“Instead of Growing Under Her Heart, I Grew in It”: The Relationship Between Adoption Entrance Narratives and Adoptees' Self-Concept

Abstract

Adoptees are partially or entirely disconnected from those involved in their birth stories, so adoptive families create adoption entrance narratives to fill that void. Scholars assert that these narratives impact adopted child well-being later in life, but that assumption has yet to be empirically tested. The goal of this study was to examine themes emerging from adoption entrance narratives (n = 105), and to then determine the impact of story content on adoptees' self-concept. Seven themes emerged: openness, deception, chosen child, fate, difference, rescue, and reconnection. Results indicate the salience of the chosen child, negative reconnection, and difference themes significantly predicted differences in adoptees' self-concept.

Keywords:

• Adoption
• Adoption Entrance Narratives
• Adoptive Families
• Birth Story
• Narrative Theory

Acknowledgments

This paper grew out of the first author's master's thesis. The authors would like to thank Ann Bainbridge Frymier, Stephanie Rollie, and Larry Nadler for their counsel on the M.A. thesis as well as Erin Zinsmeister, Erin Willer and Allison Thorson for their assistance in coding and rating the data.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Haley Kranstuber

Haley Kranstuber (M.A., Miami University, 2008) is a doctoral student in the Department of Communication Studies at the University of Nebraska–Lincoln.

Jody Koenig Kellas

Jody Koenig Kellas (Ph.D., University of Washington, 2002) is an associate professor in the Department of Communication Studies at the University of Nebraska–Lincoln.