Do Parents Love Adopted Children Differently than Biological Children?
Don’t miss this week’s New York Magazine feature on transracial adoption. The author, Emily Nussbaum, centers the piece around a central question:
Celebrity blended families have become a cultural flash point, revealing a broad anxiety: Do parents really love adopted children differently than their own offspring?"
In her interviews with several families with both adopted and biological children, Nussbaum uncovers many layers of adoption and shows the struggle parents face when trying to determine whether their children’s behavior is a reflection of adoption, race, sibling rivalry, or age. These families are quite candid in explaining their reasons for adopting, their reactions to meeting their adoptive children’s biological family members, and their struggles upon returning to the U.S. with their children.
Nussbaum draws her own conclusion that our culture might be too obsessed with genetic explanations for our children’s behavior ("He has your eyes." Or, "She gets her stubbornness from me.")
In a country that has gone mildly bonkers for sociobiological
explanations, adoptive parents may be the last holdouts. It’s not that
they don’t believe that anything is genetic; they do. But they take
seriously the idea that that stuff is not the be-all and end-all,
because they need to in order to love children from such different
sources."
She ends with this quote from the mother a four-year-old son (biological) and one-year-old daughter (adopted from Ethiopia):
My husband is six foot seven, highly educated, intelligent, athletic… With Huck, for three years, I was expecting him to be those things. And then I brought home Tana, and I have no expectations. And I realize the injustice I’m doing to my biological child. It’s just very freeing—to find that I’m so excited to see who these two little people are going to be. Because it made me realize, I have no idea. And before, I thought I kind of knew who Huck was going to be! I don’t have that feeling anymore. Because Tana taught me that."
If I talk only from my personal experience, I can say “yea, parents love adopted children differently than biological chidlren.” I was adopted at 9, and I lived with 6 years with my birth parents and 7 years with my birth dad.
My birth parents coudln’t give me anything (I mean materially) but they love me and I felt loved. My A-parents gave me everything that I never had with my birth parents and they also loved me but their love was very possessive. I knew that my a-parents loved me but I missed my b-dad’s love during 3 first years. I can’t explain why but I knew that they loved me differently.
My a-mom loved me in different way than my birth mom.I felt that my a-mom loved me but she loved me possessively: I felt that I was not her child but her possession. I have wonder: “Would she have loved me differently if I were her biological child?” I don’t have the right answer because she has no other child than me but I believe that she would have loved me in the same way if I were her biological child.
My a-dad also loved me in a different way than my b-dad. If I compared them, my b-dad always looked me with a “pure” love while my a-dad started to look at me as a sexual pleasure for him when I turned 12. Comparing my experience with other women (in my therapy group) who have been abused by their biological fathers, there is no difference between them and me: I loved my a-father, just like they loved their b-fathers; my relationship between my a-father and me was not different of the relationships between the b-fathers and the other women. So, comparing to other women who have been abused, my a-dad love was not different than the dads who love their b-children.
But if I compare my a-dad’s love for me to his love for his 5 biological children, I can say that he loved me differently. First, my a-dad was less severe and kinder with me than his b-children (that is according to my a-mom). Second, he has never abused any of his biological children but he has abused of me. I believe that abusing me was not wrong for him because I was only an adopted child (not blood related); if he exceeded the limit, it is because we were not blood related. I know that blood relation was very important to him because he liked to recall his family trees and I heard him talking about his (biological) grand children.
It is in the nature (and the instinct) of the man to procreate and leave a blood lineage in the world, so I think that very naturally, parents love adopted children differently than biological children, but I know that many parents can love adopted children in the same way than biological children because they made the choice to love them like their biological children: love is a choice (if we say that love is a feeling, not is choice, that is another kind of love).
I can say as a father of three biological children and 2 from China the answer is unequivocally NO. There is no difference in the way I love or how I feel about all my children. I do not refer to them as my “adopted” children, they are just all my kids. Kim’s story saddens me. The abuse put upon her by her adoptive father should never be put upon any child. Of course the adoptive father abusing her is wrong! Your story, Kim sounds very sad and I believe that it has for obvious reasons skewed your opinion of international adoption. My hope is that stories like yours are far and few between.
We are a hugely mixed family. My ex-wife had a bio daughter when I met her; I raised her as mine, we added a sister, I eventually adopted the original daughter. We divorced; my (second) wife had a (bio) son, who left us for good when he was sixteen. We had a bio daughter; then my first-marriage daughters left to join my ex-wife (in CA) for many years. We raised Christy almost as an only child; then, when she was 12, we went to China to get Becky Jade.
My stepson is not my son in any real sense. I had a few years to get to know him, but he essentially never forgave his mother, or me, for “horning in”. I could not love him – I never got the chance.
My “earlier” daughters, although they left us fairly early on – ages ten and six – eventually reconciled. I have NEVER felt any different toward the elder (adopted) daughter than towards the younger (bio – exwife) daughter. They are my daughters forever – and now they are my wife’s, as well. They have come to understand that their bio mother was (for many, many reasons) incapable of mothering them – so they have, in a manner of speaking, “adopted” Barb as their emotional mother.
I never had any trouble loving our youngest bio daughter – in a way, this was increased by the sense I had that she symbolized the re-bonding my second wife and I went through with each other. Becky Jade was originally another bond between us – we started the adoption process purely because my wife was so evidently in need of “somebody to mother”, and there were no grandchildren on the horizon. After she arrived here, and learned English, however, Becky began to display a strong need to bond with me, her father; at times, it seemed like she was shortchanging her mother, and my wife had some major issues with it.
Things have settled back to normal, now. From my experience, I would respectfully disagree with John – my love for Becky (both ways) is MUCH different from anything I have experienced before – with either of my wives, with any of our children. It’s a wonderful, beautiful relationship. To some extent, it’s the result of having “gone through the fires” of marriage, divorce and remarriage, and children who didn’t come out exactly as we would have liked them too. And some of it, I’m sure, is from Becky’s own unknown (to us) history.
Inevitably, just as with my older daughters, I am equally sure this will fade, and be replaced by adult relationships – I wouldn’t WANT her to remain ten years old forever. I’ll sure miss it when it’s gone!
Let me give you a small example. My work is such, that I can wait here in the morning, until breakfast is done, and my wife drives Becky off to school. We have a ritual: Daddy reads to Becky at the breakfast table (currently, we’re working our way through the Rowling oeuvre); then they pile into the car; I kiss them both goodbye – and then they both roll down their car windows, and carol, “We love you!!” into the frosty fall air.
Yesterday, when I called, “I love you back!”, Becky kept her window down for a bit, and called out, “I love you more, because I’m LITTLER!”
Can’t explain it, can’t even make sense of it – I just know I never got that before!
Peace,
JDM
I had bio parents who never loved or wanted me and my siblings, and were emotionally and sometimes physically abusive. I now have 4 wonderful children, 2 bio and 2 adopted, and I believe love has nothing to do with blood. If that were true, we could never love our spouses or friends. I love all 4 of my children with all my heart. My youngest child, who was adopted, is the most cuddly; I adore her, and hope she never stops wanting to cuddle. Actually, one of my bio children is very challenging emotionally; so if I was going to show favoritism, it probably would be towards my easy going adopted children and not my challenging bio, but I love him as well.