ABSTRACT
Chapter 9 turns to issues of identity construction in the experience of adoption, for both mothers/parents and children. Adopted children, especially if they are older than infants, will have some formative experience that they will bring to the adoptive relationship and family which may have some significant impact on their identity construction, but also on their parents’. I discuss issues of attachment in children’s development, and argue that in adoptive families, parents need to think more deliberately about how attachment is created and to consider it a part of the “job” of parenting, whereas in biological families it is generally allowed to form “naturally”. I reflect on the power of naming, and issues of naming that we experienced in the forming of our family, in terms of how we as parents wished to be named, and how the children wished to name themselves, showing how our naming was integral to the formation of our relationships. I consider two traditional theories of identity in philosophy, Hegel’s and Sartre’s, and argue that although both are unhealthy in certain ways, each may need to be tolerated (and then hopefully overcome) in adopted children’s identity work. The work of identity construction is made clear in the (reflective) adoptive experience, as is the relational nature of it.
