The Need To Know Sooner Or Later, Children Who Were Given Up For Adoption Will Want To Ssek Out Their Birth Parents

Matt Salminen, 17, of Milton, Vt., grew up knowing he was adopted, that his birth mother loved horses and his birth father was an auto mechanic. Off and on as a child, he would wonder aloud about them: “Would my birth mother like this?” “I wonder what my birth father would want me to do.”

When he was 14, occasional musing and meager details were no longer enough. While working on a family genealogy project for school, he told his parents he wanted to know more. What were the circumstances of his birth? Why had he been put up for adoption? What were his birth parents’ lives like?

In many adoptive families, this is a moment parents dread. The thought of a search is anathema.

“The fantasy is that the birth mother reenters the picture and your child likes her more than you,” says social worker Ronny Diamond, who specializes in search and reunion.

Luckily for Matt, his adoptive parents, Carolyn and Karlo Salminen, had no such fears. “I wasn’t threatened. We always knew there would be another person in our kids’ lives,” says Carolyn, whose daughter, Anna, 20, is also adopted.

Of the many lessons other adoptive families can learn from the Salminens - that it’s best to be open about the adoption from the beginning and to acknowledge the role of biological parents - perhaps one of the most important is knowing what a search is all about. “For Matt, it wasn’t about finding and meeting his birth parents,” says Carolyn. “It was about getting information.”

While children over 18 may want to meet a birth parent, children under 18 typically don’t, says Diamond. “They need to know, ‘Why did this happen to me?’ It is a search for meaning, for wholeness, for connections,” she says.

It’s a need that typically surfaces between 5 and 7.

“Kids have an ‘Aha!’ moment,” says psychologist Joyce Maguire Pavao, an adoption specialist. “A new cognitive capacity kicks in, and suddenly they get it: ‘Aha! I have another mother.”’

From that moment on, the adopted child’s task for growing up is intertwined with emotionally coming to grips with this, says Diamond, director of postadoption services at Spence-Chapin Services to Families & Children in New York.

Susan Darke, an adult adoptee who is founder and director of Adoption Connection, a search and support organization in Peabody, Mass., remembers having a driving need as a child to know what her birth mother looked like and what her likes were.

“I wasn’t looking for the woman, I was looking for her story,” she says. “Did she sew? Cook? Play the piano? But any time I asked questions, my dad would pace and my mom would get teary-eyed. I learned not to ask.”

Instead, as a teen, she surreptitiously searched the house every chance she got, eventually unearthing her adoption papers in the back of a closet. “I still remember unfolding them,” she says. “It had my birth parents’ names and my name: Patricia Ann. Knowing somebody cared to name me - that was wonderful.”

A birth name, the name of the birth parents or a picture of them, these are the details children crave. “If you have them, share them,” says Pavao. “Don’t wait for some magical moment. Make it part of their adoption story from Day 1.”

By school age, a child deduces that while he was adopted by you, he was rejected by his birth parents. Because even school-age children are egocentric, the less information they have, the more they conclude they’re to blame. Diamond tells of one girl who knew she had colic as an infant and assumed that was why she was placed in adoption.

If the details are full of drugs, alcohol, or other problems, Pavao says the solution is not to avoid the subject or lie but to find ways to be truthful yet age-appropriate.

Pavao also tells parents to explain that social worker’s notes, which is all you have to go on, don’t tell the whole story of a person. She suggests picking a positive characteristic of your child that you can attribute to her birth family: “Since you are a good athlete, someone in your birth family was, too. You sure don’t get that from us!”

When a child asks, “I wish I knew if she thought about me,” Diamond suggests saying, “I can’t imagine that she wouldn’t. Have you ever lost anything of importance that you didn’t think about off and on afterward?” Or: “We don’t forget important things in our lives, even if they are sad.”

When a child can’t settle down emotionally from a lack of information or is so preoccupied thinking about the birth parent that she can’t function well, it may be appropriate to go to the agency for more information or even to open up an adoption, says family therapist Teri Sousa, an adoption counselor at Work Family Directions in Boston.

Opening an adoption, or an open adoption from the start, which is increasingly more common, offers a range of possibilities, from sharing pictures to monthly phone calls to occasional meetings. “The key is to work out in advance what the boundaries are,” says Sousa. Her adopted son, Tyler, sees his birth mother once a year.

“For us, it’s been wonderful,” says Sousa. “I’ve seen firsthand that the more kids know about themselves, the better off they are emotionally.”

MEMO: This sidebar appeared with the story: HELPFUL TIPS FOR ADOPTIVE PARENTS Refer to the birth mother by name if you know it. If you have her picture, put it in an album with other relatives. Refer to yourself as an adoptive family, not as having an adopted child. Empathy goes a long way: “I know it’s hard not to know.” After the adoption, go to the agency to get whatever information you can so that you have it when your child asks. Don’t assume that because you adopted overseas, there is no information to be had. Many countries won’t give details at the time of adoption but will years later, particularly South Korea. Don’t let a child adopted internationally grow up with the myth of abandonment. Put it in a context: “In many countries, there is no such thing as day care, and mothers who aren’t married are rejected by their family. The mother puts her baby where she knows the baby will be cared for, and usually she watches from a distance to make sure the baby is found.” Not every child asks for more information. Perhaps you have been so forthcoming that her curiosity is satisfied. On the other hand, you may be sending signals that warn, “Don’t ask.” Three- to 5-year-olds tend to think there can only be one set of “real” parents. Tell them, “Your other mother and father are your real birth parents. We are your real parents.” If a child under 18 wants a reunion, seek guidance from an adoption service counselor who specializes in search and reunions. Not all birth parents want to be found and it could be devastating for a child to be rejected a second time.