I am also adopted, and since I was 3 years old at the time and remember it, it was never hidden from me.
Count me with those who say that there is nothing wrong with being honest with your son. Sure, you should have told your wife about the conversation sooner, but that’s the only thing you personally did wrong. As numerous posters have pointed out, you should have talked about how you were going to handle issue with her long before it ever arose – but that’s on BOTH of you, not you alone. If she thinks that discussing your son’s bio family with him is such a huge deal, then she should have sat down with you long ago to make a plan.
Her worries that your son will think, “like [bio] father, like son” speak more, IMHO, to her own perhaps unvoiced fears about how your son is going to grow up than anything else. Maybe SHE is the one who needs to recognize that your son isn’t destined to be an abuser when he grows up.
Not necessarily. Sometimes a kid is just more comfortable with one parent than the other, or is more comfortable dealing with some subjects with one parent and others with the other - not because one parent is doing something wrong, but just because that’s the way the personalities mesh. The fact that the kid raised the subject with his father isn’t an indication that the mother is doing something wrong, and it would be ridiculous and nasty to try to convince her it’s an indication of bad child-raising/dishonesty on her part. He asked one of them; that’s what matters.
My five-year-old has almost without exception brought everything difficult or sensitive to me, not to her father. It’s not because he does anything wrong - he’s an amazing father - it’s simply because that’s how she wants to deal with it. Whatever way the personalities mesh, she’s happier doing it that way. We figure as long as she’s asking one of us the crucial questions, and we’re both on the same page about the answers, it doesn’t really matter which one.
Adoptive mother here. My daughter is 11 - I can relate to the timing of the questions being asked. (and they are so often brought up in the car here, too)
You’ve received lots of good advice already - especially the insight from the adult adoptees who’ve posted (thanks everyone! - I’m listening to you, also!) - so the point I’d like to add is that ‘winging it’ is sometimes a fact of parenthood (and life in general, of course). I don’t think we can anticipate all of the questions our children will ask us and when they will ask them. I don’t think stalling your child until you conferred with your wife or arranged for her to be present for the discussion would have suited the situation. Trust each other to handle these imperfect moments.
You can both be present for an arranged follow up conversation with him to help him digest new information. That probably won’t be an absolutely perfect discussion either, so plan to cut one another some slack. Good luck with it!
To build on the comments above: it is, IMO, important to answer your son’s questions about his adoption honestly, forthrightly, and immediately. The questions he wants answered are going to become more complex and important as he grows older, and you (and your wife) want to build up credibility by honestly answering questions, so he’s comfortable trusting you when he wants to ask the really important stuff. Stalling him until you get your stories straight is not really conducive to building trust. Not telling the truth is even worse, because he’s eventually going to find it out hiself.
That’s not to say you shouldn’t think about possible questions beforehand and have a plan - there are a million ways to tell a story, and thinking about the best way to tell it can be helpful. This is real life, though, and you can’t really anticipate all questions and reactions, and sometimes you just have to wing it.
You might consider re-opening the conversation with your son to try to glimpse what he feels about his birthfather. (Say, by showing him his original birth certificate.) Don’t force it, just let him know you’re willing to talk about it whenever he’s ready to. This might help alleviate your wife’s fears of him internalizing this information.
That’s why I said indication. He could have also simply been convenient when the question came up. But I disagree that it isn’t an indication that he feels he gets a certain kind of answer from Dad. Not that Mom does anything wrong - it may be that on other topics, she is the provider of the answer he looks for.
My kids had it figured out years before eleven which parent to ask which questions of to get the answers they were seeking. But not by five. At five its was usually whichever parent was convenient.
But it is neither ridiculous or nasty for mom to at this point say “why did he ask Dad this question and not me.” Certainly more productive than turning on Dad for water under the bridge. In fact, that she is this defensive about it that its caused serious arguments doesn’t bode well for some conversations around the corner. As I said, the teenage years are full of tough questions - for all teenagers, not just those wondering about their birthparents - getting defensive about the answers isn’t going to help. And if your kids aren’t getting honest answers from you or your spouse or if they don’t think you give them the complete answer - they’ll get answers somewhere else, and the quality of those answers, or whether those answers match your values, will be completely out of your control.
I think we’re not actually saying very different things. I agree with you that it means the kid knows he’s more likely to get a certain kind of answer from his father, and that kind is what he wanted at that moment. I just don’t think it means the mother is less likely to tell the truth. (If anything, going by the OP, it could be linked to the fact that she’s more likely to make a big deal of things. Eleven is about the age where parents making a big deal of things becomes the world’s worst nightmare.) That seemed to imply that she should be doing things more like the father, in order to make the son more willing to talk to her - which isn’t necessarily the case.
I suppose I’m thinking back to when I was that age. My mother was much more empathetic, while my dad was more matter-of-fact. Sometimes I wanted empathy on an issue, so I took it to my mother, while sometimes I really didn’t - I wanted a bit more distance - so I took it to my dad. I *liked *having both options available. It would have been a bad thing all round if either parent had thought ‘The kid took this question to the other parent, so I should do things more like him/her!’
Yep. The wife’s reaction is troubling, and that’s why I think she’s got some heavy self-reflecting to do. She seems like she’s flailing pretty hard, and that means it’s time to take some time to reflect, usually…especially in this situation, where she literally had over a decade to prepare. IMHO.
Since there is so much experience in this thread, I’m going to jump in with my questions. astorian, if you want to kick me out and tell me to start my own thread, I’m fine with that too.
My adopted son is 4 years old. We were in the room when he was born (I cut his umbilical cord), and he has been with us ever since.
We’ve told him that he is adopted and we read books about adoption, but I think he’s too young to really grasp what it all means and he seems confused whenever I mention it.
My question is, should we keep bringing it up or wait for him to ask questions? I’m really struggling because I want him to know his history, but I also don’t want to be shoving it in his face.
Adoptees and adoptive parents are welcome to chime in, thanks!
I’m an adopted child, too. Thank you for being honest with your adopted child. While I obviously am not speaking for every single adopted child, most of us truly want to know why we were placed for adoption, what our birth story was, how we wound up where we are. It’s not because we aren’t happy with our adopted parents; we are. But we know that there’s more to our personal narrative, and we don’t have the answers. It’s better to answer the questions when they are asked (at the child’s level of understanding, of course) than to brush the questions aside because the questions will fester.
I knew from the beginning that I was adopted, but my questions were brushed aside until I was 28, pregnant with my first child, and witnessing the death of my mother. It was then that they decided to tell me the “whole story”. While I was finally glad to know the truth, I was (still am) angry that they waited that long to tell me.
Your wife may have wanted to be in on the discussion. She may have wanted to wait to tell him until he was older. She may have many reasons for her reaction. As an adopted child, please let me tell you that the conversation is probably not over yet. Your son will probably circle back to this many times over the course of his life. It doesn’t affect or reflect his feelings toward you or his mother. He’s simply looking for rest of his story. Please continue to be honest with him.
ETA: August West, when you tell him his birth story, tell him the truth. He lived inside his birth mother, but you were there when he was born, and he came home to live with you. Right now, I think that’s probably enough. He’ll ask questions as he has them. As you can tell, I am a proponent for honesty at their level of understanding. So, be honest.
I have no directly relevant experience, unlike the many posters above. So I’ll not offer any thoughts on what to tell the kid or when. But that’s not the only issue on the table …
What I’m NOT hearing anyone (except maybe Dangerosa) say loudly and clearly is that this conversation with the kid is but one of many to be had on adoption-related topics. By the time the kid is 20 it’s a good bet he’ll have learned that some people seek out their bio-families, both their parents and siblings. He’ll want to know whether & how he could do that. Etc.
So … the OP and his wife need to discuss, in detail, what they think NOW about all those future questions. THIS, IMO is the most important piece of advice for the OP.
If bio-Mom had issues, what do we tell kiddo if he asks tomorrow & when do we strip off the training wheels and give him the whole adult-level story in whatever degree of gory detail we know? Etc. For each of the *other *15 or 20 questions you can easily anticipate him asking given the details of his bio-situation. Focus on the tough questions.
The kid is going to continue presenting these surprise dilemmas on a schedule of his choosing. We don’t want the next one, or the next one or … to rekindle the current husband/wife strife.
Finally, you may not be able to agree. In which case you’ve learned something very important and will need to decide how to deal with it. Disagreements on parenting style are apparently commonplace. It seems successful parent couples admit that the other parent doing it “wrong” (from their POV) won’t materially harm the kid until/unless the parents get way out of sync with each other or way out of whack with society.
An issue the OP skirted, but which I sense I’m reading between the lines is that perhaps the child was not adopted by the OP & his current wife, but rather by the OP before the current wife entered the picture. There’s certainly nothing wrong with almost any imaginable blended family as such, but IF my surmise is accurate it adds another layer of complexity to the relationship differences between Kid and Dad vs. between Kid and Mom. And IF so, that too needs to come out and be discussed in the same plain & forthright manner the OP says he takes with the young one.
I’m probably reading you incorrectly, LSLGuy, and if so I apologize. However, I sense a smidgen of “the OP and his wife need to decide how they are going to control the situation when the child wants to seek out his bio-family.”
And the answer to that is … you don’t control it. Prepare yourself to handle it with grace, sure. Hope that you’ve raised your child to be considerate of your feelings? Absolutely.
But at the end of the day, this is between your child and any bio-family that’s around. It is NOT your choice - and anyone who can’t handle that shouldn’t adopt.
No, I think LSLGuy is saying that the conversation related in the first post is just the current conversation in a years-long discussion, and the OP and his wife need to be prepared for the next installment, and the one after that, and the one after that. It shouldn’t be about controlling the discussion, it should be about participating in the discussion.
In the case of when the child wants to seek out his bio-family, there are certainly a lot of wrong ways to handle it, but there can be a lot of right ways, too. How much do you know about the process? Do you know enough to answer basic questions or not? Do you broach the subject yourself? What advice do you give? What help do you offer? How does that change, depending on whether the child is eleven or sixteen or twenty-one? This, I think, is what LSLGuy is saying - anticipate future questions not to be controlling, but to be helpful.
When its appropriate bring it up. If your family does rituals, two are big - his birthday and mother’s day. On his birthday you can take a moment after cutting the cake to “have a moment” for his birthparents. On Mother’s Day, make a card for her - even if you put it in a box for the day when “maybe he’ll meet her.” Otherwise, there are lots of opportunities in popular culture - “Superman was adopted like you” or among friends “Amy was adopted from China, she was a year old when she arrived home with her parents, you came home from the hospital with us” when they come up. You really only need to get it mentioned a few times between now and the time he is in elementary for it to be something he just knows.
My son has never made a big deal about adoption. (And LSLGuy, I’m not saying there will be other conversations about adoption - my son is definitely “don’t care” and we’ve had very few - but I’d trade a lot of conversations about birthparents for ones about driving…or grades…or drugs…or girls…or race relations…adoption is easy when a kid at school he knows gets busted for cocaine or when your kid is failing math simply because he doesn’t care, or when one of the kids at school gets murdered by her boyfriend.) Make it something your kid knows, then follow his lead in deciding how much to care. And be supportive of his decisions regarding his care.
My 2 cents, as an adoptee who found his birthfamily–don’t expect too much. Reunions, even if they go well in the first few months or years, have their ups and downs. Eventually, reality sets in, and everyone’s personal flaws become hard to ignore. I am Facebook friends with my b-mom’s first cousin and a few other extended family members, and I show up for funerals. That’s about it. The first few years were good, but ultimately I just don’t have that much in common with most people in my birthfamily. Even if I did, that’s no guarantee that we’d always see eye-to-eye. It’s a human relationship, and therefore subject to the same rules as all others.
It *appears * to me that Mom and Dad have very different POVs about how to handle the whole adoption topic. The kid’s latest conversation brought that fact out loud and clear. e.g. the OP said “This situation has led to some serious arguments between my wife and me.”
This strife is a situation to be avoided. So how do we get Mom & Dad on a similar playbook? By talking to each other *before *the kid blindsides them with the next question.
I chose “looking for birth family” as simply an example of a question that’s probably going to be asked eventually and which I surmise Mom and Dad have very different attitudes about. IOW, it’s a conflict trigger for them. And one they’re quite likely to encounter, perhaps sooner than later.
ISTM the Mom is pretty uptight about the adoption thing, whereas Dad is calm about it. That may be me overinterpreting the OP. It may be simply a matter of Mom being more protective of their kid. Either way, we have evidence of a difference in attitude and evidence of parental non-communication.
As I said at the outset, I’m not competent to offer any opinion on what to tell the kid or when. Or what not to tell him. Having been married for almost 27 argument-free years I am, I think, competent to offer the parents some thoughts on how to manage their own communications and attitudes to minimize discord and stress.
I see nothing wrong with the facts you gave your son. Kids ask questions of all sorts, and deserve truthful answers when they ask the questions. If your wife’s intention was to lie to the boy then of course your wife and you should have discussed in advance what story to tell him (I don’t believe in lying to kids). My aunt did lie to her adopted kids, and those lies came back to bite her in the butt later. I don’t think either one ever completely trusted her again, it seemed to put a huge gulf between her and her kids.
