I’m going with this. Both my family and the wife’s have had adoptions now and then going back at least three generations and that is how its always been treated. It has worked well for us (raising well adjusted people) and I wouldn’t change something that works.
A polite answer is always best, to be sure, but sometimes it is hard not to answer with a bit of intensity after being provoked.
As to the idea that “this hypothetical kid is never going to meet the person in question and will never have had a relationship with her”: that could just as easily be true of a biokid, but I don’t hear anyone asking whether or not the person is an actual grandparent to a biological offspring.
Instead of dismissing the concerns of members of adopted families, maybe you should be asking questions to try to better understand the experience.
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My situation is pretty complex, but I agree that you don’t treat an adopted child any differently than if they were your biological child.
My own mother died when I was a teenager. My dad married his current wife when I was well into adulthood and before any grandchildren were born. I’ve only ever called her Janet and never had any kind of mother-child type relationship with her.
I have one biological and one adopted child.
We call my stepmother GrandJan and when we talk about my own mother, I just call her “my mom”.
I agree with your statement in isolation, but maybe the right response, since we’re all about asking questions, is to acknowledge that perhaps there is some aspect of the adoptive experience that you don’t understand, and to ask if any adoptees/parents want to try to enlighten you as to what is bothersome.
Even though you didn’t ask, I’ll pretend you did, and offer you an example of why adoptive families can be sensitive to intimations that their families aren’t “real”: Quite often when the child of an important person makes the news because they did something scandalous, the fact they are adopted is mentioned - as if the scandal shouldn’t stick to the parent the way it would if a biokid had committed the crime/said the outrageous thing/whatever. Sometimes the child will be referred to multiple times in one article as “the adopted son of the senator” and so on.
Yet, when an adopted kid makes good, people never talk about them that way. When’s the last time you heard, “Bill Gates, an adopted person…” You don’t, because a person’s adopted status is generally only referred to when the press is negative.
It’s annoying. For better or worse, adopted families are just as real as any other family.
FWIW, I agree with you and think your bluntness should be taken as a well-meaning slap in the face.
Once you adopt a child, the default should be to treat them like a biological child. They will likely encounter plenty of reminders growing up about their status. They certainly don’t need their own parents serving up these reminders.
But that issue has nothing to do with the child being adopted. What’s insensitive is giving more importance to “adopted” than to “my kid”. You child is your child is your child is your child, whether they were brought by the stork, delivered by cesarean, found under a cabbage, created in a test tube or inherited from relatives who died in a car crash.
I say “birth” as in, “My son hasn’t met his birth father since he was 2.” Biological is more clinical sounding a word than I personally want to describe my family with to anyone, especially my son.
I always refer to my late father as MY dad, but my son is 6 and has some special needs. He struggles to understand family relationships among living people and I think trying to explain that my dad would have had a relationship to him if he had lived is just too abstract.
That’s all about my son’s comprehension and the fact that my dad is dead though. He has blood relatives on his mom’s side and adopted relatives on my side and currently has absolutely no conception of the possibility that one side is any more or less “real”. I hope that when he’s older and understands there are certain real differences (e.g. genetics), he still feels we’re all every bit as much his family.
Birth works well for the mother. Saying “Birth Grandmother” or “Birth Uncle” doesn’t come out so well. But it shouldn’t come up that much either.
If my parents were dead before I adopted or gave birth, I wouldn’t refer to them as the kid’s grandparents because they never played that role. I would refer to my mom or my father. But yes, this would be consistent were the child biological or adopted. (It’s convenient that parents were never interested in grandkids so I would never have had occasion to say “Your grandparents would have loved to have met you”. :p)
However, if I look at a family tree, I refer to “my great-great-great whatever” and I never knew them. The context matters.
If the “you” there was addressed to me as it appears to be in context, I really do not need it to be explained. My family includes an adopted child as well. I get it, trust me. And my answer to the question given earlier in the thread stands. Not sure that the op was not acknowledging that (s)he did not understand, more so (s)he did not know enough to know what was not understood. Ignorance is not malice and need not be responded to as such.
Mind you I have not always been perfect in that regard IRL myself … my very real daughter is adopted from China and my wife and I are both of Ashkenazi Jewish descent. Her not being our birth child is unavoidably fairly obvious. I was on vacation visiting in-laws in Florida (Gulf coast) on the beach with her when she was maybe three to four and a women comes up and asks where she’s from. Knowing what she was meaning I answered “Oh we’re from Chicago.” Which embarrassed the woman who in fact was curious because her daughter was in process of an international trans-racial adoption herself and was hoping to learn some about the process and thus to reduce her ignorance in advance of becoming a grandmother of an adopted child. Yes it is rude to come up to someone and ask such a question especially in front of the child. But she really did not know any better and my making her feel bad was uncalled for.
Malice deserves a metaphorical slap in the face. Simple ignorance from someone who has demonstrated no unwillingness to learn? IMHO no.
BTW “biological” also rubs me the wrong way even if I sometime use it. My older children are biological and my youngest is a machine perhaps?
How do I know that my daughter’s filial relationship with me is “real”? Because I can embarrass her so easily by making a Dad joke or dancing in front of her friends!
My father died before my children were born and yet he is called “Grandpa” because of the position in the family tree. He is my children’s grandfather because he was my father.
My mother is alive and we call her “Grandma.” I just can’t see a conversation where I would be telling a story about Grandma and my father.
I live in Taiwan and am enstranged from several of my siblings. So they don’t “play that role” of being involved aunts and uncles.
Yet when telling a story about when we were kids, they are “Uncle Albert,” “Aunt Betty,” etc.
It just doesn’t work I guess. It’s come up enough in my case but mostly when trying to explain things to people. People must come up with different ways to deal with those cases where the biological relatives of an adoptee have to be identified. You can use ‘birth’ for parents but other relatives of their parents don’t get mentioned as much and are often unknown (as even the birth parents may be).
Fair enough. Perhaps our legitimate perceptions differ somewhat, due to any number of variations in our experiences.
I do agree with you about the word “biological” but find myself using it anyway, both because “birth” does not always work as a substitute and because the term came on the scene long after I’d grown up.
I never refer to my daughter as my adopted daughter and it’s quite obvious she is. People do not refer to their biological children that way and to me there is no distinction. We are a family, she is my daughter, it doesn’t matter how it came to be. When she was younger we would be asked sometimes where is she from but that was the kindest of the questions. A lot of people have common sense and tact, then there’s the rest of the world 
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This.
I understand the question though, because being a parent or grandparent is sometimes about more than just biology - it’s about behaving as a grandparent. So for example the man my mother married when I was in my twenties will never be my father but, because my daughter has known him all her life and he’s always acted like a grandfather to her, he is her grandad. I think that’s common with stepfamilies created later in life. Your mother never had a chance to do the behavioural part of being a grandparent so I assume that’s where your question comes from. Really it’s the same as adoption - you don’t become the child’s parent by biology but by your actions.
Still, for the sake of the child you just go with the normal nomenclature. You are the child’s parent, ergo your parents are her grandparents and that’s that. If a will naming grandchildren ever came to light then your adopted child would count as much as the biological ones unless there was some specific clause preventing that. If there are laws against first cousin marriages then that usually applies to legally adopted children as well as biological children and that kinship goes back to the grandparents.
I understand disliking using the term biological, btw. I guess you could say genetic instead? Birth doesn’t really work for grandparents though and I’m not sure it works that well for fathers, either. I mean, with some adoptions the adoptive parent might have supported the mother through the pregnancy and been there at the birth while the father was absent, so which is the birth parent there? Birth mother works well because it’s used so much and because the birthmother did actually give birth to the child and nobody else did, but beyond that it gets trickier.
Speaking as an adoptive father…
Use whatever words sound simpleest and most natural. I find it easiest to refer you “Grandpa” than to “your Grandpa.”
Don’t overthink it. If an adopted child knows exactly who you mean by “Grandpa,” there’s no need for differentiation.
The only time to use nuance is if there’s an open adoption and a child gets to interact with multiple families. Then you might want to differentiate by using specific names for different grandparent (“Grandpa Joe and Grandma Betty” vs “Grandpa Ed and Grandma Sue”).
I have a cousin who is adopted, and converted to Judaism immediately after her adoption. Both her mother’s parents predeceased her adoption, and they were Holocaust survivors, but she now, after having been in the family for a substantial amount of time, identifies as the grandchild of survivors. She spent many years as a foster child, and she can identify with their (and he mother’s) displacement, if not the cloud of death hanging over them. It doesn’t matter that she never met them. I know people who are the biological grandchildren of Holocaust survivors they never met, who have this as part of their identity.
You get to “know” people in the family who predeceased you through pictures and stories other people tell. Any children the OP adopts will hear stories of her parents, and see pictures of her with her parents when she was a child, and those things will facilitate an identification as the grandchildren of those people.
I think there is no right or wrong answer here, it depends too much on a lot of things.
I can say that for myself, if you showed me a picture of a man i never met, and said That was your dad, he died a long time ago, you are not going to make me feel bad or left out.
I might feel bad for you.
He is dead, i never met him, he can’t be my grandpa, the connection just is not there.
I would probably find you pretending otherwise as annoying as i found grown ups trying to convince me of santa and the easter bunny or that the family friend who is of no relation is my Tante Ester.
Yea, i was a weird child i suppose, i’m sure i’m not the only one though.
For someone else though, that might be the totally wrong answer.
It could be devastating to them and make them feel excluded and pushed out, like they don’t belong anyplace.
So i think the right answer is going to vary widely on a per situation basis