My high school girlfriend (late 1960s) was adopted, knew she was adopted, knew her brother was also adopted and didn’t think it was anything out of the ordinary. I don’t know if her parents gave her the “Your so SPECIAL” line or not.
Bobby Darin, too.
Bobby Darin - Wikipedia
I actually knew a “mother and daughter” - the girl was my son’s classmate in kindergarten and she and my son were friends - who were actually grandmother and granddaughter, although it was a big secret. Not sure how we found out the truth but a lot of things fell into place when we did.
I do recall a sense of shame being attached to adoption. I remember my brother and I used to tell our younger sister that she was adopted whenever we were trying to get her goat. She had lighter eyes and lighter hair than both my brother and I, so it really got to her and we got in trouble for it.
When I turned 50 I learned that she has a different father than I do. I have never told her and I don’t plan to. There is no advantage that I can see. There is no one left alive who can tell her who the man was. And it would probably break her heart. She adored our father who treated her as his own.
But I definitely recall there being a sense of shame in being adopted.
My wife was adopted in 1946. Back then it was all very hush-hush and secretive, especially because the birth father wanted nothing to do with the child and the mother was determined he never would be able to contact her. However, the adoptive parents were a good match and told my wife early on (I think she was three or so). My wife never tried to contact her birth mother because she thought it might break her adoptive parent’s hearts - after they passed on, she did find her birth mother, but she had also passed. Could have been a heart-breaking story, but my wife had a good life with her adoptive parents.
I’d be fucked up too if I were Eric Clapton and, as an adult, found out I was Jack Nicholson’s mother.
Meanwhile, my ex and I are white Western European stock. Both kids are South Korean adoptees. None of this mishegas in that household, I can tell ya.
This may well have been a reason some families kept such a thing secret, especially if they had a mixture of do-it-yourself and adopted kids. Though even so, sooner or later, the truth will come out.
Lying about adoption is or was a common trope in novels - the trauma experienced by the adoptee when s/he finds out is the main plot point. I don’t know how common it was in real life.
There was one family in our church, growing up, where one kid was very clearly adopted - all the others looked very similar, and the adoptee did not resemble her siblings all that much (all Caucasian, but imagine someone from Sweden in a family of people with Greek ancestry, or the like). I have no idea what the tale was - whether adoptee was the first child, or brought in later, or whatever. I assume she knew from an early age though - I did not know them personally and even then I hope I’d have known not to ask.
I imagine there MUST be weird, outlier cases where the adoptive parents are encouraged not to tell the kid, or at least not the whole truth.
Suppose someone like Jeffrey Dahmer raped Marie Noe (woman who murdered all her children over a two decade time span) and there was a child born and given up for adoption. Are you REALLY going to tell them to tell your kid all about them when they ask? Way, way better to say their parents were just a couple of high school kids who got pregnant and gave the child up to have a better childhood.
For that matter, do the adoption people ALWAYS tell the prospective parents the whole truth?
Separate question than the OP, sort of. One question is telling whether they were adopted at all. Yours pertains to letting the child know who their birth parents were.
With open adoption becoming more and more common, the latter is (sometimes) less of a question than it used to be. I know that sealed files were very much the norm until 20-30 years ago, and it could be VERY tough to find out your birth family.
I don’t know if my husband’s parents were specifically told not to tell him - but they didn’t and he found out accidentally when he was 15 or 16.
…and it was fine,
or
…which was just terrible?
No worries if you don’t want to say of course; just curious.
Really wasn’t either, He was upset that he hadn’t been told, especially since his older cousins knew. But it was a good thing that he did find out because about ten years later his bio-sibling found him. That raised some more issues because he had an older full brother and two younger half sisters and bio mother raised the other three. He came to the conclusion that the best thing that ever happened to him was being adopted because of what he heard about his siblings childhood and how they ended up. They weren’t abused , but they basically raised themselves.
Since Jack NIcholson is older than Eric Clapton, it’s more likely that Nicholson is Clapton’s mother
I think the main point would be that one major source of ethnically-similar(?) babies in before the 80’s or 90’s was unwed mothers, often teens, often younger. That source has dried up significantly thanks to the trifecta of sex education, widely available birth control, and abortion. Or is it a quadfecta with much less social condemnation of a single mother keeping their child?
Presumably one reason not to tell a child they were adopted was to avoid having to tell them the circumstances of their birth. Their birth did not need to involve Dahmer for the adoptive parents to feel the details were too complex for a young mind to comprehend. Because logically, the corollary to “we chose you” is “why did mommy not want me?”. I suppose lying about the reason someone was up for adoption is not good either. Best to keep quiet.
In all those childrens’ stories involving orphanages it was usually said or implied that the parents died a sad and tragic death… which implies life outside the orphanage for adults was pretty dangerous. Still, this was better than Hansel and Gretel, I guess.
Friends of ours adopted their son and brought him home shortly after his birth. He is graduating from college soon.
When he was in elementary school a parent quietly asked my friend if his son knew he was adopted. Thing is, my friends are about as white as you can be and their son was adopted from South Korea.
That supports my view that it was entirely up to the adoptive parents as to if, how, and when they would inform their children. I do believe, however, that information about the biological parents was kept private. If true, I doubt that it still stands because, in this golden age of information, virtually nothing can be kept private.
Parents are advised not to tell young children everything they may know about their biological parents. One couple told me all they would tell their children (at the time teenagers) only that their parents clearly must have be beautiful people. I don’t know the rest of the details but they made it clear it wasn’t information their children needed to hear.
I have an adopted son and he’s always known he was adopted. It’s a more complicated situation but at some point he asked me who his biological father was and I had to tell him that we didn’t know. Later on I had to inform him that only his biological mother, who he knew about already, knew for sure who his biological father was, that she didn’t tell us, and that it wasn’t the man who signed his birth certificate.
I’m not sure what you mean by this - do you mean your agency didn’t do closed adoptions even 30 years ago or something else? Because it’s hard for me to imagine what an agency keeping adoption a secret or not even means in a case where secrecy is possible ( if a ten year old is adopted , it’s not possible to keep it a secret)
My memory is that no one even talked about how someone was adopted, even if you were adopted by 1969 when I was 17. Everyone was too polite to talk about it, even if you could guess what happened. It simply wasn’t any of your business. You just said, “That’s nice. Do you know anything about your adoption? No? Well let’s talk about something else.”
There’s no doubt in my mind that it’s a quadfecta.
Here’s something I wrote almost a year ago in another post. It gives just one example about how shameful being a single mother was at one time, and well within living memory:
Edit: I hope I remembered correctly that the airline in question was Pan Am, and not some other well-known American airline.