For an adopted child to search, even as an adult, it takes enormous courage. In many stories about adoption searches, adoptees express the fear of hurting their adoptive parents. Many adoptees worry that it might appear ungrateful for them to search. A recent survey said that over half of all adoptees do not tell their adoptive parents about a search until it is concluded.

Fears about hurting their adoptive parents cause many adoptees to postpone a search until their adoptive parents have passed away. Some are staunchly afraid of appearing ungrateful or disloyal. Even when their adoptive parents are no longer living, a number of adoptees refuse to search even though they might long to do so.

Do adopted children search:

1) to spite the parents who raised them?
2) because they are ungrateful to their adoptive parents?
3) because they want to replace their adoptive parents with their "real" parents?
4) because they are unhappy, maladjusted misfits?
5) because they do not love their adoptive parents?
6) to intentionally punish their adoptive parents and be cruel to them?

Rarely are any of these reasons that adoptees search. A search has little to do with an adoptee's relationship with their adoptive parents. Decades ago, adoptive parents were told to take their babies home and treat them "as they were their own." (Big sigh, at least we rarely say that any longer." They were told that if they were good enough parents, their child would never be curious or need to know their phantom birth parents.

Since nearly all adoptions were closed for many years, adoptive parents had few concerns that a search would even be possible. There was little threat of their children ever being able to find birth parents even if they wanted to. As for birth parents locating their relinquished children, that too was a remote possibility.

All that has changed - it is very different now. Why do adoptees really search? Stay tuned and I will tell you what I hear from adoptees who do search.