective orientation toward the rearing of children were likely
also to be more “open” about adoption, to reveal more
information about natural parents, and to acknowledge freely the
nonbiological nature of their relationship with the adoptee. Revelation,
in other words, tended not to take place as a separate
and isolated parental activity but rather as an integral part of
the overall task of the raising of children.
We were struck by our finding that the prevailing pattern among
our group of families had been to withhold from their children most
or all information concerning the latter’s biological parents
and the circumstances leading to adoption. Seven in ten families
reported that they had coped in this manner with the problem of
the content of revelation although there were distinct differences
in this regard among families who had adopted through different
agencies. Only 12 percent of the parents had shared with their children
the true facts of adoption as they knew them.
It is important to realize that these data offer no basis for assessing
the relative merits of full versus minimal revelation. Nor are we
aware of any rigorous research which might shed meaningful light
upon this knotty question. It may well be, however, that it is not
so much what and how much is revealed to the adoptee that is the
decisive factor in the impact of revelation upon him as it is with
the degree of comfort or ease his parents experience with their
choice of approach. We would suspect that adoptive couples could
choose to divulge everything they know about the adoptee’s
biological background or almost nothing and carry off either posture
well or poorly depending upon the amount of anxiety it entailed
for them. That stance which is most congenial to their emotional-psychological
make-up, i.e., which is most ego-syntonic for them, may in the last
analysis also be the most positive and constructive one for the
adoptee with respect to his subsequent psychosocial adjustment.
We learned with some surprise that only a single aspect of revelation
was definitely associated with the nature of adoptive outcome. Adoptees
who showed marked curiosity about their biological past and desired
to learn more about it than their adoptive parents knew or were
willing to divulge tended to manifest a more problematic adjustment
in a variety of life-space areas. None of the other ostensibly important
aspects of “the telling”—the timing of the initial
revelation, the nature and amount of material revealed, or the frequency
of subsequent allusion to adoption—was appreciably correlated
with outcome.
We consider this finding (as well as the foregoing data suggesting
the nonparamount role of revelation in the child-rearing behavior
of our adoptive couples) to be among the most important and provocative
findings to emerge from our study. Because they run counter to some
fundamental assumptions of adoption placement practice, we believe
they are suggestive of the need for further investigation of the
dynamics of revelation in adoptive families and its influence on
the subsequent life adjustment of adopted children.
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