The Blind Side: Family Structure-Adoptive Family

Many adoptees feel out of place, they struggle finding a place to settle and when they do they often times feel as though they need to work to prove their worthiness. As an adoptive shield grows he as long The begins to question. He question why his birth parents didn 't want him and why he wasn 't good enough for them. He may begin to wonder why he act and looks the way he does. Being an adoptee can cause crippling anxiety, in the case of Lesli Johnson, " I went to therapy for the first time when I was 6 years old because I had begun to suffer from sleep issues and crippling separation anxiety from my mom." ( Johnson ). An adopted child has the right to know their birth parents; so that they can have some sense of self worth and identity, they can learn something of their past, and find acceptance in the way things are.

May cause different emotions for adopted child as they have the right to know their origins

“I want to be like my adoptive mother, but my birth mother says I’m like her. I don’t know what to do or who I am. My whole life is messed up. It’s not my fault. It can’t be fixed,” said a girl adopted into an open adoption (Byrd). An open adoption is a process in which the birth parents and the adoptive parents know each other and are involved in the adopted child’s life. A closed adoption is when there is no contact at all and no identifying information is given between birth and adoptive parents (Byrd). While both are common to today’s society, closed adoptions allow opportunities for the adoptive parents to raise their kids without the interference of birth parents (Bender).

Not many children who are put in closed adoptions get to know who they are and their family history. Closed adoption children do not get to know any of their historical background, and this sometimes gives children self-esteem issues (“Adoption Emotional Issues”). They can also deal with loss and grief issues at times because they do not have their biological parents around to help raise them. It is not until the age of eighteen for the child to legally find their biological parents on their

Living with family can make life rather complex, especially when dealing with problems, because this group of people are so close to each other emotionally. It’s hard to keep secrets or keep things behind doors because there’s not really a door that can’t be opened by everyone. This is especially true with children and teens going through the ropes of high school. Finding the balance of when a child needs to be disciplined by the parents and when to let the child be more independent with their problem solving or even finding a way to have everyone connect to each other while also providing a comfortable space or bit of a distance from each other can be a hard task for everyone, especially if there are multiple individuals within the family.

A child who is adopted is always a good thing, yet there are those who wish to return to the days of racial segregation when it comes to adoption. The “National Association of Black Social Workers, in 1972, likened whites adopting black children to ‘cultural genocide’” (Clemetson & Nixon, 2006, para 16), which is a completely racist view of how White people would poorly raise a Black child based solely on skin color. Their stance on interracial adoptions has changed somewhat in the last 40 years. The wording has been softened to a more politically palatable and sustainable “transracial adoption of an African American child should only be considered after documented evidence of unsuccessful same race placements has been reviewed and supported

Now there are some things to consider when it comes to adoption. One of these being that transracial adoptees do not always want to be adopted by people from a different race. Meaning that skin tone and ethnicity plays a factor in the adoption process. Many people question if placing an adoptee in the home of a different race family fits the need of the child, and in the long run that’s the main goal of adoption, fitting the needs of the child. This situation has become very common, and are not always bad. However, “Trans-racial adoption can have very good outcomes, but one issue keeps cropping up – and that’s a sense of loneliness and isolation, a sense of not belonging. Adoption is a new identity and when you get the added challenges of people

‘People are realizing that closed adoptions do more harm than good, because adoptees tend to imagine one of two extremes about their birth parents — they’re either famous, exotic royalty or celebrities, or they’re villains with loose morals’.

Where we come from is a huge issue. Just as scientists debate the origin of man and the universe, adopted children can have questions about their genetic roots. Questions like: “Why do I look like this?”, “Why do I have these health problems?”, and “Why do I have these emotional issues?” go unanswered if biological parents are never known. In a study of adoptive families, parents were asked how they felt years after their open adoptions. One

Functional and dysfunctional families are two different family settings that can cause conflict for the story.

Everyone has a support system that gives them courage when they need it. This system can be friends, but is often a parent either birth or adoptive. Children just have a special bond between them and their parents and why would they not, they are around with every twist, turn and roadblock that gets in the way. This is not just because they have known their children their whole life or part of it is because they teach their children the skills that they have learned so in the future they have the tools they need to succeed and push past the roadblocks. This is a common occurrence in the book Cheyenne by Lisa Wiedmeier where a girl named Cheyenne loses her adoptive parents in a car crash that appeared to be accidental. After the death of

Did you know that one third of all children in the United States (US) are expected to live in a stepfamily before they reach the age of 18[helpguide.org 2008]? While some people consider blended families abnormal, they can be just as good as a “regular” family. With blended families becoming more common, there are more studies being done to show both the similarities and differences between “regular” and blended families.

The adoptive family may ignore or make little effort to incorporate into the family the cultural heritage of the adopted child (Adamec,136). This decision to leave the culture behind, outside the family, does not suggest that the child is neither accepted nor loved or cherished as their own. However, when the adoptive family also adopts and embraces the cultural identity of the child's birth culture, it enriches not only the adopted child but also the entire family and extended family as well. Another factor is attachment is the child’s age when they were adopted. The older the child when adopted, the risk of social maladjustment was found to be higher (Simon, 188). Most children when adopted at younger ages have a better chance to adjustment normally, than children adopted over the age of ten. An infant learns to trust quicker, than a ten-year old child does, but all of this depends on each case. Developmental theorist Eric Erikson, discusses trust issues in his theory of development. Erikson's first stage of development is “Trust versus Mistrust”, which states “if needs are dependably met, infants develop a sense of basic trust” (Myers, 149). For an adopted child, placing the child early in a key ingredient to successful attachment of child to parent and vice versa (Cox, 1). Such an attachment, which is strong among the majority of families throughout the paper, is an important

There are common ordeals and situations that can trouble a family emotionally, physically, and psychologically. Adoption is one situation a family must encounter when a child is born without a proper system of support to sustain life after birth. The causes for a family to make a heartfelt decision to place a child for adoption can have dramatic effects on the birth parents, adoptive parents, and child (Adoptee), even if the decision is meant for the best.

They have self-satisfaction and identity development problems more than their peers. An identity problem is an effect that teenagers develop once they know they’ve been adopted. They do not have a strong sense of self and struggle with identity issues; that also leads to depression, anxiety, and other psychological health problems. Children in semi-open adoptions often wonder what their real families look like, where they live and how they act. They begin to become curious about their biological family and wonder what it would be like to meet their family members and other siblings they may have. In the other hand, during open adoptions children are given a chance to know their birth parents and form some kind of relationship with them and receive information that they might not have known in the past. Feelings of regret may come along with their identity issues. The children may feel as though they are doing something wrong behind their adopted parents back. They feel betrayal towards them for simply being curious of their biological family. In many cases the emotions are confusing and difficult to deal with. They also face difficult times when questions begin to arise about being an adopted child in the family. People outside your family will become curious if the child does not physically look like the parents. That is when at times adopted children become sad and annoyed at the same time. Adoption parents should quickly