When your family is formed through adoption, whose story is it to tell?

By Leah Lusk, content specialist

People connect through stories. They ask questions of one another, looking both for commonalities and for opportunities to deepen understanding when someone’s experience is different from theirs.  Fishermen swap stories of the one that got away or the biggest fish they ever snagged. Parents share tales of their late nights with a sick child, when a child learned to walk, and – sometimes – aspects of their child’s origin story.

When you are a parent through adoption, some parts of your child’s origin story don’t belong solely to you. You’ll have your story about how you came to choose adoption and how you connected with your child’s birth family. Your child’s birth parents have their own story, including how your shared child came to be adopted. And your child has a birth story – even when they don’t know all of it. Sometimes adoptive parents are characters in those early stories and sometimes they aren’t, but they should always take pause when considering what to share and with whom to share it. When people learn that a child is adopted, they often have a lot of questions, and adoptive parents should pose their own questions before sharing freely.

On her blog, adoptive mom Lori Holden, who wrote Open-Hearted Way to Open Adoption, responds to a reader’s question about oversharing as a parent. Lori shares the following three questions to help adoptive parents decide whether to share:
• Does this person need to know? The answer to this can be yes for myriad reasons. It could also be no for myriad reasons. The point is to think it through.
• Why are you wanting to tell? Is it to help your child in some way? Or perhaps to feel special yourself? I’m not saying either is “good” or “bad.” The point is, again, to think it through and examine your motivation.
• Might there be any repercussions from telling — not just immediate, but long-term? Take a moment to think it through from your adoptive child’s perspective in 5, 10, 15 years.

Adult adoptee Sara Easterly also shares things to consider – from an adoptee perspective – when parents are deciding whether and what to share.

Remember that adoptive parents are the custodians or caretakers of their adopted child’s story until their child can choose for themselves what aspects of their story they want to share. Adoptive parents have a responsibility to support their child in exploring their own story and preparing their child to respond to questions and comments from others about adoption. The W.I.S.E. Up Program for Adoptive Families, from the Center for Adoption Support and Education, provides simple tools and resources to help kids and their families decide what to say or do when they get questions or comments about being adopted.