To understand the challenges of identity development in adopted children, it helps to know what makes an identity. When most people refer to their identity, they are making reference to their aggregate sense of themselves. We understand identity to be composed of many aspects including, but certainly not limited to, realities of birth. That encompasses race, gender, socioeconomic conditions of one's early years, experience with religion as well as the ever-increasing plethora of biogenetic information about ourselves and others. Then there are one's life experiences and choices. This complex collection of information, processed through the mind of the person considering who he is and the meaning this has for him, are the core attributes of what we generally call identity.
For some, this equation would seem to be pretty straightforward. For a person who knows her ancestry, current family and circumstances, identity is less of a mystery. As the eldest son of England's Queen Elizabeth and her husband, Prince Phillip, Prince Charles has known from an early age who he is. He is prince and heir to the throne of England. Being born into an identity so predetermined and fixed can be an element of security in one's life. It also can be a contributor to a feeling of being trapped in a role that one didn't choose but is somehow predestined to fulfill.
Challenges for Adopted Children
For a child who has been adopted and raised in a different set of circumstances from those to which he was born, the issue is far more complex. Adopted children may not know (or be told) much about their birth parents. The part of identity formation that has its roots in family history, tradition and genetics remains unknown. There is a gap in the otherwise understandable formula that leads to the construction of one's own identity. It is like removing a known from an equation and substituting an X.
Because children cannot, as a rule, tolerate this lack of knowledge, they fill gaps in their knowledge with things they infer, wish were the case or simply fabricate. For many adopted children, this gap in real information gets filled in this way. That unknown information becomes a construction of the child's wishes, imagination and fears.
The issue of identity development in children adopted from different countries and cultures is even more profound. The consequence can be an identity more defined by a child's awareness of what she is not than by the things that she knows that she is. This is referred to as a "reactive identity disorder." Defining one's self in terms of what one is not (how a child is not like his parents, for example) is an issue. This doesn't mean that interracial adoptions are doomed to fail. Variables include how the obvious differences are discussed and how people the child knows react to them, especially those who matter most to the child. This includes parents and close friends.
Adoption is Part of Identity
It is functionally impossible for adoption to not be a component in the identity of the child. Supported by facts or not, many adopted children have to live with the idea that for some reason their birth parents were unable to care for them. There are many versions of this story; very few of them are good.
The stronger and more healthy the child's post-adoption (particularly pre-adolescent) experience, the less likely that this aspect of his identity will take control of the way the person sees herself. Our identities have many parts. Being adopted becomes a given, but not necessarily the dominant one.
There has been a great deal written on this subject. This includes Thomas Bowlby in his books of the '60s and '70s, Attachment, Separation and Loss, as well as the 1997 paper written by Harold D. Grotevant from the University of Minnesota, "Family Processes, Identity Development, and Behavioral Outcomes for Adopted Adolescents." The findings of these and other studies are remarkably similar. One cannot deny that the fact of adoption (especially when it has been a cross-cultural or cross-racial one) is a significant factor in the development of human identity.
Research in this area continues in all parts of the world. The bottom line is that to try to deny that adoption can, and inevitably does, play some important role in the development of human identity is arguably, unpardonably naive.
Experience and learning will always play a role. But a person is always, at least in part, the composite of DNA and tissue that arise from their ancestry as well as the conditions of his prenatal experience, birth and early life. It is far better to have these realities acknowledged than to try, as some adoptive parents have, to deny them out of existence.
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