Defining Adoption
adoption noun (taking child) https://dictionary.cambridge.org/us/dictionary/english/adoption
the act of legally taking a child to be taken care of as your own: https://www.dictionary.com/browse/adoption
The act or process of establishing a legal relationship between a child and a parent other than the child’s biological parent, thereby entrusting the designated adult with responsibility for raising the child:
Act of leaving one’s natural family and entering into the privileges and responsibilities of another…. The Greek word for adoption (huiothesia [uiJoqesiva]) means to “place as a son”.
https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/fictive
fictive kinship invented and not true or not existing
relating to writing that is about imaginary characters and events and not based on real people and facts
In cultural anthropology, ‘fictive kinship’ is a term for social bonds that are not based on blood or marriage, but are treated as familial connections. These relationships are formed through shared experiences, mutual support, and a sense of belonging. AI Overview
Most definitions for the cultural anthropological definition of fictive kinship include legal relationships, as adoptions would be, as on par with biological relationships. Yet other ‘fictive kinship’ definitions refer to adoption as a non-biological relationship for continuing lineage or to meet survival challenges.
Adoption Jessaca Leinaweaver Brown University 2018 https://www.anthroencyclopedia.com/entry/adoption
A social science discussion of the definition of adoption. I offer a patch work summary.
Because examining ‘adoption’ reveals the processes of social kinship, it offers us a direct route into understanding the social practices that are part of how all families come to be. … studying adoption has helped anthropologists to demonstrate that all kinship is adoptive. In other words, no matter whether blood ties are asserted or recognised in a particular relationship, that relationship requires upkeep, assent, and intentional or matter-of-fact fostering. As Émile Durkheim wrote more than a century ago, kinship is ‘a social bond or it is nothing’ … [As for the term] ‘fictive kinship’ (a term that has been part of anthropological usage at least since the nineteenth century. ‘All kinship’, Weston says, ‘is in some sense fictional’. … By itself, as Durkheim proposes, birth is not sufficient to establish belonging to kin: ‘kin work’ is required. [Puts me in mind of the idea that there is ‘no baby without a parent’.]
… Adoption is, I suggest, the purposeful taking on of a kinship role, responsibility, or duty vis-à-vis another person. … a man [referring to] a child he had only recently brought into his household, ‘I am going to be his father…Aren’t I feeding him right now?’… Legal adoption is a different story, though of course legal adoption need not preclude the feeding, raising, and nurturing of a child. … [It includes] implications of inheritance, permanent affiliation, and rights … ‘the right to inherit wealth [is made] effective through a right to care and be cared for’
In the contemporary West, adoption is a process that sometimes uncomfortably entangles child welfare services on one end (the removal of children from birth families that are found to be unsuitable) and the desire for ‘social progeny’ … Seligmann gracefully demonstrates how many parents’ emphasis on metaphysical connections [the God-given ‘forever child’] can preclude a full-on examination of geopolitical inequalities that make international adoption possible… [Like the adoptee who asked why couldn’t God have just helped my biological family?] …
Make Me a Mother: a memoir
Susanne Antonetta WW Norton, 2014, 16-20
Susanne Antonetta defines Adoption as “a process of choice” “to take on someone or something” as when “two biologically unrelated people become the legal parents of a child”; most often these biologically unconnected people are people who may be entirely unconnected to the child’s biological family but these people may also be those who may be connected to the biological family as step-parents or other family members or even simply donors of an egg.
Thicker than blood: adoptive parenting in the modern world
Marion Crook Arsenal Pulp Press, 2016, 82
Some parents deny there is any difference between adopted and biological children. This attitude prevents exploration of possible differences and creates problems in the future. I agree there is no difference in our ability to love our adopted children or for them to love us, but there are differences in how they live in the world One difference is their ability to get information about themselves. …. But adoptees have a huge need to know about their birth families, …
Parenting an Adopted Child, 2nd ed. Kathy Lancaster, PhD. Barrons Educational Series Inc., 2009, 13
This entire book is essentially a definition of adoption.
To help our children successfully adapt, we must acknowledge the differences between adoptive and biological families and take positive steps to incorporate adoption education into our family system.
Journey of the Adopted Self: a quest for wholeness Betty Jean Lifton Basic Books, 1994, 11,146-147
The adopted child is always accompanied by the ghost of the child he might have been had he stayed with his birth mother and by the ghost of the fantasy child his adoptive parents might have had. He is also accompanied by the ghost of the birth mother, from whom he has never completely disconnected, and the ghost of the birth father, hidden behind her.
The adoptive mother and father are accompanied by the ghost of the perfect biological child they might have had, who walks beside the adopted child who is taking its place.
The birth mother (and father, to a lesser extent) is accompanied by a retinue of ghosts. The ghost of the baby she gave up. The ghost of her lost lover, whom she connects with the baby. The ghost of the mother she might have been and the ghosts of the baby’s adoptive parents.
And here writing of attempts to reconnect with the biological family: The old reality no longer holds. It is, as one adoptee described it, like being in a white space in which the adoptive family and birth family cancel each other out. One’s identity is obliterated. Nothing will ever be the same again……As the poet Anna Akhmatova said in another context, there is no glue to put lives together at the place they have been cut off.
Lost & Found: the adoption experience, 3rd ed. Betty Jean Lifton The University of Michigan Press, 2009, 6,14,186
Betty Jean Lifton asks the question: What importance is there to the blood tie? How profound is the folk saying ” blood is thicker than water”? What happens to people when they are cut off from their blood connections?
…some of our state adoption statutes:
Custody may be awarded for a temporary duration but a degree of adoption severs forever every part of the parent and child relationship; severs the child entirely from its own family tree and engrafts it upon that of another. For all legal and practical purposes a child is the same as dead to its parents.
In his classic book, Shared Fate, sociologist David Kirk, himself an adoptive father, speaks of the reluctance of adopters to admit their marginality in a society where kinship is measured by blood relationship….
No matter how close or antagonistic blood relatives are, they are secure in their biological tie. The very certainty of their relatedness gives them a sense of belonging that they take as much for granted as the air they breathe. But deep in the psyche of both adoptees and adoptive parents is the knowledge that “they’re not mine”.
Somebody’s Child: stories about adoption Ed. by Bruce Gillespie and Lynne Van Luven Touchwood, 2011, 156
I bristled when others referred to my biological parents as my “real parents”; I drew a clear line between love and blood, and put the emphasis on the former. But that was before I met my only full sister and my closest biological relative. While looking at her was not exactly like looking in a mirror, I could not deny how much it meant to finally meet someone who was a blood connection.
The Not Good Enough Mother Sharon Lamb Beacon Press, 2019, 141
“Real” of course is the wrong word. The real parent is the one who raised you…. There are many configurations of “real” parents in the world, from grandparents, aunts and uncles, adoptive parents, and the parents who raise you to chosen parents who are mentors, coaches, teacher, neighbors. The “real” parent is the one who wakes up at night and worries about you.
Who is a Worthy Mother?: an intimate history of adoption Rebecca Wellington The University of Oklahoma Press, 2024, 5, 6, 16, 30-31, 93, 94, 145, 177,178
…From a macro view, adoption is the lens through which we can see in stark relief how our nation differentially values humans. The whole project of adoption is contingent on making value judgments about a pregnancy – about who is a worthy mother and who is a worthy baby. [Rebecca Wellington’s sister] knew what it was like to carry around the shame of adoption… We had both spent our lives finding different ways to cover over and disguise the scarlet A of adoption that we carried on our chests.
…As a young adult, I took [my adopted family history] on as my own, anchoring myself to them to root my past and add meaning to why I’m here and what I’m supposed to with this life I have. For a long time, this was how I attempted to fill my identity: with stories of people I’ve known and known of but to whom I’m actually not physically or biologically connected.
The saying that blood is thicker than water continues to shape and dominate the American psyche in deeply influential, if not subconscious, ways…. The false assumption of what an ideal family should look like negates the experiences of children and guardians living outside a two-parent, heteronormative, biological ideal.
Susan Harness (in Bitterroot: a Salish memoir of transracial adoption, 2018) synthesizes the consequences of adoption” “Adoption, by the very act, is defined by tragedy; death, the inability to be a parent (as in the case of my birth mother) and, in my case, the inability to be a whole and complete child”.
Rebecca Walker, after giving birth to her daughter, imaged how her own birth mother must have experienced Walker’s birth. “…adoption is traumatic. And when that adoption is not a choice, made deliberately and freely by the birth mother, the trauma can be unfathomable …. I (Rebecca Walker) wasn’t touched or held by my birth mother during those first two days of life. My birth mother suffered through a long hard labor and then walked out of the hospital alone…. Giving me up must have been the hardest thing she ever had to do. My was birth not a celebration. It was traumatic.
In her memoir detailing her search for her birth family, Katrina Maxtone-Graham describes adoption as an “amputation from history.”
…In the conclusion of American Baby, Gabrielle Glaser writes: Adoptive parents … must also understand that adoption always equates to loss for the adoptee. People who are adopted are often told that they are “lucky” … But there is no dispute that their families love them, and in that sense, of course, they are lucky. But love and devotion can only go so far in annulling loss, even if — especially if — it is not verbalized. So often in adoption, each party carries grief…. We are all a combination of nature and nurture.
Adopting older children: a practical guide to adopting and parenting children over age four Stephanie Bosco-Ruggiero, MA, Gloria Russo Wassell, MS, LMHC and Victor Groza, PhD New Horizon Press, 2014, 70
…some people close to you may not consider adoptive families, especially families that have brought an older child into their lives, “real” families.
The Adult Attachment Projective Picture System: attachment theory and assessment in adults Carol George, Malcolm L. West The Guilford Press, 2012, 21,22
Bowlby’s theory is that the child actively uses what he or she anticipates about the consequences of attachment events to construct a model of the self as worthy of seeking and receiving care and protection from attachment figures. When, as with a rejecting or inconsistently responsive caregiver, the relationship is disturbed, the child will likely experience him- or herself as incompetent (at least in the sphere of attachment) and unlovable. By contrast, when events have led the child to anticipate the caregiver’s availability, understanding and responsiveness, the child will consequently experience him or herself as competent and valuable. In short, Bowlby emphasizes that the empathic responsiveness of the caregiver to the child’s attachment behaviors integrates or fragments the working model of the self.
Barbara Tizard 1st January 2010 https://thetcj.org/child-care-history-policy/adoption-a-second-chance-by-barbara-tizard
In fact, adoption had always performed one service for children because, until the 1989 Children Act, any child born out of wedlock was illegitimate; so adoption within a family, which she mentions in Chapter 1, was a way of legitimising illegitimate children….
Adoption has ceased to be a service for childless couples and has become a form of child care.
Thinking Critically About Child Development: examining myths & misunderstandings, 3rd ed. Jean Mercer Sage Publications, 2016, 330, 246-248
Adoption alone does not cause social and emotional problems, although some problems may exist before adoption.
Adoption is Both Elena S. Hall Elena Hall, 2021
Adoption is happy and adoption is sad. It can make my heart hurt or make it feel glad.