Very insightful piece, Angela! Looking forward to more adoptee-centered work from you.

I’m a late-discovery adoptee, but if I’d known I was adopted when I was a kid, I would have hurled those 12 words, and much worse. One thing I’m super interested in is how adoptive families misunderstand the children they adopt because they have no context for a child’s behavior. For example, if a child in a bio family acts out (or can’t sit still), the family may be able to relate that acting out to another relative’s behavior, and then use that history to understand or moderate the child’s behavior.

I developed asthma as a toddler (unusual in the 1950's), and my adopters had no idea what was wrong with me. One of my earliest memories is of them yelling at me to “cough it up.” My bio family would have known exactly what was wrong with me because my mother was a severe asthmatic.