Adoption, Communication, and Family Networks: Current Research and Future Directions

ABSTRACT

This special issue of the Journal of Family Communication highlights the role of communication processes in adoption placements. Six original, peer-reviewed, empirical articles comprise this special issue. Together, these articles represent cutting-edge research on the formative dialogue that sustains adoption kinship networks. Each article is theoretically driven and analytically rich, offering important advancements for adoption and communication research and theory. In this introduction, I preview each article, emphasizing key empirical contributions. I then talk about the collective contributions of the articles. Finally, I offer future directions salient to the next phase of adoption communication research.

Adoption has existed as a family formation practice for centuries. Adoption takes various forms around the world, including but not limited to domestic infant adoption, transracial adoption, international adoption, adoption from foster care, kinship adoption, and informal adoption. Spanning these adoption practices is a central commonality: adoption relationships are created and sustained through communication (Colaner & Horstman, 2021). Communication with and about the adoptee, adoptive family, and birth family forms the basis of individual and family experiences, including identity, relational solidary, trauma, and grief resolution. Adoptive and birth families are particularly discourse dependent, meaning they rely on internal and external communication to make sense of their family structure, create belongingness in the face of genetic disparity in the adoptive family and separation from genetic relatives, and justify and defend their family legitimacy in the response to societal discourses of biological normativity (Galvin, 2006).

This special issue of the Journal of Family Communication on Family Communication and Adoption features six original, peer-reviewed, empirical articles focused on communication processes related to adoption placements and family functioning. Together, these articles represent cutting-edge research on the formative dialogue that sustains adoption kinship networks. Each article is theoretically driven and analytically rich,offering important advancements for adoption and communication research and theory.

In this introduction, I preview each article, emphasizing the main empirical contributions. I then talk about the collective contributions of the articles. Finally, I offer future directions salient to the next phase of adoption communication research.

Preview of articles in the special issue

Ranieri and colleagues present findings from a multi-informant study assessing adoptive parents’ and adoptees’ perceptions of cohesion, flexibility, adoption communication openness, and adoptee adjustment. Structural equation modeling reveals differences in perceptions of family dynamics within the adoptive family, underscoring the importance of utilizing a system perspective in family communication research.

Their study offers an adoption-specific assessment of the role of communication in the circumplex model of family functioning. Olson (2000) has long positioned communication as a facilitating dimension on flexibility and cohesion axes of the model. Here, we again see communication as an important facilitator but with nuanced focus on adoption communication. Importantly, they found that adoption communication openness (ACO) mediated the relationship between cohesion and adoptee adjustment. Such a finding suggests that adoptive parents who can cultivate a sense of family closeness may be more able to engage with their children on difficult and/or emotional conversations about their adoption. Of course, the cross-sectional nature of the student cannot confirm the directionality of this relationship; it is possible that ACO contributes to family cohesion. Regardless of the direction here, it is notable that ACO and family cohesion seem to facilitate adoptee adjustment.

Lee and colleagues usher the focus of the special issue to another difficult topic of communication in adoptive families in their examination of adoption microaggressions (AMAs). They use the lens of discourse dependency (Galvin, 2006) to demonstrate how adoptive parents address AMAs. Adoptive parents primarily viewed comments about the adoptee being “lucky” and derogatory comments about birth parents to be rude and intrusive. Adoptive parents responded to AMAs in a variety of ways. First, adoptive parents used internal boundary management (IBM) to cultivate belonging in the family. IBM was particularly important in the face of AMAs that suggested that the child was lucky or that the child would want to search for birth parents. Parents also responded to AMAs by teaching their children how to engage in external boundary management, specifically giving their children strategies for how to address outsiders’ intrusive or invalidating comments and questions. Finally, adoptive parents in transracial families engaged in preparation for bias (PfB) in response to AMA by helping their children recognize, understand, and cope with racial/ethnic discrimination. Parents specifically helped their child by developing strategies for the child to use in response to AMAs (e.g., “just ignore them and walk away”), educating the child about racial/ethnic discrimination, providing the child with brief statements to use in response to AMAs (e.g., “we are a REAL family”), and validating the child’s experience. Across these three AMA responses, parents cultivated a framework to combat AMAs. Parental descriptions about responses to AMAs occurred via nine thematic responses: refuting the microaggression message to shift the flawed narrative, reinforcing and/or legitimizing adoptive family identity, noting others’ dismissal of the complexities of adoption, validating the child’s overlooked experiences, giving children the choice to act within AMA situations, and emphasizing children’s right to privacy.

Lee and colleagues present detailed models that depict how AMA’s response practices co-occur and are embedded within adoptive family relationships as well as in interactions with outsiders. This nuanced set of strategies gives voice to the complexities of adoptive family communication, particularly with regard to personal and family identity. Adoptive families, and especially transracially adopted children, face adoption stigma and identity challenges that require elaborate communicative frameworks.

The next set of articles provide a specific focus on health and genetics in the context of adoption and family relationships. First, Yoon and Theiss examined adoptees’ uncertainty about and information management strategies regarding genetic family health history (GFHH). Genetic health information has implications for preventative health measures and sense-making of health conditions. Using the theory of motivated information management (TMIM), Yoon and Theiss assess factors contributing to uncertainty management strategies concerning GFHH. Adoptees grapple with incomplete and/or missing information about their health history to varying degrees. Whereas some adoptees may find a lack of health history distressing, others do not. Uncertainty discrepancy trumps actual uncertainty here, meaning that the difference between the amount of uncertainty desired and uncertainty experienced is a driving force for adoptees’ information management regarding GFHH.

Yoon and Theiss analysis provide detailed insight into this process. They found that individuals with more uncertainty than desired experienced anxiety when thinking about their GFHH. Additionally, anxiety was largely predictive of negative expectations about and feelings of efficacy for reducing uncertainty about GFHH. TMIM provides insight into how uncertainty discrepancy, anxiety, outcome expectation, and efficacy guide information gathering or avoidance strategies. Specifically, negative outcome expectancies are negatively associated with seeking information and support and positively associated with information avoidance.

GFHH has real implications for longevity and quality of life yet can be out of reach for adoptees, depending on the nature of their adoption placement. Whereas other TMIM studies have focused on how information seeking /avoiding strategies relate to efficacy, Yoon and Theiss here illuminate the complexities that exist when information is unobtainable. When attaining GFHH is impossible (such as when the birth parents are unknown, unavailable, or unreliable), adoptees must manage uncertainty in other ways. Yoon and Theiss point toward the role of social support as an uncertainty management strategy. Although social support cannot offer adoptees the GFHH information they desire, social support can lessen the difficulty of the uncertainty discrepancy. Such a finding is an important step forward for the TMIM theorizing as well as for the network of family members, friends, and practitioners supporting an adoptee struggling with GFHH-related uncertainty.

The second article to explore uncertainty related to genetic health background focuses on adoptees’ transition to puberty. Goldberg and Virginia explore difficulties that arise when adoptive parents do not share a genetic link to their child to inform the child’s puberty experiences. The timing and presentation of puberty-related changes is largely dictated by genetics. Thus, adoptive parents lack the ability use their own experience of puberty to predict and explain their child. Confounding the situation even more, adoptive parents in same-sex families lack personal experience when guiding a child of the opposite sex through puberty (e.g., co-fathers parenting daughters, co-mothers parenting sons). Thus, adoptive parents, and particularly lesbian mothers and gay fathers, face increased uncertainty during their child’s adolescence.

Goldberg and Virginia used qualitative interviews to explore adoptive parents’ management of uncertainty during their child’s transition to puberty. Adoptive parents reported adoption-specific challenges during their child’s transition to puberty, noting that their child experienced increased adoption identity exploration, emotional upheaval, and desire to learn more about their birth family. The timing and nature of puberty-related changes increased adoptive parents’ uncertainty. Some adoptees went through early puberty due to trauma or racial differences (e.g., earlier average onset of puberty, darker body hair). Parents drew upon the birth family, the adoption community, and pediatricians to gather information to help manage their uncertainty. Importantly, open, progressive, and nuanced communication was central to parent-child interactions about puberty. The majority of adoptive parents took an open, developmentally graded, and progressively nuanced approach in their puberty communication.

The third paper focused on uncertainty examines the importance of original birth certificates (OBC). Rizzo Weller interviewed adult adoptees about their experiences related to their OBC in terms of implications for personal, enacted, and relational identities as articulated by the communication theory of identity. In the U.S., states differ in the laws guiding adoptees’ access to OBC. Rizzo Weller explains how OBC operate as an important symbol, containing basic facts about the birth including birth parents’ names, details about the time and place of birth, and vital birth statistics (e.g., birth weight). Adoptees from closed adoptions or from states with sealed records are unable to access their OBC. Adoptees who were able to eventually access their OBC expressed a deeper expression of personal identity. These individuals described how learning details about their original name, their birth mother’s name, and their vital statistics at birth connected their personal and adoptive identity in new and important ways. Adoptees enacted their adoptive identity in advocating for both themselves and other adoptees to have access to their OBC. Advocacy became an enactment of their adoptive identity and provided greater meaning to the role of adoption for adoptees’ understanding of self. Accessing OBC also complicated adoptees’ relational identities due to identity shifts. Adoptees expressed feeling increased ambiguous loss and heightened emotion after accessing OBCs. New information about their birth and adoption placement sparked new perspectives on relationships, including steps toward reunification with the birth family and subsequent rejection by or connection with genetic relatives.

In connecting experiences related to OBCs and adoptive identities, Rizzo Weller offers a theoretical extension to CTI through the introduction of a new identity layer named phantom identity. Adoptees expressed not only ambiguous loss but also identified with a sense of who they were before the adoption, who they might have been if not adopted, and how their place within their original family could have shaped them. This phantom aspect of self is part of the adoptees’ identity, giving meaning to adoptees’ sense of self and purpose. However, adoptees can never truly experience that identity. Rizzo Weller brings new depth to the uncertainty embedded in adoption. OBCs are more than a piece of paper for adoptees; they are symbols of past selves, connection to alternative selves that will never be, and portals to important genetic information.

Finally, Suter and colleagues offer a critical analysis of Chinese Communist Party birth planning propaganda. This unique study offers context to the wave of international adoptions that emerged during China’s era of strict birth limits and birth quotas. Chinese birth parents have been the receipt of cultural judgment for their birth, abandonment, and international adoption practices. However, Suter et al. offers a more nuanced portrayal of family planning decisions during China’s one child era through their analysis of Chinese Communist Party birth planning propaganda.

Suter el al.’s contrapuntal analysis draws from relational dialectics theory to identify five competing and collaborative discourses animating the one child era propaganda. The Chinese Communist Party used policies, slogans, and visual depictions to portray the one child structure as ideal. This propaganda promised childbearing-aged couples an idyllic, wealthy, modernized lifestyle in exchange for their fertility sacrifices and labor. Government-issued depictions of possible utopia argued that reducing the quantity and improving the quality of the Chinese populace would create a new generation of superior-quality singletons to reform and modernize China.

Suter et al. offer an important alternative, non-Western perspective of Chinese international adoption by illuminating the socio-political and economic underpinnings that fueled the one child era. Western imaginary of this era often focuses on the brutality and inhumanity of incentive- and punishment-based propaganda. Suter et al.’s findings encourage us to broaden our understandings of Chinese birth parents’ lived experiences. The power of the images, the promise of a utopia, and the threat of personal punishment and national ruin compelled childbearing couples to adhere to the one child policy. This particular gaze into the one child era provides an alternate, non-linear, non-textual and more affective, image-based entry point for broadening the Western transnational community’s perception of Chinese adoption practices.

Collective implications from the special issue

The collection of articles in this special issue is notable in both quality and scope. The authors used data-based research embedded in qualitative, quantitative, and critical methods from a broad range of fields. Empirical data came from surveys, interviews, and archival records. Analyses included bivariate statistics, structural equation modeling, rating and coding of open-ended responses, thematic analysis, hermeneutic phenomenology, and contrapuntal analysis. Researchers contributed to the issue from a range of academic homes, including communication, family studies, developmental psychology, clinical counseling, and social psychology. These six articles are each based soundly in theory, offer analytically complex findings, and suggest important implications. Together they contribute to adoption research in the following three ways.

Prioritizing communication openness

First, these articles firmly situate communication as a vital force creating, sustaining, and shaping adoptive families. Communication researchers have long described adoptive families as discourse dependent. These articles delve deeper, giving nuanced insight into the role of adoption communication openness. ACO is a vital communication construct in adoption research with important implications for adoptive families. Brodzinsky (2005) originally articulated ACO as a highly empathetic and immediate form of parent-child communication in which parents initiate and invite free-flowing dialogue about the adoption. Rather than following a child’s prompts about adoption talk, ACO tasks adoptive parents with setting a tone of comfortable approachability about adoption interactions. Children from families with high ACO can discuss thoughts and feelings about their adoption without fear of damaging their relationship with their parents or threat of retribution for thoughts and feelings about their adoption – even when those thoughts and feelings may be difficult or unpleasant.

Articles in this issue home in on the role of open, responsive, and interpersonally rich communication in facilitating adoptive family functioning. Raneri et al. demonstrate that adoption communication openness facilitates the relationship between family cohesion and adoptee adjustment. Lee et al. detail an elaborate array of internal and external response strategies that adoptive parents use in response to adoption microaggression. Yoon and Theiss introduce social support as an important communication process to help adoptees manage uncertainty about genetic family health history. Communication openness played an important role in supporting adoptive families through this developmental transition by creating a relational environment that emphasized connection, free-flowing dialogue, and responsiveness. Goldberg and Virginia found that parents’ communication openness about puberty related their communication openness about adoption. Adoptive parents with an open and nuanced approach to puberty talk tended to be similarly open in their adoption communication. As with Rosanti et al.’s findings in which adoption communication openness amplifies the role of cohesion, Goldberg and Virginia offer evidence that being open and responsive about the adoption offers opportunities to facilitate dialogue in other areas. There is considerable evidence in this special issue and previous adoption research to support the foundational role of adoption communication openness for fostering adoptee development and family functioning.

Cultivating adoptive identity

A second important contribution across the studies is the formation of adoptive identity. Adoptees must make meaning of the role of adoption for their definition of self and their place in their adoptive and birth families. Studies in this special issue contextualize unique challenges related to adoptive identity development. Adoption stigma and racial/ethnic identity complicate adoptive identity development. For example, Lee and colleagues demonstrate how identity exploration can be confounded by adoption stigma, microaggressions, and racial bias. Suter et al. similarly explain that Western interpretations of China’s strict birth limits and birth quotas tend to emphasize the brutality of the practice. Harsh judgment about Chinese Western international adoption practice stigmatizes Chinese birth parents and the children (primarily daughters) placed for adoption.

Missing information about genetic and health history also pose unique challenges for adoptive identity development. Goldberg and Virginia explain how developmental changes surrounding puberty intensify adoptive identity issues, made even more complex by adoptive parents’ lack of genetic relatedness to guide the child’s puberty transmission. Adoptive identity is also complex due to missing genetic health history (Yoon & Theiss) and original birth certificates (Rizzo Weller). In the absence of such basic information, adoptees piece together a sense of self amidst irreducible uncertainty. Yoon and Theiss explain the importance of social support to cope with the uncertainty, given that uncertainty can often not be reduced through information seeking. Rizzo Weller describes the ambiguity surrounding adoptive identity as intense and pervasive. Her introduction of the term “phantom” identity gives voice to the lingering present and possible self that cannot be known.

Adoptees at times attempted identity exploration to better develop a sense of self, including searching for birth relatives, advocating for the release of the original birth certificate, and considering genetic DNA testing (e.g., 23 and me, Ancestory.com). This exploration at times offered adoptees helpful information and greater clarity. Other times, however, new information prompted identity confusion and increased identity confusion.

Adoptees’ relational and social networks play an important role in grappling with identity challenges. Adoptive parents assist their children with identity challenges. Findings in this issue describe how adoptive parents educate adoptees and prepare them for bias (Lee et al.), provide social support when adoptees face uncertainty (Yoon and Theiss), assist them in accessing OBC and information about birth families (Rizzo Weller), and usher them through puberty while managing uncertainty (Goldberg & Virginia). Suter et al. explain how examination of nationalism, government policies, and widespread propaganda provide an alternate, non-linear, and more affective view of Chinese Western international adoption. Their focus on the propaganda that fueled the one child era provides a nuanced view that can help individuals adopted from China. Again, communication with and about adoption, adoptees, and their relational networks have important implications for identity development and affirmation.

Translational opportunities

The third contribution of this set of articles is the specific translational opportunities arising from the findings. Authors offer numerous suggestions for adoptive parents, medical practitioners, therapists, educators, and social service agencies. The specific suggestions offered at the end of article are thoughtful, innovative, and promising. For example, authors encourage adoption communities to develop perspective-taking skills to help them consider situations leading to one’s adoption (Suter) and closed records (Rizzo Weller) in ways that might promote a sense of empathy over abandonment. Authors also recognize the growing popularity of genetic DNA testing, including the increased potential to find birth relatives (Goldberg & Virginia; Suter), understand GFHH (Yoon & Theiss), and predict developmental changes during the transition to puberty (Goldberg & Virginia). Authors note the potential benefits and risks of this new type of personal information, including disappointing or failed attempts at birth family reunions, acquiring difficult information about one’s health background, and re-orienting one’s adoptive identity in light of new information. Adoptees and their families will need to carefully consider the positive and negative implications of genetic tests. Therapists, doctors, and genetic counselors can better assist adoptive family networks in this process by understanding adoption-specific nuances related to health history and identity.

Adoption professionals can also better support families in the pre- and post-adoption stage by applying implications presented in this special issue. Uncertainty was a prominent theme across the articles. Adoptive parents could benefit from strategies to cope with and increase tolerance for uncertainty. Pre-adoption trainings have the potential to prepare prospective parents. Pediatricians and therapists can approach interactions with the family with an eye toward the level of uncertainty the family is experiencing and how they feel about that uncertainty. Community educators can help adoptive parents better understand institutionalized racism and aid them in developing internal and external strategies to minimize the impact of microaggressions.

Importantly, translational opportunities include both interventions and preventive avenues. Although translational opportunities tend to focus on interventions after relational difficulty, preventive measures hold great promise. For example, pre-adoption training and continuing education, maintenance-focused family counseling, family enrichment programs, and adoptive family support groups have potential to help adoptive families strengthen relational competencies, routinize conversations about adoption, and facilitate transactional dialogue about adoption before the family reaches a crisis point.

Family communication research has a natural tie to psychoeducation, suggesting that existing adoption communication research can provide useful insights to adoption practitioners, mental health professionals, and adoptive and birth families. Future research-based, evidence-tested adoption communication training programs have great potential to support the adoption community.

Future research

This special issue constitutes an important advancement of adoption communication research. The findings presented here bring new insights into adoptive family dynamics. At the same time, important empirical questions remain. For example, new research emerging from neuroscience and fetal and infant learning suggests that adoption trauma may be more pervasive and consequential than initially understood (Perry, 2019).

Open adoption practices have become normative in domestic adoption (H. D. Grotevant, 2020). Adoptive kinship networks continue to be made up of “relationship pioneers,” with each triad trekking new ground to create a configuration that best serves the child (H.D. Grotevant, 2009, p. 311). More research is needed to articulate best practices for navigating emotional distance regulation between the adoptive and birth families while promoting connection between birth families and the children they have placed for adoption.

Issues of race continue to divide our world. Transracial and international adoptees experience discrimination and racial identity complexity in unique ways (Marcelli et al., 2020). As White supremacy continues to create and perpetuate a racially charged society, it is important to continue the work to understand how White adoptive parents experience the racism their child faces, socialize their child’s racial identity, protect their minority child against racism and discrimination, and combat racially charged violence and discrimination.

More voices are needed in adoption research. Adoption research tends to focus on adoptive parents’ experiences (Colaner & Horstman, 2021). More research is needed to give voice to birth family experiences, particularly birth father experiences, which are largely unrepresented in adoption research. Adopted children’s voices are also largely silenced. It is important to understand what adopted minors comprehend about their adoption as well as their communication needs and preferences. Additionally, adopted children are connected to vast webs of intergenerational relationships. More research is needed to understand how adoptees navigate relationships with biological family members, including siblings, grandparents, and extended families.

Disclosure statement

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