Another point that should be made is in a circumstance where a child has an existing relationship with a birth mother, but someone else is now the adoptive parent, foster parent, step parent, or legal guardian, they usually DON’T have the child call them mom. Typically, in such a circumstance, the birth mother is still called mom, and the “new mother” is called by her first name.
Adopted means the children are not living with people who are their biological parents. I don’t think adopted children have quite the blood obligations that biological children have. After all the female adopter didn’t risk her life for them to be brought into the world in the manner that a biological mother does in childbirth. (That’s the reason my mother is the only human being I would ever donate a kidney to).
Non family members who have any signficant contact with the child or the parents where issues of trust are involved should have this information to evaluate their relationship with the individuals.
I cannot imagine a situation short of a nuclear holocaust in which the biological ties of a child are so completely severed as to be non-existent. In such a case, the child should be raised among people of his or her own background (race, ethnicity, religion, etc.) and taught that there is nothing wrong with being an orphan. It just something that happens.
I’m curious what obligations each group has. Should adopted children be encouraged to murder their adoptive parents in their sleep perhaps? Or maybe just spit on them and abandon them in their old age?
Should we assume that all adopted children would do that and act accordingly?
…Apparently we do assume that adopted children are psychopaths, because their adopted status affects whether we trust them or not.
There’s nothing wrong with being adopted - you’re merely an untrustable psychopath! Or more untrustable than a proper child, anyway.
You may be surprised to learn that others don’t revile adopted children in this manner.
Born and raised the United States, lived fifteen years in the former Yugoslavia, and currently back in the United States. Raising children who are not your biological spawn is actually quite common in my family and culture and children are treated quite well. Frequently, better than the ones living with their biological parents. However, mother means only one thing: the woman whose vagina the child come from and father: means the persumable sperm-provider (because let’s face it before DNA testing it was only a persumption). Having the biological parentage commonly know becomes important when people start thinking about marriage (like does epilepsy run in the family for example) or other partnerships where you really need to consider all factors like how much of personality is genetic (such as some types of risk taking and compulsive behavior) and how much is nurture.
Well, in that case, I can see why you would want adoptive parents to be distinguished from biological parents by a different form of address.
However, I can see no shred of a logical reason why anybody else should agree with your, um, idiosyncratic views on the obligations of children.
Neither does a biological father. Why any sane person should consider this a criterion for evaluating the extent of filial obligation is beyond me.
This is getting sillier by the minute. As a teacher, I have “significant contact” all the time with students who talk to me about their parents. Why on earth should I care whether the parent in question actually went through labor with the child or not?
My daughter’s best friend was adopted from China. Her mother is white. Her father is black. There are no “blood ties”, but they’re a lovely, loving family.
I’m not sure why you’d want to tie parenthood to genetics. The people who deserve the title “mom” and “dad” are the person who raise the child, not the people whose involvement with the child ends at the moment of birth. (Or conception.)
I had a conservation with the young woman the client has adopted this afternoon and she has long suspected her adopter would try to use withdrawing financial support as a means of controlling her, so she is at least prepared. As for as the client, I seriously think ignoring her is the best solution after the rambling, vile conversation I had with her recently where the money blackmail was mentioned. I think it’s so sad that this woman is throwing away the possibility of a loving relationship with a child she raised all because of her extreme paranoia that someone else might get called mommy.
Yes, it is. However, it seems absolutely absurd to overreact to this situation to the extent of proposing that no adoptive mother should ever be called “mommy”. Talk about throwing the baby out with the bathwater, as it were.
I don’t get why this matters, especially to you. Genetic ties wouldn’t prevent you from killing a child, you’ve said. So why are these genetic ties important enough to keep a kid parentless but not important enough to keep from killing him?
There has been a notable lack of “hysterics” in this thread, despite the offensive attitude dispayed in the OP and in subsequent posts.
Rather, there has been a willful effort by ZPG Zealot to portray the rest of the world as “wrong” while insisting that we all adopt her own ideolect* for our conversations. Her explanations do not even appear to have any basis beyond her personal emotional reactions to certain words.
It is not a matter of what “others would wish to describe their own personal relationship with their children.” It is a matter of her both insisting that we all change language as it exists and declaring that we are all “wrong” to employ it as it exists while steadfastly refusing to provide any reason to do so.
Your attempt to portray the situation as merely insecure people defending their emotional baggage is both inaccurate and unhelpful.
And it is pretty clearly an ideolect. There has been speculation that she comes from a culture with different values for some words, but we have had numerous posters from Eastern Europe and from among the Rom over the years and this is the first time this issue has ever come up, so I am not persuaded that it is cultural.
I’m biased, being an adoptive parent. I’m also a bio parent. In my children’s lives they have any number of “mothers.”
My son has, in addition to me, a birth mother and a foster mother. Neither he remembers. But both who bear the title “mother.”
My kids have three grandmothers.
They have godmothers, den mothers and cookie moms. They have friends whose mothers act as “second moms” to them, keeping them for weekends and treating them like their own family.
I have my own mother in law in addition to my mother, and the mothers of several friends who are addressed as “mom” by many people who they neither gave birth to.
Mom (or mother) is a title that gets used for many purposes.
Likewise, I know people who call their parents by their first names. I know people who were raised by relatives other than their birthparents - some of whom call these relatives mom and some who call them “Aunt” or “Grandmother” or whatever their biological title is.
My grandmother - born during WWII had a sister who was a cousin. That was not generally know outside the family, and the adoptive child called my great grandmother “mother.”
My own father was adopted - his birthmother raised him, but along with his adoptive father.
My mother had a step mother. My grandmother. Her aunt.
I have a girlfriend who has three mothers - her mother and two step mothers (both divorced from her father, both still involved in her life).
The title isn’t exclusive and can mean a wide variety of things.
The poster you’re responding to wasn’t talking about hysterics in the thread, rather, s/he was referring to the “hysterical” reactions the OP says s/he gets IRL when she discusses this issue with people. The poster you’re responding to is explaining to the OP that s/he gets these “hysterical reactions” because she’s using language that is perfectly acceptable in her own ideolect, yet perfectly offensive in standard usage. That’s pretty close to what you’re saying too, idn’it?
OK, that’s you. But who are you to decide what someone else’s familial obligations are? And what difference does the risks involved in bearing children matter? I’ve given birth to two kids, and at no time during the pregnancies and deliveries was my life ever in danger. Does that mean my kids have less obligation to me?
Can you explain this a little more? Whose sense of trust is at issue here? How could it possibly affect a third party’s relationship with the individuals? My adoption has no bearing whatsoever on my relationship with my teachers, friends, or anyone else, and why should it?
Can you explain WHY a child should be raised among people of his or her own background?
Sorry not to respond sooner - I was threatening my children with death if they failed to call me “daddy”, and all my daughter did was roll her eyes and tell me to switch to decaf.
You are a better adoptive parent than I am…having rescued my indentured servant from a miserable life, I feel that I should be addressed as “Mistress” and had him scrub the bathroom this morning with his toothbrush while my spoiled biological child watched and laughed at him and called me Mommy.
I remind my children all the time that life isn’t fair.