An adopted child or adult are often referred to as adoptees. Being an adoptee means being part of a community of people who relate over their identities as an adopted child. Some adoptees have known for years that they were born to a different mother and others don't find out until later in life, referred to as Late Discovery Adoptees.
How you relate to your adoption depends on how open your family and environment were to discussing your pre-adoption life. As adoptees grow older, the questions become more pressing and the related emotions more complex. One of the biggest concerns of adoptees is their past and as adoptees get older, questioning why they were placed into adoption and asking who made that decision for them may sit on the forefront of their adoptive identity.
Thousands of adoptees register for search centers every year, according to Adoptee Search Center & Registry. Depending on the state an adoption was processed in, information about an adoptees past can be more difficult to retrieve. The past can be difficult to track down and also hard to handle in particular, if the birth parents were ruled unfit to raise a child by the state or suffered from addiction, a disability or had the adoptee as a result of a rape.
It's normal for adult adoptees to be curious about their pasts and isn't a sign of discontent with their adoptive life.
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