In today’s post, we continue looking at some helpful advice from Betsy Keefer and Jayne Schooler, authors of Telling the Truth to Your Adopted or Foster Child: Making Sense of the Past.

What is the ideal age at which to tell a child he or she was adopted?
The authors have a terrific answer for this question: Children who were adopted during infancy should grow up knowing that they are adopted in the same way they grow up knowing that they are male or female.

I’ve talked with several people recently who didn’t learn they were adopted until they were 18 or older. They were NOT happy when they learned that everyone else in the world knew they were adopted except them.

The authors write:

When children or adults discover they were adopted, they feel disconnected from the adoptive family (and often, from the rest of humanity), an overwhelming rage at the parents’ lack of honesty, and a tremendous sense of shame that this information was regarded as so negative that it had to be hidden.

Adoption is not shameful, and parents who choose not to tell their children they were adopted insinuate that it is. It is a very insecure parent who imagines that if her child knows she was adopted, she’ll love her parents less.

In reality, an adopted child has the capacity to simultaneously love both her birth and adoptive family, write the authors. They shouldn’t have to choose – they should be told that it’s okay to love both. When adoptive and birth families are not caught in a competitive tug-of-war, their children are granted permission to “love and attach to the adoptive family.”

In most cases, there won’t be a specific “telling” moment, but rather, a “knowing” that one was adopted. “Parents who search for an appropriate telling moment find that it never comes,” write the authors. “The longer parents wait, the more difficult it becomes to tell the child.”

When parents wait until their child is an adolescent to tell him he was adopted, they feel embarrassed that they’ve avoided telling him earlier. So they wait a little longer for “the perfect moment.” And a little longer. And a little longer. And suddenly, their child is grown and someone else inadvertently (or intentionally) shares the information. Oops!

Betty Jean Lifton, an adult adopted person and author of numerous books about adoption, asserts that all children should have complete information about their birth family history by the time they reach adolescence. “It is important that parents share this info prior to, not during, the child’s journey through identity formation and individuation, key developmental tasks of adolescence.”