What Do Adoptees Think About Adoption?

Have you ever wondered what adult adoptees really think about adoption? Join us to hear about the Profiles in Adoption: Adult Adoptee Experiences report, based on research by the National Council for Adoption. 

In this episode, we cover:

• Who did you interview for the Profiles in Adoption: Adult Adoptee Experiences report, and how did you find them?
• You separated your responses by type of adoption.
• How satisfied are adult adoptees in general—life satisfaction?
• Did they think that adoption could and did work in their best interest? In the best interest of their birth family? In the best interest of their adoptive family?
• What were their thoughts on openness in adoption?
• For transracial adoptions: Do you believe your adoptive parent(s) did a sufficient job at discussing issues of race/ethnicity with you?
• What were their thoughts on whether to allow transracial adoptions?
• Were adoptees in favor of their families having an annual recognition of adoption?
• Specific questions for those adopted from foster care. P. 25
• Specific questions for those adopted as infants domestically. P. 28
• Specific questions for those adopted internationally P. 30
• Advice for future adoptive parents. P. 32
• What adoptees wish their parents had done differently. p. 41

Transcript

Please pardon any errors, this is an automated transcript.
Dawn Davenport  0:00  
This is Creating a Family. Talk about foster, adoptive and kinship care. Welcome back to all you regulars, and a special shout out. Welcome to our newbies. We are so glad to have you. I'm Dawn Davenport. I am the host of this show, as well as the director of a nonprofit creating a family.org. Today we're going to be talking about what adoptees think about adoption. We're going to be talking with Nicole Davi. She is a dedicated advocate and professional with a passion for enhancing the lives of children and families. She is the Director of Research at the National Council for adoption, and she leads research initiatives that inform legislation advocacy and empowers professionals and policy makers. We will also be talking with Ryan Hanlon. Ryan is the National Council for adoptions, President and CEO, and he is passionate about utilizing research and education to ensure that all those impacted by adoption have their resources and the support they need to thrive in their families and communities. Brian has expertise in accreditation and regulatory issues state licensing matters and adoption related policy topics. It's important to note that while neither of them have lived experience as an adoptive person, the report we're going to be talking about was based exclusively on surveying those who do have lived experience. So this is the second or third of your profiles in adoption, and this one focuses on the adult adoptee experience, as Ryan knows and Nicole will soon learn. This is just music to my ears. I was so happy when I saw this come out. I loved your profiles in adoption report on birth families, and we interviewed you folks based on that one talking about birth and natural parents. It was absolutely wonderful to see what you have done in the area of adult adoptees. So Nicole, let me start with you, and we're going to bounce questions between you and Ryan. So who did you interview for the profiles in adoption, adult adoptee experience report, and how did you find them?

Speaker 1  2:12  
So shocker, we interviewed adoptees, specifically adult adoptees who were adopted in the United States, whether that's from another country into the United States, domestically and foster care adoptions in the United States, we did exclude step parent adoptions from this study, so we ended up with 12 147 eligible respondents after we cleaned the data and removed any responses that did not meet our criteria. So we had 154 from foster care, 617 from private domestic adoption, and 447 from inter country adoption. We were able to locate these respondents through predominantly email dissemination. We used our listserv, we reached out to member agencies. We had some concerns about the increase of bots when it comes to online responses, so we kept it to direct contact dissemination. That is

Dawn Davenport  3:06  
such an interesting point. I have heard that from other researchers, because one of the things that we do at creating a family is often help researchers by posting that they're looking for participants. And it's a real issue now that we have to be concerned about. Yeah, it seemed like you were had significantly more international adoptees than you did from foster or domestic infant. Did I hear you correctly on that? And if so, Nicole, why? Yeah,

Speaker 1  3:32  
private domestic was the highest count we had, but foster care was significantly lower than the other two. I think Ryan might be able to speak a little bit more on those differences. Do

Dawn Davenport  3:42  
you have a feel for why? I can imagine a number of reasons why. You know

Speaker 2  3:46  
it might be when we did our outreach, we did outreach to agencies that are working in adoption, and we asked them to help disseminate this to adoptees in their network. And they might be more likely to be in contact with adoptees, whereas often someone who was placed for adoption from foster care doesn't have a or maintain a connection with the agency that was involved there. So that could be part of the reason. Yeah, I thought that Don As you know, the demographics of what type of adoption was doing lots of placements at different periods of time has changed. We did hear from a lot of people that were placed for adoption decades ago, when there were far fewer adoptions from foster care, really. I mean, since prior to the 1990s there really were far, far fewer adoptions from foster care than what we're seeing nowadays. And you know, at the same time, prior to, say, the 1970s there were significantly more private domestic adoptions. That makes sense, and so that has fluctuated significantly over time. That could be one of the factors here as well, but we were pleased with a large sample. It's not perfectly even by those types of adoption. We recognize that, and that did put some limitations in terms of what additional analysis we could do. At times we would do an. Process by type of adoption. At other times, we looked at all the responses together. Nicole mentioned that, you know, the three, you know, large categories that we broke up by type of adoption. Some answers were such that they were labeled as other they didn't really fit. So someone who was placed for adoption in the United States a long time ago, but actually lived in an orphanage or a residential setting. We didn't put that in with private domestic adoption because we thought that would be a different experience. We noted that it was put in as other. You know, you'd have to read the report to see okay, are we including those respondents or not? It was a small category. Was 29 out of that over 1200 that were categorized as other. We either didn't have enough information, or it was different enough from the other categories that we didn't think it would be appropriate to stick them in one of those three.

Dawn Davenport  5:49  
I was very thankful when I saw that you were separating by type of adoption and the three types you have in other but the three main types were adoptions from foster care, domestic infant adoption, international adoption, we see it happen. So off we run a large online support group, 11,000 some odd members. And when questions come up to be talking about adoption, there seems to be particularly well adoptive parents as well as adoptees. It seems like we lump in all of our discussion as to adoption in general. And in fact, there are such significant differences by type of adoption that any discussion, it seems to me, on adoption, we at least have to acknowledge that. So one of the first things I did was look to see if you did that. And I went, Yeah, they did. I was very thankful. Let me also just say to our listeners, this is a highly readable report. It's going to sound very numbers oriented, and it is numbers oriented, but the questions are good. They are questions a way that you might ask them. So this is highly readable, and we will include a link to this report in the show notes, so that you can just click on it and get to it immediately. And you're going to want to after you hear this discussion. Don

Speaker 2  7:00  
I think that's a great point. And even within type of adoption, there's a lot of diversity, right? I mean, not just because someone's in the inner country, adoptee, you know, they might have been adopted from a different country, but a different time period. But even if those things are the same, they could have had very different experiences prior to adoption, or in an adoptive family or in some other aspect. And I think that shows throughout there isn't a monolithic or uniform way that you're able to talk about adoptees or talk about type of adoption here very wide ranging responses. And when Nicole and I and our two co authors set out to actually have this report published, what we wanted was for readers to see exactly what was the question we asked, and then what were the adoptees responses? So we didn't want to do a lot of editorializing there. We wanted to really make this kind of their voices, yes. And then in the qualitative portion, when Nicole played a lead role in that, she did a lot to just make sure we were hearing from those voices. She used a lot of quotes directly from the adoptees to emphasize each of the themes and sub themes, again, because we wanted this report to be hearing what adoptees views are, or their experiences are on the various facets and questions that we put forward. Yeah,

Dawn Davenport  8:12  
and you did a good job on that. I felt so one of the first questions, and it's actually one of the questions I think adoptive parents often in their mind ask, and that is how satisfied we all hope that we're raising our children to be satisfied, happy, productive adults and to not live in our basement and not be on our payroll. So all of those are the things that we parents seek. So one of the first questions you ask was trying to get at life satisfaction, which I thought was a good one, because that really is what parents are. We don't expect perfection. We don't expect sunshine and roses all the time, but we we pray that our children are satisfied in life. So Nicole, I'll start with you, and then Ryan, I will come back to you. I know, Nicole, you did more of the qualitative responses and less of the number crunching. So how satisfied in general, are adopted people? And did you see distinctions when you broke it out by types of adoption?

Speaker 1  9:11  
Yeah, so we focus in on a few kind of key categories to assess that satisfaction, right? So we asked about adoption satisfaction. Specifically, we asked a number of questions to gage life satisfaction, and then we asked about education, career and medical status or family satisfaction. And across the board, we relatively found that adoptees were falling within what we were looking at out of a scale of five, they were around 3.3 to four, right? So they're around that like mid level satisfaction to maybe a little bit within the higher satisfaction range. There was a little bit of a range between type of adoption, but not super significant. We also compared based on whether an adoptee had parents of a different race. We were expecting to see a difference in level satisfaction, and we actually, with life and adoption satisfaction, were surprised to see a slight reduction in satisfaction with families of the same race. So that was a really interesting finding. But overall, there is relative satisfaction throughout and for education, career and then the marital status, family satisfaction, we actually found that over 70% of adoptees were in the somewhat agree or strongly agree for being satisfied on all of those points across all types of adoption, which was really interesting. That

Speaker 2  10:34  
is interesting. We were surprised by that finding, as Nicole said, for the life satisfaction question, in particular, those five questions that are listed in our report come from what's called the satisfaction with life scale. So it's a standardized instrument that's been used in lots of other research around the world, including, you know, in the US, you can compare the results of our report to others who have used it. That's one of the benefits of a standardized instrument. You can compare, you know, different populations. So to directly answer your question, most adoptees have life satisfaction that's going to be in the same range as the general population, if you were to look at

Dawn Davenport  11:11  
that. So my next question is, if you do no population, right?

Speaker 2  11:15  
That kind of stigmatized view of adoptees as being troubled or being problem children or having behavioral issues throughout their life. There might be reasons why those stereotypes are there, but one of the things we want to do is help dispel the myth that all adoptees are very dissatisfied with their life. Some are. That's true. Some are extremely satisfied, and when we're looking at these populations, especially, you know, private domestic and adoption from foster care, we're squarely and compared to the general population, our average satisfaction levels in our country adoptees slightly more elevated than that. But this is not a tale of two different groups when it comes to life satisfaction, it is very safe to assume that the typical adoptee, or the average adoptee, is going to have life satisfaction the same as the typical person in the United States and typical member of the general population.

Dawn Davenport  12:12  
You know it's a you probably face this as well. We certainly do, because we're talking and publishing articles on this on a fairly regular basis, and we do spend a fair amount of time. It feels like talking about, Well, part of our mission is trauma informed research base, so our two hyphenated buzzwords trauma informed. We do spend a lot of time talking about trauma. We talk a lot about setting realistic expectations for adoptive families. We talk a lot about it feels like the issues that adoptees might face, and yet we're sometimes called to task on that because it does feel, and I think it is a valid criticism that we are focusing on air quotes around the word problems. We do it because we want realistic expectations to be set, and we think that that will contribute to better outcomes. On the other hand, it is absolutely true that I it was about two years ago we started taking a really strong look. Are we being too negative biased? You know, are we? I don't have the answer. I will say that we struggle with it, and we hear from people, adoptees, saying that we are pathologizing them. And I I hear them and but we also hear from others who say that if we don't focus on the potential issues where, you know, having the rainbows and unicorns approach so I see both sides. What can I say?

Speaker 2  13:35  
I agree. Don I think the more we can look at research and look at what are the variables that might be leading towards some of these outcomes can be really helpful and to do better education around what some of the outcomes might mean. So for example, Don you and I had a long conversation about the services that adopt these receive, like Therapeutic Services post adoption, and we can look at that and say, Well, this is an indication that there's lots of problems, or we can look at that and say, this is an indication that a lot of needs are being met. Valid point. So when we label something like receiving therapy as problematic, then we're stigmatizing that experience, and we might be actually preventing someone from getting what needs they have. The flip side of that is, if someone's in need of therapy and not receiving it, whatever the challenge that they're facing still persists for them, but they're not going to have that label as having received some type of therapy, and so it's really important that we talk about this thoughtfully. Our report looked at how well adopted parents talked about race, for example, and there's a huge discrepancy between whether or not the parents did that sufficiently. But then also, like when you look at time frames, how well parents, for example, inner country parents talked about birth culture and honoring their their race and ethnicity, over time periods, they did it very poorly. You know, in the 1960s in the 1970s and 1980s they did it. Much better in more recent decades.

Dawn Davenport  15:03  
Let me take a moment to thank the jockey being Family Foundation for their support both of this podcast, but also their support of 12 free courses that we offer on our website. You can find them at Bitly slash JBf support, that's D, I T, dot, l, y, slash, j, b, f, support. Going back to what Nicole was saying that a bit of a surprising finding was that the general score for life satisfaction, which was over several questions, but the general score for transracial adoptees was slightly higher than for domestic infant and foster care, and I know that you did not tease out the reasons why. I would speculate that one possible reason would be that, with transracial families, adoption is front and center as far as you're not going to have late identified adoptees you're going to have, and we're forced to talk about adoption, because we're a family, obviously formed through adoption, so I don't know that's one thought, but we don't know why.

Speaker 2  16:08  
Yeah, I mean, that's very much a possibility. It could be on the adoptive parents themselves, that the type of parent that only would pursue a child who's the same race might have other aspects that are less flexible. And there's, all sorts of reasons. And you're right, we didn't ask more questions to get at that. I think it's worth exploring in future research and to confirm that other researchers have the same finding that we do, because they very well might not. Yeah, it's interesting. Nicole mentioned it was an area that we were surprised by. It's not an enormous difference in terms of their numbers, but it does prove to be statistically significantly different for our sample. And I think it's worth looking at that in the future to say, you know, what do other researchers find? Or if we do this again, have we been able to repeat that same finding? It's

Dawn Davenport  16:53  
a really good point you raised, though. Is there a difference? That's really interesting. Yes. Is there a difference in the type of parent who adopts transracially from the type of parent who does not? Yeah, that's an interesting thought, right?

Speaker 1  17:04  
And that's not to say that these parents did an amazingly better job, like Brian said, The sufficiently addressed issue did not show that a majority of parents did an amazing job addressing race with their children. So

Dawn Davenport  17:16  
that's race, though, not necessarily adoption. Yeah, I did. I thought that was interesting that a lot of the transracial, the majority of transracial adoptees, I believe, did not think that their parents had done a I think the sufficient was the right. I'm looking at my

Speaker 2  17:33  
sufficiently addressed it. You're correct, but that's a

Dawn Davenport  17:36  
different issue from whether they talked about adoption more, right? But again, we're all speculating here. One of the questions you ask the adoptees is, did they think that adoption could and did work in their best interest? And then you ask about whether they thought it worked in the best interest of their birth family, and did it work in the best interest of their adoptive family? Which was very interesting. I liked that split because I was interested to see what they responded so, Ryan, let's start with you. So did adoptees think that adoption worked in their best interest?

Speaker 2  18:10  
The responses are provided by type of adoption, and then, as you said, gone by those three different groups, on the whole, they do. They think it can work in the best interest of all three and we asked this question very generalized. We didn't ask them, was this true for you? We just said, Do you think adoption can work in the best interest of these groups? And then ask them to be responsive. The majority for all three types of adoption and for all three populations, indicated they do think it can work in the best interest. It's not the same for those three populations, adoptees are much more likely to say adoption can work in the best interest of adoptive parents than in birth parents. So they're not all equal. There's still a significant minority that says it doesn't work in the best interest of the different parties involved, including adoptees and birth parents. So the answers were not uniform by any means, but certainly the majority, at times, very large majorities, are saying yes, this can work in the best interest of all the different parties involved.

Dawn Davenport  19:12  
Ryan, did you see a distinction between the types of adoption and whether they thought that adoption worked in the best interest. Let's just say for the adoptee at this point, the larger

Speaker 2  19:23  
differences were actually for inner country adoption. They tended to be more positive, more likely to say they strongly agreed that it can work in the best interest of parties involved, and they were the least likely to strongly disagree that it can work, you know, not work in the best interest of those so the inner country adoptees did respond differently than the other two groups, but again, the majorities were saying, Yes, this can work in their best interest. Don one of the interesting things we asked the same series of questions to birth parents when they did our prior research report and we asked birth parents to answer this by you. All three populations now as a reminder, or for those that haven't seen that report, we were only looking at private domestic adoption and the majority of our responses. We distinguish between birth mother respondents and birth father respondents, but the same was true there. So our birth mother respondents were by far the largest of those two groups, and they also believe that adoption can work in the best interest of all three parties involved. But similarly, they were more likely to view adoption as working in the best interest of adoptive parents than birth parents.

Dawn Davenport  20:32  
Interesting, yes, and for those interested, we did creating a family podcast on that profiles and adoption, birth parent experiences. And you can just search whatever app you're using right now, and you can find that it was a fascinating show as well. Let's move to talking about openness now. Openness is because you covered and you broke down your responses by year of adoption and in no area probably well, transracial is really another important one to do that, but certainly in openness, because we've seen a huge shift in the attitude towards and the emphasis on the importance of open adoption. So Nicole, what were in general, the adoptees thoughts on openness?

Speaker 1  21:17  
Yeah. So there were two main factors. When we were looking at openness, we were looking at what information adoptees really had access to, and we were also looking at how their families felt about open relationships with birth family. So in regards to accessing information private domestic and foster care, had around 83% of them were reporting like having some birth family information, which was much, much smaller for inner country, which I'm sure is not that surprising to hear. When it came to family medical history, though, really, all types of adoption had a minimal amount, and inner country mostly flagged, having no information at all. And then in regards to relationships, being comfortable with a relationship and supportive of a relationship were kind of the two factors we looked at, and we found that adoptive family comfort with and support of was much higher for inner country adoptions and was around moderate levels for foster care and private domestic adoption. Is

Dawn Davenport  22:16  
there a difference between Foster and domestic infant?

Unknown Speaker  22:19  
I think they were relatively similar.

Dawn Davenport  22:22  
I'm just, I'm curious about that, because with foster the excuse or not excuse, it could be the real reason. But the reason often given is we're concerned about safety, therefore we are not interested in having and keeping in mind, openness does not necessarily mean visits and physical contact. It can be just, quite frankly, a spirit of openness, although we would hope that there is some form of communication, and I'm just kind of curious, you would think logically that, given that reason, that you would see less acceptance and more suspicion of openness with foster care. Yeah.

Speaker 1  22:55  
So the questions we asked specifically asked about the relationship, whether there was comfort with having a relationship, support of having a relationship, rather than, like, the wider spirit of openness, which is really important as well. But in regards to the number, I mean, Ryan, I'd love to hear your thoughts, but they're relatively similar. I mean, there's, like, some factors that are slightly different, but I would say overall, the bell curve is pretty similar for the two.

Speaker 2  23:18  
Yeah, nothing stands out to me as dramatically different there, and there might be different reasons. Different reasons for that. You know, children placed for adoption from foster care tend to be older, so they might have had already an existing relationship that might be easier to maintain, or they might be answering questions around a relationship differently. One of the related questions that we asked just for private domestic adoption, we asked the adoptees when they knew they were adopted, because we know historically, it was much more likely that adoptees wouldn't have been told about their status as being adopted, or they were told about it at an older age. So for those looking at a report, it's on page 27 and we looked at it by the decade in which they were placed for adoption. And and, you know, to be clear, the majority, a large majority, said they knew since they were very young, but they were much more likely in the 50s, 60s, 70s, to say they found out in elementary school or later. Over 20% said that in the 1950s 15 or so percent said that in the 1960s later, it drops down, and unfortunately, through our sample, remained in that kind of 10 to 12% range where they're finding out in elementary school as opposed to finding out earlier. So it's an example of where practices do change over time, but there's still work to be done. No one's saying a good practice would be for someone to find out as a surprise. You know, as opposed to finding out when they're so young that they're continually having conversations so that it's not coming as a surprise to that individual,

Speaker 1  24:47  
and we heard a lot about openness in the qualitative data as well. We had those three key questions that we incorporated in the report, and when we asked adoptees about advice they were giving to adoptive parents, that was a. Thing we heard time and time and time again, it was our key number one theme that we pointed out about discussing adoption early and often, having safe space, honesty, you know, no shame and secrecy, because a lot of adoptees experienced, even if their adoption wasn't entirely kept from them, that like just environment of shame and not telling others about it, and then obviously birth family openness specifically and really making sure that there was comfort expectations of openness, discussions of birth family, all of those things,

Dawn Davenport  25:31  
lack of fear of openness in general. I am loving this interview, so I hate to interrupt it, but I wanted you to know about our weekend wisdom podcast, where we answer your questions. Since we're answering your questions, we need you to send us your questions. We take about them anywhere from five to 10 minutes to answer a question that you submit. So send them to us at info, at creating a family.org going back to the transracial What were their thoughts and one of the questions whether transracial adoption should have been allowed. What did you hear from that? I'll start with you. Ryan, yeah. So

Speaker 2  26:12  
just for the audience to know, this question was only asked to adoptees who indicated that they had no parent, no adoptive parent that was the same race as them. So it's a much smaller sample that we heard from here. And the question we asked was, Do you believe adoptive future adoptive parents should be allowed to adopt a child who is a different race slash ethnicity than they are? And for foster care and inner country, they had a very large majority that said, yes, they should be allowed. They agreed with that statement, a smaller but I would say, you know, all of these, even when they're a small, you know, minority response, or a significant response, to be mindful of and to hear from, learn from, for private domestic it was actually about half and half, again, smaller sample, but a slight majority actually disagreed with that statement about future adoptive parents adopting a child of a different race. Again, that for me, was a surprising finding me too and does not match the other two types of adoption that we reported on.

Dawn Davenport  27:13  
It also doesn't match life satisfaction, necessarily, not that they're those are two separate things, and one should not get them confused. And I was going to mention that actually, in a similar vein earlier, I think when we were talking about criticism, that I think probably a valid criticism is that creating a family, as well as other education based organizations, focus more on the negative. I think it's important for both professionals as well as parents to realize that you can be quite satisfied with your life and still have problems with the institution of adoption. I think that might also play into this question. When I was reading those results, I was also surprised that you could be satisfied with your life and pleased with your adoption, but still not think that this is back to transracial not think that transracial adoptions should be encouraged, although allowed, I think is the word you use. So yeah, and

Speaker 2  28:10  
that's correct. And different research studies have actually not had dissimilar findings, like I'm thinking, for example, of a study that came out of the UK where they looked at private domestic adoptees, they had life satisfaction that was same as the general population, but they had perhaps lower responses on other facets of their life. There's a different study that came out of the Netherlands for inner country adoptees actually had higher life satisfaction than the general population, but it didn't necessarily mean when you looked at their education level, or their, you know, other aspects of their life, that they were in some category that would have allowed us to assume that things were better for them, so your point on, like, what was the question we're asking, and then allowing the adoptees to be responsive to that, and then not trying to infer more without doing The real work to ensure that we have an understanding of that. Yeah,

Dawn Davenport  29:03  
very good point, because it is tempting, and I will, I am guilty of that. When I read some of the I go, Oh, okay, well, that's because or which, how do we know? And that's also infantizing of the permanent child, where the parent tries to infer a reason when we may not have a clue. Yeah.

Speaker 2  29:21  
And you know, I think one of the other things we're talking about how someone might be satisfied with their life, dissatisfied with adoption, one of the other things we found is there's a lot of nuance in their responses. And this came through in the open ended questions much clearer, because there's obviously more room for the respondents to give us nuance. And they would say things like, my parents could have done better at x, y and z, and I still think they did a good job. It wasn't it was terrible or it was wonderful. They often had something to say where, here's what they could have done better, and given the time frame, or given their circumstances, or or they messed this up, like the. Majority were insufficient at talking about race, but still, that same sample is saying yes, but we still think other adoptees should be allowed to be placed for adoption with parents of a different race. So this isn't one question tells us everything we need to know,

Dawn Davenport  30:14  
no and you can't do that in parenting. I mean, I would count it as a win if my kids said, you know, they screwed up. But all in all, they did, you know, they did their best, or they tried or or whatever, you know, oh,

Speaker 2  30:24  
yeah, it's like baseball, right? If you're batting 500 Yeah, amazing, right?

Dawn Davenport  30:29  
Yes, yeah. And the more kids you have, the more you take that 500

Speaker 1  30:35  
Exactly. And Ryan, to add on to what you said, Something else that's important to mention is that a lot of adoptees flag the fact that they maybe felt that their parents didn't meet a certain need, but that training and education has changed, and that that would not be the case if they had been adopted today. So even looking at like, again, we keep talking about this race question. But like, I think many people might say that that's another reason why, like, adoptive parents should continue to adopt children and maybe a different race or culture, because if they went through today's adoption trainings, that could look very different. And a lot of a lot of adoptees recognized that fact and said, you know, times have changed. Thoughts about this have changed like they never would have done it this way, you know, but that's how it was when I was a kid.

Dawn Davenport  31:16  
Along that line, I'm curious you ask about which this question surprised me that you asked, but I was really thankful you did, and that is, what were adoptees thoughts on their family having an annual recognition of adoption. It could be an adoption day or it could be a family day, but somehow a recognition of their adoption. Nicole, what were their thoughts?

Speaker 1  31:40  
Yeah, it was interesting. And to kind of tie to one of the themes that I had throughout the qualitative data was right attuning to your specific child's needs. What feels like is working for them? We asked whether or not these adoptees had experienced a celebration of their adoption, and then if they had experienced it, would they recommend it for others, and if they hadn't experienced it, do they wish that that was something their family did? And we pretty much found that those that had it recommended it, and those that didn't didn't wish that they had so it kind of is in line with that. It's not one size fits all, and it's finding what works best for your child. And the open ended responses discussed celebrating the adoption day, specifically, a lot of the time it was actually something we highlighted in the contradiction section, because we had quotes that were like, This was fabulous. It made me feel special. It contributed to my belonging. And we had other comments that were feeling really othered. Someone compared it to, you know, how dogs have a gotcha day, and how insulting that felt to them. So there's really a wide variety in what that experience might be like for an adoptee,

Dawn Davenport  32:47  
which is in keeping because I you know, the idea that just because you were adopted, put you in a group that makes you all alike, is ridiculous, yeah, and yet we do that in the literature and in the popular press. It speaks of adoptees as if they're one uniform, fungible group, and nothing could be further from the truth, and your qualitative data, really, I thought, teased that out well. And

Speaker 2  33:11  
Don for your listeners, there were differences by type of adoption, not by the responses. As Nicole said, those that had it would recommend it for others, those that didn't which they had had it on the whole, you know, that was the general response. But even when you ask, did you have an annual recognition, half of inner country adoptees families had an annual recognition, but it was only a quarter of those adopted from foster care, and just 15% of those who were adopted through private domestic placement. So different experiences by type of adoption as well.

Dawn Davenport  33:45  
Valid point, and I can actually, from a practical standpoint, do see that actually, as I'm sitting here thinking through people who, when we talk about that in our online support group, the Facebook group, by the way, facebook.com/groups/creating a family that would actually play out. The second half of the report is really dedicated more to the qualitative, I think. And you broke the questions out by type of adoption. So Nicole, if you let's start with the foster care adoption. One of the questions was, what factors they think are important when choosing adoptive parents. And so what factors did they think were important?

Speaker 1  34:27  
Yeah, so that one, we asked a few different types of adoption. And so for foster care, the highest were adoptive parents age and adoptive parents race. And for private domestic adoption, it was predominantly adoptive parents views on openness, but those were just our close ended ones. And then we also had the open ended for foster care, which was asking for what advice they might have to improving the adoption from foster care process as well. Okay,

Dawn Davenport  34:56  
that's where I want to turn that before we do that factors in choosing. Adoptive parents. You've mentioned what the number one factor was for foster care, and it was age, number of children already in the home, and adoptive parents race for domestic infant. You've said that it was adoptive parents view on openness. Was there a close second on that one? There

Speaker 2  35:19  
wasn't the next closest was the adoptive parents political, social or religious views. And that wasn't very close. It was a and they could choose more than one, and most did in terms of what are important factors. But it was nearly two thirds who said the adoptive parents views on openness are what's important,

Dawn Davenport  35:37  
fascinating. And I was saying, What did international adoptees respond on this, on the factors for choosing adoptive parents? We

Speaker 2  35:44  
actually didn't ask that question for intercountry adoption, and the reason we didn't is the way that families are matched via inner country is often very different, and so we didn't think that that would be a as useful of a response. It still might be interesting to compare adoptees views on what's important, but for intercountry adoption, as you know, Don it's often a foreign country who's making a match, and they're not necessarily looking at it by those same factors. And so we wanted a report that could be really practical for professionals and others to really utilize in training future families, in working with the population of adoptees, and we didn't know that that question before in our country would actually be practical for them? Yeah.

Dawn Davenport  36:26  
I mean, the country itself has specific criteria for age, health, the whole thing, so it's, yeah, all right. So now, from the qualitative responses you specifically, let's start with foster care. Believe that your questions were advice for improving the foster care adoption and you've got, of course, a number of quite a few responses, but Nicole, could you briefly summarize or highlight a couple of responses? Definitely.

Speaker 1  36:52  
So like we said, we only asked this question to foster care adoptees, so was a smaller response rate by far than our other two questions that we highlighted. We had 125 responses that we were analyzing, but there were definitely some key themes that pulled through. Many discussed placement and permanency decisions, specifically the importance of prioritizing family preservation and reunification. That was probably our most recurrent response. A lot about caregiver screening and training and the importance of having even more comprehensive evaluations on specifically the motivations and parenting capabilities of adoptive parents. There was also discussion of having more time for reviewing suitability post placement but pre adoption, and kind of seeing how the family is adapting to having the child in the home, how the child is feeling about their placement. And a lot of discussion about needing even more, increased training for on trauma issues, on birth family openness, really making sure that visitation is encouraged and happening, and more training on cultural competency and transracial adoption, there was a lot of discussion on accessing supports and services, as well as more key information. So therapy and mental health was discussed a lot, services for both the child and the adoptive parents was discussed a lot, as well as the importance of ensuring that adoptees from foster care being able to access comprehensive medical history, birth family information and birth certificates came up again and again, and there was a subset of adoptees that really focused more on discussing what they felt was the brokenness of the foster care system that we wanted to make sure we also included. There were some calls for entirely overhauling the foster care adoption system, and even some that reference the importance of abolishing it all together.

Dawn Davenport  38:47  
Yeah, we hear of those as well. We hear that view moving to some of the open ended views on inter country placements. One thing that surprised me, well, first of all, one of the questions before I get to mine that surprised me was, are they in favor of inter country adoption? And the way you ask it was, when family reunification and domestic adoption are not possible in the child's birth country, do you believe the US should continue to allow inter country adoption? And the overwhelming majority said yes. One that surprised me was, I guess somehow I thought that more had traveled to their birth country. You'd ask, had they traveled back to their birth country? And only 41% had said yes. I don't know why that surprised me, but it did,

Speaker 2  39:30  
you know, I didn't know what to predict. So for me, I was interested in the results. And one of the things I guess I've seen anecdotally is that it often is country specific. It seems that there are certain countries adoptees are more likely to travel back to than others. There might be like geopolitical reasons for that. It might also end up being a cultural thing that they're connected with either their agency, who's organizing this, or other adoptees who have helped, you know, make connections for them. What's interesting that. Is the vast majority of those who have done a trip like that recommend it to other adoptees. And so it seems to be, we don't want to read too much into this without hearing from them directly. But we said, based on your experience, would you recommend a birth country trip to other intercountry adoptees? And we only asked that to those who had done one and it was 90% said yes, 1% said no, and there was a 10% or so that had a more nuanced view. They could say other, and then they listed that out. But overwhelmingly, they're viewing this as something that they would recommend to other adoptees.

Dawn Davenport  40:37  
And sometimes it was caveats, yes, if it was adoptee? Letter, yes, exactly, yeah. But type of thing, did you know that, in addition to this podcast and website full of resources for you that's creating a family.org, by the way, we also have an online support group. That support group can be found at facebook.com/groups, slash, creating a family. So please check it out. All right. So now let's talk about the advice for future adoptive parents. Of course, we were happy you asked that question, because as parents, we always want to ask the real experts, the adults who are living our child's experience, what they would recommend. And it's going to be impossible to summarize everything. But we'll start with you, Ryan, you broke it into themes. Name a theme that was interesting to you, and then we'll move to Nicole to let her talk about another thing,

Speaker 2  41:35  
sure. Well, Nicole already mentioned openness, and that was by far the biggest thing that came out for us, the one after that, was being child centered, so following the child's lead, you know, being attentive and attuned to your child. That came through as a strong theme. And then I'll let Nicole talk more about some of the contrasting views. But an additional theme was seeking out education resources and support for those parents, like really encouraging them to find avenues for that. And then Nicole, I know there was a number of things that came out with the contrasting views, and you spent a lot of time really working through that.

Speaker 1  42:10  
Yes, definitely it took a while to even get it into three themes. Honestly, we had a great diversity in responses, and I think that this is a great opportunity to mention Ryan and I included this in the report. But one of the limitations of this report was our sampling style, which was proposed sampling, and we expect that it skewed the responses in a way that we may have received people who very positively and negatively connect with adoption.

Dawn Davenport  42:38  
Let me stop you a second. I didn't catch what you said. It was some type of sampling. And can you say that word again? Yes. Sorry. So

Speaker 2  42:45  
it was non probability sampling. There was aspects to which it was both purposive, which is what Nicole said, and it would have been having what's called snowball sampling. Non probability sampling just means we didn't do random sampling to get our final group of respondents. There's reasons for that. It's enormously difficult to do that and get a large sample, unless you have the resources of something like the Census Bureau, where you can start, you know, with a huge group, and then determine who are the adoptees and who are not, and then only randomly select within that group of adoptees that would allow us to then infer to a larger population of adoptees if we had done that type of sampling, because we did non probability sampling, what we wanted to do is we wanted a very large sample, and we want to just be clear that we think there's a lot we can learn from these responses, but we need to be cautious on our generalizing this to all adoptees. Yes, as Nicole said, this can lead to something like selection bias, where I wondered about those that really want to have their their views heard because they think adoption is the best thing, or those that are really, you know, opposed to adoption, they might be more inclined to respond to a request to complete a survey than someone who has much more neutral views towards adoption. I was

Dawn Davenport  44:06  
going to talk to you about that. That's something that, and I think the internet exacerbates that. And so it's a challenge, and it's a challenge both ways. That's right. And if you just ask adoption agencies, they're going to be more likely to be in contact with people who are more positive, because those who have a strong negative view might have been cut off contact with the adoption agency. So yeah, right. I'm sorry I interrupted you, Nicole, but I didn't catch what you said. And yeah,

Speaker 1  44:32  
or just those who are more like engaged with their adoptee identity, like there's plenty of adoptees who don't think about that facet of their identity at that level. They're not engaged in the community, and those are going to be the hardest ones to reach, but that is going to, in many ways, make it not as representative as we would like it to be. And so we saw that even more so obviously, in these open ended responses, where it was really shocking and interesting to see how the range of advice and you. Some people who are saying adoption is horrible, you should never adopt. That's the only advice I would give, and people who are saying adoption is the most perfect thing no one can ever do wrong, right? And it's interesting, because the purpose of this question is really to provide what so many adoptees probably offer in their daily life. When someone comes up and says, Well, what do you think? And you hear that advice, and you think to yourself, Okay, this is an important person to, like, take this advice and really listen to it, because they have the lived experience. But wow, can that advice vary? Right? And seeing this at a grand scale, where you were able to identify so many different responses, made this really, really helpful, but also it really clarified that the experiences are going to be so different, and you really have to take each voice and recognize how much that might vary. So we mentioned communication. Ryan also mentioned being child centered. That pulls us back to what we discussed before, about, like, really, at the end of the day, it's about being attuned to your individual child's needs. Like the variance of responses from really, they should have pushed me so much more to be involved with my culture, or I was overly pushed, and I should have just been able to like, be who I was, right. But what we heard across the board, no matter what exact plan or structure adoptees felt was best, it was be a loving parent. Be a supportive parent. Be patient, be committed, be attentive. Those words came up again and again and again, and being attuned, adjusting to the child's needs, it was really give me the opportunities to engage in the adoptee community, to engage in my cultural or ethnic community, but then let me engage at my own pace, and kind of like, trust that I'm going to be able to communicate that. And we also talk about, like a safe space bringing things up again and again. So it's not just relying on what your child tells you, but there was a lot of really specific factors that we found really helpful, and I tried to include that throughout. And we, like Ryan said, included a lot of quotes, because almost none of the words used in this report were our own words. We really tried to pull just exactly what they're saying, what are we seeing the most of, and give that to everyone to do with what they feel is best. Ryan,

Dawn Davenport  47:14  
can you summarize what adoptees wish their parents had done differently, which was a separate, open in the question that you asked

Speaker 2  47:21  
Yes, it was a separate question. The kind of three high level themes aren't that different, actually, than our first question. The first one focused on communication and messaging. It was the same idea of being honest, having that space to communicate and then to actually be talking about issues, as opposed to bearing them or waiting on the adoptee to raise the issue with the parents. The next theme was accessing support, similar to the prior question, find ways to get the supports that you need as a parent and find those for the adoptee as well. And then the third one, and this one surprised us, adoptees went out of their way to answer this question by saying, my parents did well. So you know, the actual question we asked was, What if anything, do you wish your adoptive parents had done differently related to discussing your adoption with you? And they wanted to tell us that their parents did a good job. We were surprised by that, simply because it didn't really directly answer our question. But over and over, that was one of the primary responses we got, and so we ended up including that as the final theme in that section, the communication piece was the one that we heard the most. And the driving factor there is sharing information with the adoptee and not having that be something where they've got to do an end run around the parents or that kind of lack of information is a void that they're then filling with unknowns, or you know that they don't have the freedom to have that conversation with their parents.

Dawn Davenport  48:49  
Well, once again, thank you so much for the National Council for adoption for doing these profiles in adoption. I highly recommend this as good reading material for adoptive parents as well as adoptive professionals. Again, we're linking to profiles in adoption, adult adoptee experiences in the show notes. It will link you directly to the NCFA site and the PDF that has the report. Thank you so much. Nicole Davey and Ryan Hammond. Truly appreciate it.

Unknown Speaker  49:20  
We appreciate it too. Thank you. You.

Transcribed by https://otter.ai