Sunday, April 21, 2013


Adoptive parents... How many of you joke that your kid's problems are not your fault due to them having other parents? If you say this is it more in a funny way or do you really use adoption as a way to take the blame off yourself and put it on the birthparents?

I realize in some cases like drug abuse it's a true statement. I just heard this said to me from someone who just told that her two grown children came to her in the middle of growing up.

I think this could possibly make the child think that if they'e natural parents fucked up and did something wrong then they must be screw ups too.

4 comments:

Rebecca Hawkes said...

Wow, I just wrote about this, too ... or something very similar, from the adoptee point-of-view: http://www.rebeccahawkes.com/2013/04/bad-seed-vs-blank-slate-why-must.html

Such comments really do impact us -- adoptees, that is -- over time.

birthmothertalks said...

I will check out your post.

April said...

My husband's cousin is a grown adoptee, and he has heard his uncle blame his son's problems on him being like his worthless birthfather. We disagree and see it more as a problem with poor parenting by his adoptive parents. We joke about certain less desirable traits coming from our kid's birth family. But this is more discussing genetics than placing blame, and we even joke about it with the birth family. My daughter's asthma and another's heart defect could have been inherited or caused by her birth family's actions, but it's not something we joke about. Any bio child of ours could have had a medical problem too.

birthmothertalks said...

Thanks April, I feel for your husband's cousin. It must be so bad to be put down like that. Izzy has joked about a couple of the funny things we have in common too.