‘No more secrets, it’s over!’: small stories about late adoption disclosure of Chilean adults

ABSTRACT

Today there is broad consensus that adoptive parents should initiate open communication early and continue talking about adoption throughout their children’s lives. However, a significant group of adopted adults do not know their adoptive origin and learn about it late in their lives, especially in Latin American countries where closed adoption systems dominate. Within a broader narrative study carried out in Chile, in this article we analyse a subset of 14 narrative interviews of people adopted domestically who underwent processes of late adoption disclosure. We draw from a small stories approach (Georgakopoulou, 2015) and identify a narrative structure for accidental and late disclosure experiences. We focus on three dimensions of the communicative experience narrated by participants: (1) the spatio-temporal situatedness of disclosure, (2) the construction of family emotions, and (3) the issue of the ‘right age for disclosure’. Focusing on these dimensions is particularly relevant because the narratives of adult Chilean adoptees seem to depart significantly from current master narratives on how families should talk about adoption. Finally, we discuss our findings in relation to adoptive identity construction processes, current debates regarding communication in adoptive families and origin search processes, and the implications for specialized professional interventions in this area.

KEYWORDS:

• Adoption
• late disclosure
• narratives
• small stories
• secrets

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 It should be noted that, in comparison with LeCompte’s (2000) three-step process, the corpus of small stories (14) and the succinct nature of the small story extracts (a few lines of transcript) makes the mid-step process of creating taxonomies of items redundant and inefficient for our analysis.

2 The narratives have been transcribed for this article in lines and stanzas/blocks, following a simplified version of stanza analysis (Gee, 1991) and ethnopoetic (Hymes, 2003) transcription and patterning conventions. All narratives were originally produced in Chilean Spanish and have been translated for this article by the authors.

3 To protect participants’ identity, we used pseudonyms and omitted details of their stories that were linked to places and dates that could facilitate identification of those involved.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the ANID-Chile under FONDECYT Project No. 317033 and the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation under Grant PID2020-112692RB-C21/AEI/10.13039/501100011033.