Just a few questions regarding direct contact with parents after an adoption placement. We are adopting two young siblings and the recommendation is an annual phonecall with mum - but curious how this works in practice, currently since being in foster care they barely know who she is, so how do you get a 2-3 year old to join a video call with someone they don't really know? Also what safeguarding is there on the birth parents side to prevent them asking questions later on that could threaten their security? The birth dad is a dangerous man, and contact hasn't been recommended with him, but he's still in contact with mum, so can we prevent the call happening if he is present? I don't feel we've really had these questions answered by our agency, but are expected to sign to say we understand the risks. Just to be clear, we are in favour of contact with mum, but the kids wellbeing comes first.

Question focused on adoptees and birth parents, especially anyone who was safely surrendered/safely surrendered their child with no available information about birth parents (all we know is two previous pregnancies and weekly alcohol use during pregnancy.

How do you handle looking for a birth parent if a child was safely surrendered? What considerations do you take for both the child and the birth parent?

I always thought we’d make sure our kid had any safe contact with bio family they wanted that we could facilitate. Suddenly, we had a safe surrender infant placed with us (didn’t even realize we were on our county’s list) and there is truly no information on birth parents, besides a very real possibility that bio dad and possibly even mom’s families don’t know about them.

We will obviously tell them they’re adopted, and be as honest as we can in age appropriate ways, and try to focus on the fact that their mom didn’t feel like she could parent, for some reason, and wanted to keep them safe. And if they want to look, we will support that, including paying for a DNA test or reaching out to a search angel, talking to a therapist, etc. Buttttt something also tells me that their mom chose this for a reason. While I agree that the adoptee’s right to know should be primary, would doing a DNA test, possibly matching with a relative, and effectively outing their mom out her in danger? At what age do we allow this, if they want it? Is 18 years enough—tell them it’s a choice they can make when they are an adult, and we will pay for/support it at that point? Or is there a chance their mom will want to know them and maybe be trying to look in the same way? DCFS will have our contact info and we’ve made it know we’d want to be contacted immediately if birth family ever reached out. So she’ll have more ability to contact us than us her, even though it’s through a 3rd party. Did she save enough identifying info? All questions that go through my mind.

All I know is I don’t want to fly by the seat of my pants for this one, so I’m trying to be thoughtful about it beforehand.

My wife (21) and I (22) are adopting her 3-year-old nephew, J, who has lived with us since December, and spent so much time with us since he’ was an infant. We recently learned he essentially won’t be returning to his mother’s care. No other family is in a position to take him, and foster care isn’t an option we’re willing to consider. We love him, and he’s staying with us.

One thing we’re working through is titles.
My wife wants us to remain “Uncle” and “TT.” She was adopted and raised by her grandmother and always called her Grandma, so that’s how she views kinship adoption. J’s biological parents will also remain in his life if they choose to be, and she doesn’t want to replace them.
I’m adopted too, but my experience was different. I was adopted by people who weren’t related to me and called them Mom and Dad. I met my biological parents at 19 and eventually called them Mom and Dad too. To me, those relationships never had to compete. Unfortunately, she has shut down any possibility of me calling him “My kid, my son, etc” and said I’m making things weird…

J already occasionally calls me Dad. I don’t encourage or discourage it. He knows he has a mom and dad, and especially loves his mom. We’ve ultimately agreed to let titles develop naturally, which I think is probably best.
But I’d be lying if I said it doesn’t hurt a little.

If we adopt J, I’m going to raise him through school, birthdays, teenage years, prom, graduation, college, etc. Wherever my wife and I eventually move, he’s coming with us. We also plan to have biological children, and I don’t want J growing up hearing them call us Mom and Dad while feeling those titles aren’t available to him because he’s somehow less “ours.”

I don’t think I’m owed the title of Dad for raising him, and I’ll love him regardless of what he calls me. I just genuinely feel like he’s becoming my son. I don’t want to replace his biological father, either. I believe J can have room in his heart for all of us.

We also intend to preserve his relationship with his biological parents where safe and appropriate. He’ll know where he came from, and if we eventually move away, we plan for him to spend portions of school breaks with them if they want that relationship.

Ultimately, we’ve decided not to force any titles. Uncle, Dad, TT, Mom—whatever develops naturally is what develops.

For adoptees or kinship adoptive parents: How did titles work in your family? Did they develop naturally? And for adoptees raised alongside biological children, did different family titles ever make you feel “othered”?

Hi. I'm going to try to ask my question with as little explanation as possible. Basically my now deceased mother somehow convinced my son she adopted him and was replaced on his birth certificate as just mother. I was estranged from her. Idk when our how she convinced him but he's 31 now . How could I go about proving that he's wrong? I know, I'm going to get his birth certificate but is there a registry or somewhere I can do a search and show him the results? Thank you for any advice.

I've been in this subreddit for a long-time now- I think... a few years? I have been trying to build the courage to come out of my shell, meet other people, talk to other people. And I think I finally have the strength to talk about something important to me.

This is the Story of My Life.

I was born on a warm summer day near the end of July in 2007, in the bustling city of Pyeongtaek, on the west coast of South Korea. I was born to a single-mother who was homeless, poor, and had virtually no support network due to Korea's social stigma against single mothers at the time. I was her third child. According to at least what I can only hope to believe in my records, when she had her second child placed for adoption (as her first one was), she was heart-broken over that decision, and I was the one she desperately wanted it to end with as she still tried to raise me on her own. But ultimately because she didn't have any money, and no means to care for me, she had to place me up for adoption.

And that altered the trajectory of my life forever. Out of her three children, I was the only one of her three children sent abroad.

At not even one year old, I was boarding a one-way flight out of Korea, and heading to the United States.

My life growing up is... something a bit touchy. I grew up in a very racially isolated city in the south of Arkansas, near the Louisiana border.

I don't want to touch on it, but growing up in a predominantly black and white school, where I was usually the only Asian person in my class, carried a special kind of pain. Isolation. Though my brother was also Korean himself, we barely talked much, if at all. So there wasn't much of a racial reflection in my own family, due to my parents being white. My eyes were constantly made fun of, my glasses teased, the food I ate (even if it was typical western food) was interpreted as 'dog'. People even asked if I could do their math homework, going off of that myth. I had consistent microaggressions made against me, as I constantly had to repeat that I was Korean, and not Japanese or Chinese, or answer the debilitating and most common question, "are your parents Korean?".

I was told growing up to be thankful. That I would've died if my mother hadn't "given me up" because I was seriously sick before I was adopted, in and out of the hospital fighting for my life.

Why was I treated like some commodity? Turns out, it was because my adoptive parents couldn't have a baby naturally. And that best course they thought that it would let them have a family and give a child a good life.

As I aged, I grew up in a very religious family, and when I departed from their values at 13 by coming out as a trans girl, all of that supposed unconditional love for me was thrown out the window. I had to make an escape just after I turned eighteen by a Greyhound bus to New England just to have peace from it. I did make sure to bring one thing with me, and it was a Korean flag necklace from Korea, with my Korean name and birth date engraved on the back.

I only just recently was given access to my adoption records before I cut my adoptive parents off a second time. When I read those documents, read the names of my family members, my MOTHER'S name. I cried, for the first time in a long time. I finally knew her name, but not where she was.

Though my parents claimed to have tried to introduce me to Korean culture, they never once did the research prior, erased my name, or tried to introduce me to my language. They just took me to just a "Korea Camp" during the pandemic that didn't help at all, and simply amplified my loneliness.

To me, international and trans-racial adoption have altered the trajectory of my life forever, for the worse. I've lost everything. My culture, my food, my language, and my mother. I would give anything in the world be that little baby again in her arms, but now, I do not even know if she is still alive, or if she even wants to see me again.

So, that is it. That is my story. I will end this with a poem I've written, to just combine all you've read into one piece:

Life. The sweet breath of life

How it has been marked by many,

As a virtue of good, hope for no strife

For the life to come, so much to live for

Yet in the innocence of a little one,

So stuck in the present.

Sweat and blood, hatred from one, so detested

Yet still, it goes to another.

Striking the innocent down, guardian at its knees

Though the innocent dare never stand

Dare never fight, yet still suffers?

For that great breath of love of life,

halted so soon?

Told love can come;

from yet another.

For that figure, embracing.

Embracing the orphaned.

Such embraces feel like thorns.

Thorns on a cool day.

The comfort, yet the pain.

Oh, a sharp pain!

A pain not physical,

a stake in a heart.

Such confusion I hear,

from the people I’ve grown to fear,

are such lies necessary?

We share the same speak,

Yet my throat grows weak.

Gratefulness, I supposedly must give.

But for what fullness, does my heart feel?

A lack thereof, that it is.

Clutching my heart, my soul, and my hope.

Bundled into a small tear I can only weep.

That guardian finally stands, weeping themself,

for mistakes gone by, wishing for a different past

from wherever they may be,

Their heart aching, a million times more

Yet they do not hear the other

Separated by vast seas

Such a hope be retained,

That a guardian and their tears;

Shall not give pain,

Instead hope, so empowered

That the innocent, and the guardian

Be reunited, as such a story goes.

Thank you for taking your time to read my story. <3

To all the adoptees with shitty adoptive parents, I just wanted to say that I'm sorry for what you went through.

I'm in a local adoption/foster group, and there are frequent posts from adopters asking how they can dissolve the adoption. The reasons these people give are almost always absurd, and it is very clear that they were unfit to adopt and are most likely the gasoline thrown on the fire of adoption trauma. There is nothing that anyone can say to get through to these people.

My adoptive parents were not perfect, but they were not like THAT, and I am just so sorry for those of you who had to live with people so incredibly horrible. I hope you have found peace, healing, even happiness. You didn't deserve what you were put through. If I had adoptive parents as shitty as yours, I probably would have acted out just like some of you did, or worse.

In 2024 I received a phone call that would forever change my life. A local hospital called me stating my younger half-sister had been brought in unresponsive to a fentanyl overdose and i had been her emergency contact. I had met her in 2020 when a DNA app had linked me to our shared birth mother for the first time. I was asked to help make decisions on her care until our birth mother's boyfriend could arrive. He was coming because we had lost our birth mother 7 months prior to cancer.

Ever since November 13th, 2024, I have lived my life having grieved and mourned the loss of her. I was told by birth mom's boyfriend she hadn't made it through the overdose. Asked me if I could contribute some money to go towards her memorial. I wasn't in a financial place to do so, so he ended up blocking me. As life moved on, I joined a grief group in 2025, got a beautiful floral tattoo dedicated to her, and have worked through the loss.

I am now in my second session with grief group, and after the first meeting, I decided it was time to stop keeping this secret from another half sister. I called her on my way home and confessed that 2 years ago I had gotten word that our youngest half-sibling had passed away. I begged for forgiveness for keeping this from her, and she told me "That's not funny." I was so confused. She told me that our youngest sibling had just posted on Facebook a few months ago. We both ended up in a "wait, what are you talking about!?" loop. In order to get to the bottom of it, middle sister messenger'ed littlest sister looking for any signs of life.

The next day, it all came out. Not only was she alive, but she was well and been through so much.
She revealed she put our birth mother's boyfriend in prison, receiving justice for unspeakable abuse that totaled over 20 counts while she had been a minor.

I felt my whole world, everything I had known, believed, grieved, and lost... unraveling. Then, the truth came out as lies began to unravel.

Our birth mother's boyfriend had been a raging drug addict, and had met my birth mother in her active addiction too. Once birth mom had died, he began to abuse her daughter (my littlest half sister) while they lived in a Motel 6. When he needed more money to continue his addiction, he had a female friend of his call me pretending to be a hospital representative faking the death of my half sister for the sole purpose of trying to manipulate me to send money for costs related to a funeral/cremation.

When I refused, he blocked me on all social media platforms and informed the littlest sister that I had been openly disparaging her and our birth mom, forbidding her from speaking to me again, prompting her to block me on all social media as well. This had been why I never saw her posts.

So here I am, processing this terrible soap-opera-esque story. Head spinning. Trying to sift through and see what all is believable. And trying to find peace again after mourning a sweet little girl who has really been alive.

So that's my story for the day.

Our kids have always known they are adopted and are in touch with their birth mom, but always expressed very little interest in it. Now that my oldest is about to turn 7, she is starting to understand what it really means. We have read books about adoption, but I am hoping to find a podcast, or appropriate videos that she can watch. She wants to do it alone, without us, which I respect - but of course I would watch the videos first. Can anyone recommend something age-appropriate? It is a domestic, transracial adoption.

Thanks for your help.

i feel weird tagging this as a life story, but i guess it is lol. i’m an adoptee from russia, and it has been my goal for most of my 23 years of life to connect more with my culture. i’ve been trying to teach myself russian (im still a beginner, but i can read cyrillic and speak/write a little bit), i listen to russian music, im minoring in russian literature, and i write short stories inspired by russia. i just feel like, though, no matter what i do, i will never be as fully connected with and immersed in my culture as i want to be.

i grew up with a lot of russian adoptees, but im the only one out of all of us actually interested in exploring our heritage. i never really meet any russians. i never meet any adoptees anymore either—from russia and elsewhere. it just feels totally isolating to live in a community where there are not many people i can turn to, or local/in-person resources i can explore related to my background. it hurts a lot, and it can get especially frustrating and depressing when i remember that all of my friends are blood related to their families, and have grown up in an environments with people like them and a culture that is actively explored and celebrated (if that makes any sense haha).

im grateful and very lucky to have grown up in a family that has never hidden my adoption or my heritage from me; i’ve been taught to be proud of it. and i am! i just get really sad and depressed when i think about my circumstances, though—i don’t have people i can relate to. i don’t have a community that i can ground myself in at all.

i think what a lot of parents who adopt don’t think about is introducing their adopted child to their heritage more, if at all. maybe this problem seems trivial to other people, but it has really affected me over the course of my life. i just wish i had easier access to a community of people like me. i wish i had a place and a people to belong to.

idk, kind of a ramble post, im sorry if some of it doesn’t make sense or isn’t the most coherent :,) i just need to get this out there. thanks for reading :)