Seeking personal advice: How Much To Tell Kids About Adoption Details

In My Humble Opinion
1

Normally, I am not at all in the habit of sharing family secrets or squabbles with strangers (and let’s face it, even people I’ve “known” here for years are pretty much strangers to me). But I need some fresh perspectives, so I’ll take a chance and share my situation. This situation has led to some serious arguments between my wife and me, and there are several different angles to consider here. You may think I’m completely wrong about everything, you may think she’s right about everything, or you may think we’re each right about different parts of the problem.

Before I start, it’s worth noting that, normally, my wife is far more liberal and open-minded than I am.

As some of you already know, I have an adopted 11 year old son. He’s always known that he’s adopted, but never seemed to care much. He hardly ever asked any questions about his biological family, until pretty recently.

When my son asks me questions about ANYTHING, I try to answer them all straightforwardly and accurately. I don’t keep many secrets from him. If anything, I may bore him by telling him more than he really wanted to know. (my wife says that, if someone asks me what time it is, I’ll give them a lecture on the history of time, and she’s not entirely wrong about that). And there’s no telling when or where he’ll decide to ask a difficult or uncomfortable question. It might be in the bathtub, it might be in the back seat of the car on the way to school, wherever.

Well, about two months ago, my son started asking me questions about his bio family- he asked if he had any brothers or sisters (he does- a sister and two brothers) and why his mother gave him up. I told him the situation honestly, but left out an important detail, hoping he wouldn’t ask about it. But he did ask- he wanted to know why his bio father wasn’t with his bio mother. I elected to tell him the truth: that his bio father had done some very bad things, including beating up his mother. I hoped that answer wouldn’t hurt him or sadden him, and apparently it didn’t. His questions had been answered, his curiosity was satisfied for the moment, and he moved on to other topics (Hot Wheels, roller blading, etc.).

Now, I didn’t think about this much for several weeks, since he hasn’t raised the issue again. But weeks later, I told my wife about the questions he’d asked and the conversation we had. My wife was livid, for several reasons. In no special order, here are the things she was angry about:

  1. She felt I told him too much, that an 11 year old would have been content with a shorter, less detailed version of events, and that he didn’t need to know his bio father was abusive.

  2. She worries that our son will personalize and internalize this information in a negative way- that he may think, “My father was a bad man, so I’m going to be a bad person too.”

  3. In any case, I had no business answering his questions without her being present- that I should have conferred with her first, so we could formulate a family talk we could all have together.

  4. She was outraged that I hadn’t told her about such an important conversation until weeks later.
    At this stage, I’d just like to hear some opinions on all the angles.

Was I wrong to tell my son so much of the truth? Should I have told him a sanitized story now and told him the more unpleasant details when he was older and a little more mature?

Can telling him unpleasant truths about his father lead him to think he himself is destined to be the same kind of man?

Was I wrong to answer such questions on the spot, without bringing her into the conversation?

You don’t have to tell me the last part. I WAS a jerk not to tell her sooner about important questions he raises, about adoption or any other hot button issue. That wasn’t secrecy or dishonesty on my part- just my standard forgetfulness and cluelessness.

2

Sorry, but I have to side with your wife on the bulk of this, although, both of you have responsibility for (I’m assuming) not discussing exactly how to handle these questions BEFORE they were asked. That’s a conversation you should have had and come to agreement on.

Your son is still young. He may seem mature to you now, because you are comparing him to what he was before. Once he gets older, you’ll likely look back and go “wow, he was only 11, he was still so young.” I don’t think he will benefit from having too many details at this age.
But that’s not my decision- it’s yours and YOUR WIFE’s decision to decide together what to tell him and when.

You should have let your wife in on the conversation right after it happened so that she would be prepared if your son also approached her on the same subject and asked additional questions given the new information he now possessed.

3

I was adopted (as were all the kids in my family); there was never a question that my folks didn’t answer openly and honestly from the very beginning. My personal opinion is that you and your wife should have made the decision to answer his questions honestly from the very beginning, which would save you both from having to worry about “clearing” the info from the other parent.

I understand that your wife is upset, but you’d be surprised as to what kids can understand, process, then move on. I think her fears are unfounded, and I think you did fine-I really doubt that he’ll think he will turn out bad. If he every brings it up again, you can tell him that doing awful things is not genetic, and that he’s responsible for his own actions.

So:
-You weren’t wrong to tell him the truth-he’s old enough to understand that people fight.
-I don’t know if he’ll think that he will follow his bio father’s path, but you can tell him that he won’t, and that you are proud of the person he is becoming, that he will become the type of grownup he wants to be, etc.
-I don’t think you were wrong to answer on the spot if you and your wife never agreed that you had to clear info with the other person; if you had an agreement, bad on you.

4

Basically, everything that CGav8r said.

I think it does depends on the kid (although I do think that one should be as open as possible given what the kid can handle).

My kid is pretty analytical and not overly imaginative/anxious, so I could imagine her at age 11 being totally okay with processing something like “Bio-dad beat up bio-mom and that’s why they’re not together, because Beating Up People Is Bad.” It wouldn’t even occur to her to worry about whether she might grow up to beat up people, or whatever; she’d accept it and move on, or if it crossed her mind, she might mention it off-hand.

My friend’s kid is much more imaginative and anxious, and I’d worry a lot more about her reaction to that kind of thing; in her case, I’d want to be more proactive about having the conversation that biology isn’t destiny, she is responsible for her own decisions, etc.

But mostly I think your wife is overreacting. Your son wanted information and you gave it to him, and it doesn’t seem like it’s bothered him that much. And if it does bother him, he knows that you’ll answer him truthfully if he has more questions in the future. So – win.

I actually think that the way you did it was better than the way your wife proposed to do it. It sounds like you answered him matter-of-factly, which would have reassured him that it wasn’t really a big deal, just a fact of life – “this is how it happened.” I would think that holding a big Family Meeting and making a Big Deal out of Jointly Answering Questions would be much more likely to trigger anxiety – OMG, mom and dad think this is Such a Big Deal we have to sit down and have a Talk!! Should I be worried about this?!

Because really, it’s not a big deal. His bio-dad was not the greatest guy, it sounds like. So, guy’s not in his life or his mom’s. Moving on.

But yeah, what CGav84 said about having a decision about answering questions that would avoid having to clear stuff with the other parent.

5

I think what you did was correct. As a kid, I wished my parents would have been more open about my adoption circumstances, as I ended up creating fairy tales about my bioparents which were later broken by the reality of the situation.

I do agree you and your wife should have discussed beforehand what all you were going to release to him, but too late on that. All you can do now is reassure him biology alone doesn’t make him who he is and will be.

6

Probably a conversation you should have had with your wife early on, but I think you did fine.

Here’s a possible approach going forward: you apologize to your wife for not having this conversation with her before answering your son’s questions. Then you start a conversation about other possibly touchy information you may or may not want to share with your son, and try to cover as much as possible so you both know what the expectation is.

7

It’s IMO one of those situations where there is no wrong answer, because there is no right answer.

I dealt with questions from my (two adopted) children much as you did - give them all the information I had as soon as they asked. They didn’t ask, much, maybe because the details were sketchy and because I tried my best to answer any question as accurately as I could. Not just about adoption, any question.

Eleven does not seem to me to be too young to hear that he was adopted because his birth father was abusive (among other reasons). You know him better than I do, obviously, but I always figured if they were old enough to be curious they were old enough to receive an explanation.

As far as the worry that he will grow up to be abusive because his bio-father was abusive - I doubt it. Children tend to model the behavior they grew up witnessing, and that would be the behavior your son witnessed between your wife and you. It depends, I suppose, on how old he was when he was adopted. (Both mine were infants - in fact two days ago was my daughter’s 22nd anniversary of arrival, and she is 23. My son was not yet six months old when he came to us.)

insert several paragraphs of long-winded bragging about my daughter who is working full-time in her degree field after graduating with honors, and my son being back in college and getting straight A’s in his courses, including accounting and economics…

It would not have occurred to me either to talk to my wife about his asking about his birth family - not because I am clueless (I am, but that’s not the reason) but because my wife and I are both much more likely to over-explain than to treat the question as evidence of something wrong, or a crisis point, or something like that. There are lots of adoptions in my family, intra- and inter-racial both. And it is just one of those things about our family.

I would advise that, if your son asks you again, answer him again and let your wife know about it. I don’t think you did anything wrong, but I don’t think she did anything wrong either.

There will be more questions to come. One that arose in my family was what the genetic inheritance of my adopted brother-in-law would be like - good or bad. Two of his children are teachers (one in China and the other in kindergarten) and the other plays in the NFL, so his genes were probably pretty good.

My prayers are with you.

Regards,
Shodan

8

I think your wife needs to take a deep breath and calm down a little.

Being open is about not having to confer, which could easily be interpreted as secretive, by an 11yr old. Not being fully honest is the kind of thing children are exceptional at sensing. And often misinterpreting. Mentioning it to the wife a bit earlier would have been prudent but that’s hindsight.

If you presented it as casually to him, as you just have to us, I think you’re fine. If it’s not upsetting information to you, he’ll take it on board in the same sense. Your wife’s over concern however will instantly be telling him that this information carries some other message as well. That it matters somehow and must be significant.

Lastly, it was but a few lines of conversation. Really only the opening phases of a conversation that, by necessity, will continue over decades. So you’re both going to get another swing at this, you should relax. I can’t think of anything better than your child getting two different takes on his bio parents. It could prove very helpful for him to view two nuanced responses, as he finds his own take on things.

Sounds like you’re doing a great job! Keep up the good work!

9

One thing I was already thinking, and is confirmed here, is that my wife and I should have had a plan for talking about these issues.

My response to the immeiate question may or may not have been right, but I definitely shouldn’t have been winging it.

I’m appreciating all answers so far, including those that say I was out of line. I’m not just looking for people to reassure me I was right.

10

The main thing you and your wife both did wrong is not having the conversation about this wayyy before the topic was likely to come up. You need to stay ahead of this stuff. There are a few complicated things in our family that our five-year-old is gonna ask about soon, and my husband and I have discussed them*, so when she comes out with the questions at awkward times, we’ll have answers that we’re both good with.

  1. I think you were right to tell him, assuming you didn’t go into gory details. A five-year-old, no. But an eleven-year-old is old enough to deal with those core facts. If he’s asking about it, he deserves the answer.

  2. Your wife is right, he might worry about that, depending on what kind of person he is. You guys need to make it clear that his behaviour and his life are totally separate from his father’s.

  3. You were dead right on this one. Kids pick their moments to ask about this kind of thing - moments when they feel comfortable dealing with it - and you really need to roll with that, like you did, even if it’s not the moment you’d have chosen. If you postpone the question to a Big Family Meeting, you’re making it into a much bigger deal, and the kid will be much less comfortable about asking the next time he has a question - which you really don’t want. Yes, you should have discussed the answers with your wife - but again, the time to do that is before the question gets asked, not after.

  4. She’s right. You already know that.

*Well, mostly. I recently found myself trying to explain decomposition, with specific reference to a close relative, at 7.15am, while making a school lunch and getting breakfast into a toddler, before I had had my coffee. That one we hadn’t seen coming.

11

The father of an adoptive daughter here.

In our case this was an open adoption and no secrets at any point. We were always up front to our daughter and answered her questions when they occurred. However we did make a point to try and answer them all together. We also put in a lot of effort to keep one step ahead and anticipate questions that would be coming up.

When she had questions to me I would answer as short and concise as I could and then then tell her we would talk more with her mother later. Then when all three of us together I would bring up the subject again and we would discuss. Usually at dinner.

If you told your wife “weeks” later on that conversation with your son I can fully understand her anger. I hate to think how my wife would react if I did the same.

As for unpleasant truths in the birth family, we had the same issues. I know my wife is much more tactful than I in answering such questions, so I always made a point to have those conversations with the 3 of us.

As to your son internalizing the negative truth that I cannot answer to as all kids are different and you have to know your own. With us our daughter never held anything back. That was extremely difficult to deal with at times, but we always knew what was on her mind as unpleasant as it sometimes was.

12

“Out of line” is definitely, way, WAY too strong. I think it’s fine and admirable that you answer your son’s questions honestly, and it shows him that you respect him.

You’ve already said that you agree you and your wife should have had more of a “let’s get on the same page” plan in place, which is the area that raised the biggest red flag for me. And beyond the two of you having a conversation, I think she’s right about #2 being potentially very sensitive for some kids, and I think it might also be helpful to talk to a social worker or other person with some expertise in this area to see if they can offer any tips about how to frame this. Of course, as other posters have pointed out, some individual kids might not have any undue concern about this at all. I don’t know how your kid is, but it wouldn’t hurt to have some more specific information about this situation. As your wife said, he might worry (not even now, but in years to come) if he himself is destined to be violent, or if the stress of having an unwanted/unexpected baby caused the biofather to abuse the biomother.

13

Adoptee here, late 30s, found my birth parents when I was 18.

The short answer is that it’s your son’s bio family, not your wife’s. She has no claim over information regarding his family. In short, if she would let him watch a movie where this happens to one of the characters (adoption from a troubled family, including the same details of the situation), then she has, BY DEFAULT, judged him ready for these truths about your son’s bio family. And that’s that. I’m the expert here, as an adoptee with literally decades to reflect on the situation, and she is in the wrong, IMHO, regarding whether or not he’s ready for this info.

Once she calms down, she’ll probably realize this. Meanwhile, you two fell down on the job by not having this conversation as soon as you adopted the little guy. No offense, you’re human, I’m just emphasizing it for prospective adoptive parents who may read this thread.

14

Honesty is the best policy. You did good in this adoptee’s opinion.

15

While I think the conversation you had seemed fine, I’d be upset too if you hadn’t told me about it right away. We try to keep each other in the loop about important conversations, and this topic is such an important one I’d feel sad and left out if I didn’t even know it happened.

My guess is all the other complaints really have the fact you didn’t tell her right away at their root.

16

Adoptive parent, daughter of an adoptee, daughter in law of a birthmother.

You did the right thing. And while I think it would have been nice to have discussed this with your wife first, the fact that he brought this up with you is an indication he had faith you would tell him the truth, and she wouldn’t. And frankly, your kid needs to be able to tell you difficult things and have you be honest - and you need to be able to tell him the difficult things. You are on the cusp of the teenage years, there will be lots of difficult “he’s not ready for this” conversations ahead of you - which really means you aren’t ready - he probably needs to be whether you are or not. At eleven, there is a non-zero chance he’s been offered drugs or knows kids who use. There is a non-zero chance that someone he knows has already become sexually active. He’s almost certainly been surfing the web for porn. In middle school, kids have started skipping class. You earned some trust points, and those are valuable things to have in your pocket over the next seven to ten years.

17

I’m with the consensus here, too. I’m an adoptee from birth (went home with adoptive parents from the hospital). The plan should have already been in place for what to answer, and you should have told your wife right away about the conversation. But the conversation itself needed to take place as it did, when he asked, so you did the best you could. Whatever age a kid is when they ask the question, they need an answer - the plan would be to have the age-appropriate answers prepared as discussed beforehand. That ship sailed on that question, and IMO you gave an age-appropriate answer without the gory details. Perfect. Move on with a plan and you’re all good!

18

Sounds like you did everything right, except for thinking you should have reported to her about this conversation. A conversation between you and your son can be private, as can a conversation she has with him.
He asked questions and you honestly answered them. To have put him off until she was present would have been awful and made the importance of the unfortunate facts of his parentage seem more important. This information is more likely have a negative effect on him if you and your wife treat it like a shameful secret. The abuser should be ashamed, not you, not your wife, and not your son. Protecting him from the truth isn’t helpful.

19

You summed up my parenting philosophy with your last sentence.

Also, the point you made about the wife NOT being asked this question by their son is so DAMN spot on. Props to you. The OP’s wife needs someone to VERY gently tell her that there’s a reason she didn’t get asked.

20

I think your wife is too worried about points 1 & 2, but has a point with number 3.

As others have said, it seems like a problem years in the making, i.e. there should have been a plan in place for either of you to either answer questions honestly and independently as they came up or perhaps reserve some conversations for the whole family.

Point 4 obviously ties in with point 3, and I can absolutely understand why she was upset about not knowing about the conversation. From your wife’s point of, divulging bio dad’s history was probably a seminal moment in your family’s maturation, and she wasn’t there for it. Not that she wasn’t there to control the information, but perhaps that she wasn’t there to love and support him as he received it.

A huge part of a close relationship is being there for someone when they hear unpleasant news, and it sounds like you deprived your wife of that capability in this instance. Even if the news is ultimately received with a shrug, it’s nice to have been there in case things had gone differently.

All this sounds harsh, but it isn’t meant to. I have basically zero experience with adoption, but my one meaningful conversation on the topic was with a girl who absolutely appreciated that her parents where open and honest with her, so in that regard, you did very well by your son.

In sum, I don’t think an apology to your wife is out of order, nor a conversation about how to handle similar things in the future.

And frankly, I salute you and all the other adoptive parents here and elsewhere.