Helping Adults Who Were Adopted as Children

Like most other western countries, there was something of a boom period in adoptions in Australia between the 50s and the mid-70s, with those adopted children of course now being adults. Although changes to legislation in the early 90s have made it easier to access adoption records, those adopted in the closed era still continue to teach us about the lifelong nature of adoption. For the last 10 years, my colleagues and I have been conducting research on issues facing these adult adoptees. In this paper, I will focus mainly on two of those studies. The first involved a comparison of 100 adult adoptees and 100 non-adoptees in terms of self-esteem, identity processing styles, and perceptions of the parenting they received from their adoptive parents. The second study involved comparisons of a further group of adoptees and non-adoptees, and included two questionnaire phases and an interview phase. We looked at variables such as attachment, adult relationships, secrecy, depression, emotional arousability, and search and reunion issues. Both studies focused on Anglo-Australian participants because (a) they were the most common adoptions in Australia during that era, and (b) indigenous and international adoptions raise a host of other issues unique to those situations. However, many of the points I cover would also be relevant to other groups of adoptees. In this paper, I’ll be focusing on some of the main findings and the implications of those findings for practitioners. More details about the methodologies can be found in the publications listed at the end of this paper.