This is a question I have always had about people that adopt children who are not in anyway related to them, but whenever I try to ask it, I get hysterics. Why is it necessary to maintain the fiction that the adopters gave birth to the children by raising them to call their adopters mother and father (or other parental names)? It never made sense to me, if adoption is such a good and noble thing, that the relationship between the child and caregiver had to be hidden. It also seemed rather insulting to people who were guardians or godparents and raising children.
Well of course you get hysterics. When you adopt a child, that makes it–ta daaaa–your child. What is it supposed to call its parents, if not Mom and Dad?
What would you like the little outcast to call them, anyway? Master and Mistress? The Beneficent Ones Who Took Me In?
I would also add that the relationship is rarely hidden. You will get things like “Soandso is the adopted son of Senator Smith.” This will happen whether Soandso had just been sentence to jail or has won the Nobel Prize.
I know plenty of kids that call their adopters either godparents (to distinguish them from their biological parents) or Auntie and Uncle to explain that they are not living with the people who gave birth to them, but have a family relationship to them. My sister raised four of our distant cousins (she was their legal guardian). They called her Cousin because she wasn’t their mother, but it was always a title of respect.
In my own ideolect, “mom” means primary female caregiver, and does not mean biological mother. So the practice of raising adopted kids to call their primary female caregivers “mom” does not strike me as strange at all.
I suspect my ideolect matches almost all native English speakers’, but I’ve been wrong about that before.
I’m adopted and I’ll give you a straight answer, even though I think your question is somewhat disingenuous.
It’s because children don’t know or understand the distinction between being a birth child and being an adopted child. All they know is who they are bonded to, and who loves and cares for them. Even if they know they are adopted, as I always have, this is still true. Children can’t understand abstract concepts like adoption, but they respond to the care of a parent the same way a birth child would. It would make zero sense to me, for instance, for me to call my parents one thing, and my siblings who are not adopted to call them something else, because my relationship with my parents is essentially the same as the one that my siblings have with my parents. That’s not a fiction, it’s a fact.
Incidentally, I don’t consider adoption to be necessarily a “good and noble thing.” It’s simply…a thing. It’s an institution in which the adoptive parent and the adopted child each benefit. Any parent who is adopting a child in order to be good and noble is doing it wrong, in my opinion.
I suspect that the “hysterics” are the result of you shaping the argument in a way that is both hostile and silly. Adoption, by its definition, means to take as one’s own child. That is what the word has always meant. It means that the adoptive parent has all the responsibilities of a birth parent, so why invent a new term of address for the child to use in the home?
Beyond that, of course, is your extremely curious claim that there is some sort of fiction involved. There are cases where parents “hide” the fact of an adoption, but they are pretty rare. Most adopted people are raised knowing that they have been adopted.
Why would you see a need to suddenly change a practice that is pretty universal across hundreds of cultures across thousands of years?
I’d be curious as to what you consider “plenty” inasmuch as I know none.
However, the scenario you then lay out is a particular form in which a somewhat near relative whose relationship to the children is already established then takes on a new role. In that situation, I could see what you describe happening. However, far more adoptions are either of babies or among strangers, so that there is no prior relationship to disentangle in order to establish the new relationship and there is no need to employ new words to describe the situation.
Obviously, because the relationship is that of parent and child. Not godparent, auntie, cousin, nanny, etc. I don’t want my children calling me by my first name. I want them to call me by what I am to them, their parent. Would you have a mother whose child was gestated in a surrogate call her someone else, too? Or a father whose child was from a sperm donor?
I have a great deal of difficulty believing the OP is completely sincere. The answer to the question in the title of the thread is so chimp-obvious that it’s hard to believe it’s a straightforward, honest question.
Forgot to add this to my earlier post, and it was relevant because it explains why I think your question is disingenuous.
People ususally adopt because they want to be parents. So, it follows that they want to also be treated as parents by their children. I’d be very surprised if you didn’t realize this without having to be told.
I think it’s as simple as that’s their parents. And like Hilarity asks, why would you call them anything else but mom and dad?
Actually, the kind of adoption in which people take a completely unrelated child and make the child legally “theirs” is NOT pretty universal across hundreds of cultures across thousands of years. In fact, it’s rather rare. Throughout history, children were cared for and raised by people other than those who gave birth to them, but rarely was the biological history altered.
Calling adoptive parents “mom”, “dad”, “parents”, or what have you is not altering biological history. These words have other senses than merely the biological ones, as illustrated by the very phenomenon you are describing.
A friend of mine adopted her sister’s daughter (that is, her biological niece) at age 5 or so, and the girl called my friend “Mom” from that day forward. (The biological mother is still alive and part of the family; she was just unable to raise a child.)
That oughta pop a blood vessel for the OP.
I always thought people adopted because they sincerely cared about the well-being of a child who needs someone to take care of it. I don’t understand why their simple act of wanting to father a child or gestage anf give birth somehow translates into the right to claim they have done those activities. I have a a friend who wants to be a Duchess. Now of course, she can call herself all she wants, but that doesn’t mean she has a noble rank.
Adoptive parents have been referred to as parents across cultures and years. Paul, in the Epistle to Romans, says that our adoption by God allows us to call Him Daddy (Abba). Regardless of anyone’s view of that particular epistle, it is pretty clear evidence that Paul was calling upon a recognizable phenomenon in his culture.
I have no idea what you are claiming with your assertion that “biological history [was] altered.” You are taliking about forms of address, not biology. In your apparent scenario, birth and adopted children in the same family would wind up using different words to recognize the same relationship–a pretty clear way to cause dissension in the home. I can’t imagine running around referring to an adopted kid as “my adopted son,” making sure that everyone to whom I talked was told that the child was an “outsider.”
Do you actually think that gestating and giving birth has a whole hill of beans to do with being a parent?
I don’t think that’s typically the predominant reason. People USUALLY adopt children because they can’t have their own biological children, but they want to be parents. They, of course, sincerely care about the well-being of the child who needs someone to take care of it, but that is true of most parents, whether their children are adopted or biological.
You’re making the assumption that gestating and giving birth to a child is the definition of being a parent.
The “right to claim” biological parentage?
I am bewginning to get the strong impression that you are just here to yank our collective chain. You have not offered a single coherent explanation for your position and your accusations of imputed motives do not even make sense.
Yeah, now that you put it like that, never once has my mother claimed that she gestated and gave birth to me. I would think it mighty strange if she had, and perhaps a trip to a psychiatrist might be in order.