FREE ESSAY ON ADOPTION AND IDENTITY FORMATION

ADOPTION AND IDENTITY FORMATION

There has been an enormous amount of research conducted about adoptees and their problems
with identity formation. Many of the researchers agree on some of the causes of identity
formation problems in adolescent adoptees, while other researchers conclude that there is
no significant difference in identity formation in adoptees and birth children. This
paper will discuss some of the research which has been conducted and will attempt to
answer the following questions: Do adoptees have identity formation difficulties during
adolescence? If so, what are some of the causes of these vicissitudes? Is there a
significant difference between identity formation of adoptees and nonadoptees?
The National Adoption Center reports that fifty-two percent of adoptable children have
attachment disorder symptoms. It was also found that the older the child when adopted,
the higher the risk of social maladjustment (Benson et al., 1998). This is to say that a
child who is adopted at one-week of age will have a better chance of "normal" adjustment
than a child who is adopted at the age of ten. This may be due in part to the probability
that an infant will learn how to trust, where as a ten-year-old may have more difficulty
with this task, depending on his history. Eric Erickson, a developmental theorist,
discusses trust issues in his theory of development. The first of Erickson's stages of
development is Trust v. Mistrust. A child who experiences neglect or abuse can have this
stage of development severely damaged. An adopted infant may have the opportunity to
fully learn trust, where as an older child may have been shuffled from foster home to
group home as an infant, thereby never learning trust. Even though Trust v. Mistrust is a
major stage of development, "the greatest psychological risk for adopted children occurs
during the middle childhood and adolescent years" (McRoy et al., 1990). As children grow
and change into adolescents, they begin to search for an identity by finding anchoring
points with which to relate. Unfortunately, adopted children do not have a biological
example to which to turn (Horner & Rosenberg, 1991), unless they had an open adoption in
which they were able to form a relationship with their biological families as well as
their adoptive ones. Also key to the development of trust is the ability to bond with
adoptive parents. The absence of a biological bond between the adoptee and adoptive
parents may cause trust issues in the adoptee (Wegar, 1995). Baran (1975) stated, "Late
adolescence . . . is the period of intensified identity concerns and is a time when the
feelings about adoption become more intense and questions about the past increase."
Unless the adopted child has the answers to these arising questions, identity formation
can be altered and somewhat halted. McRoy et al. (1990) agree with this point:
Adolescence is a period when young people seek an integrated and stable ego identity.
This occurs as they seek to link their current self-perceptions with their 'self
perceptions from earlier periods and with their cultural and biological heritage'
(Brodzindky, 1987, p. 37). Adopted children sometimes have difficulty with this task
because they often do not have the necessary information from the past to begin to
develop a stable sense of who they are. They often have incomplete knowledge about why
they were relinquished and what their birth parents were like, and they may grieve not
only for the loss of their birth parents but for the loss of part of themselves.
In essence, it seems that the adolescent's identity formation is impaired because he
holds the knowledge that his "roots" or his "essence" have been severed and remain on the
unknown side of the adoption barrier. 
The identity struggles of the adolescent are "part of a human need to connect with their
natural clan and failure to do so may precipitate psychopathology" (Wegar, 1995). Also in
agreement with Wegar, McRoy, and Baran is Frisk. Baran et al. (1975) wrote, "Frisk
conceptualized that the lack of family background knowledge in the adoptee prevents the
development of a healthy 'genetic ego' . . . ." In most of the studies surveyed, 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. 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 et al., 1990).
While searching for an identity, adolescent adoptees sometimes are involved in a behavior
which psychologists term 'family romance.' This is not a romance in a sexual manner, but
rather a romance in the sense of fantasizing about birth parents and their personal
qualities. Horner and Rosenberg (1991) stated that "the adopted child may develop a
family romance in order to defend against painful facts." Often times, adoptees wonder
why they were adopted, and because closed-adoptions are common, the adoptee is left with
many unanswered questions about the circumstances of the adoption. The adoptee may have a
tendency to harbor negative feelings about himself, feeling like he was unwanted, bad, or
rejected by the birth parent. These feelings can be quite powerful, so the adoptee will
engage in this family romancing behavior in order to offset the negative feelings and try
to reconcile his identity crisis. This point is stressed by Horner and Rosenberg (1991)
when they write, "The painful reality to be confronted by adoptees is that their
biological parents did not want, or were unable, to find a way of keeping and rearing
their own child. The children feel that they were either 'not meant to be' or
'intolerable' . . . ." 
Finding an identity, while considering both sets of parents is a difficult task for the
adolescent. 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. Horner and Rosenberg
(1991) write:
Adoptive status may represent a developmental interference for children during
adolescence. 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 conflictual 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 to whom he can relate. If the adolescent has some
information about his birth parents, such as ethnicity, socioeconomic status, and
religion, Horner and Rosenberg (1991) believe that 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." It
appears that if the adoptee has even a minimal amount of information about his birth
parents and adoption, he will have an easier time with identity formation than an adoptee
who has no information about his adoption. 
The adoptive parents can also play a key role in aiding in identity formation of the
adopted adolescent. Much of the research I surveyed at least touched upon the role of the
adoptive parents. "Kornitzer stated that the more mysterious the adoptive parents make
things for the child the more he will resort to fantasy" (Baran et al., 1975). This is
yet another argument for open adoptions. Again, if the child knows the circumstances of
his adoption and other pertinent information about his biological roots, he will have an
easier time forming an identity in adolescence. It is also noted that, " . . . young
adoptees are vulnerable to feeling 'different' or 'bad' due to the comments and actions
of others" (Wegar, 1995). This is to say that the child will feel more accepted, and that
his adoption is not a stigma if his adoptive parents have the conviction that being
adopted does not make the family 'bad', and it does not mean that the adoptive parents
are failures because they could not have biological children. Sometimes the negativity of
adoptive parents about the circumstances of the adoption can be sensed by the adoptee,
thus causing the adoptee to believe that there is something wrong with being adopted.
Once again, this can cause identity formation problems, especially if the adolescent
believes that he is inferior or bad because he is adopted and not raised in his
biological family. "The literature on adopted children has long documented particular and
sometimes intense struggles around identity formation, and suggests that in many ways
adopted children follow a different developmental course from children who are raised by
their biological parents" (Horner and Rosenberg, 1991).
While most of the studies I read found that adoptees have difficulty in identity
formation during adolescence, I did find an article which refutes this point. Kelly et
al. (1998) write: 
Developing a separate, autonomous, mature sense of self is widely recognized as a
particularly complex task for adoptees. While many scholars have concluded that identity
formation is inherently more difficult for adoptees some recent comparisons of adopted
and nonadopted youth have found no differences in adequacy of identity formation, and a
study by Stein and Hoopes (1985) revealed higher ego identity scores for adoptees. Goebel
and Lott (1986) found that such factors as 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.
In conclusion, it is difficult to say who is right in their beliefs about adoptees and
identity formation. The research I have reviewed has mostly shown that adoptees do have
quite a bit a difficulty forming an identity during adolescence, and that this difficulty
can be due to a number of factors. Negative parental attitudes about adoption can have a
negative affect on the adoptee. The issue of open versus closed adoptions will forever be
a debate, but the research does show that the more an adoptee knows about his birth
family and the circumstances surrounding his adoption, the easier it will be for him to
form an identity during adolescence. Most of the researchers who wrote about the family
romance seemed to do so in a negative manner, when in fact I believe that the ability to
fantasize about the birth family may be a healthy option for the adolescent who is the
victim of a closed adoption. It allows him to construct a view of what his birth family
is like, and it also allows him to relieve himself of some of the internal pain which is
caused by closed adoptions. Overall, most of the literature supported the notion that
adoptees do indeed have identity formation problems.
Bibliography
References
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