ABSTRACT

The idea of belonging somewhere is an ordinary and fundamental building-block of a sense of personal identity. In adolescence, every young person has to work out a more personally defined sense of identity. This involves an often painful process of separation from the earlier identity, which is given by virtue of one's child status within a family, an unquestioned simplicity and certainty about who one is. This normal adolescent pathway is often quite a difficult one for young people to traverse, and, indeed, in recent years concern about adolescent mental health has reached a high level. The attitude to the lost birth parents will, of course, be influenced by how much time the child spent with them, by the nature of their difficulties in caring for him, and by the circumstances in which he came to be removed from family care.