Infertility Issues
If you are thinking of adoption due to reasons of infertility, it is critical that you and your partner first deal with the genuine and sometimes overpowering grief that follows the infertility process -- a process which may have stretched over many years and may have included stressful and costly infertility treatments.

Adoptive parents owe it to themselves and to any children they adopt to come to terms with the issues raised by infertility before they pursue adoption. They both need to be 100 percent sure they want to adopt and shed the view that adoption is a second best option.

Many adoption agencies will preach this as well -- insisting that parents work through their issues of infertility grief first, then come back to adopt later. Ultimately, this can mean laying the dream of having a biological child to rest, which can understandably be a very, very painful admission.
 
An Adopted Child's Perspective
Even if a child feels or believes that being adopted is the best thing that ever happened to them, it is important to be aware that there are a lot of emotions an adopted child may go through, either now or in the future.

Adopted children can adapt and adjust well into their new family, with time, patience and a lot of love and attention. In the first two years of life, children are normally building a sense of trust through their attachments to the adults who love and care for them.

When that does not happen (as is often the case in orphanages), it can take longer for the adopted child to establish that sense of trust and reciprocal unconditional love – much to the anguish and hurt of their new parents. But it can happen.

Once old enough to understand, adoptees (either as children, or later as adults) may experience recurring feelings of loss, rejection and abandonment by their birth parents. They may wonder why they were placed up for adoption or what was 'wrong' with them that caused their birth parents to give them up. So, just like for some parents, grief can also be a common emotion for adoptees.

Unfortunately for adoptees, if their adoptive family is generally a happy one, the adoptee may also experience guilt for their feelings of grief – so they can be doubly-tormented. Along with grief and guilt, an adoptee may react to their experience of loss through feelings of anger, numbness, depression, anxiety or fear.

These feelings may occur anytime in life, but especially during emotionally-charged milestones such as marriage, the birth of a child, or the death of a parent. Note also that adoptees who experience feelings of loss or abandonment during adulthood may or may not recognise a connection between their current feelings and their old feelings about the initial loss of the birth parents.

Those adopted may also have identity and self-esteem issues, especially prevalent as they reach adolescence.

Questions about their biological family, why he or she was placed for adoption, what became of the birth parents, whether the adolescent resembles the birth parents in looks or in other characteristics, and where the adolescent 'belongs' in terms of education, social class, culture and peer group can also confuse an already-questioning teenager.

The question of the influence of nature (inherited traits) versus nurture (acquired traits) may become very real to the adopted adolescent, who is trying to determine the impact of all of these influences on his or her own identity -- trying to make sense of it all.

As always, if you or your adopted children need to talk with a professional about any issues that either of you are experiencing, please do so.


International Adoption
Adopting a child from another country almost always means that the adoptive family will become a transracial or a cross-cultural family. Studies have found that transracially-adopted children appear to handle adoption identity issues better than most because they cannot pretend to be like everyone else.

But again, the adoption experience varies from person to person. Interestingly, transracially-adopted children tend to identify with their parents' race more so than their own.

In order therefore for an adopted child to develop a broader sense of their identity and heritage (and perhaps greater self-esteem and pride), it is usually recommended that parents incorporate elements of the adopted child's original culture into their day-to-day life, including friendships with people of the child's ethnicity, food, and traditions into the family lifestyle.

For parents, do not be scared to do this because embracing another culture can actually be one of the unanticipated joys of inter-country adoption.