Adoption Lit: Quiz Time!

So hopefully this post is fun and maybe you'll learn something.  No one needs a quiz, but I'm doing my best to keep things interesting.  When we took PAC (classes) we did this exercise as a group.  Here are the rules- below I will list a group of statements.  Read each statement and decide if it is positive adoption language, or not.  I will give the results below.

1.  Do you have any children of your own?
2.  She's never been able to find her real family.
3.  They have two children of their own and an adopted child.
4.  We just had a visit with her birth parents.
5.  Our adopted child just graduated from college with a degree in business.
6.  I was placed for adoption.
7.  An adoption plan was made for Jimmy.
8.  My parents were not the natural parents to my sister.

I thought I would include a paragraph from the article "Speaking Positively: Using Respectful Adoption Language" by Patricia Irwin Johnston.  It's kind of funny.

"Though in adoption parent and child are linked by love and by law, the fact that they are not connected by blood has often meant that some people are unwilling to acknowledge their relationship as genuine and permanent.  Thus they use qualifiers ("This is Bill's adopted son") in situations where they would not dream of doing so in a non-adoptive family ("This is Bill's birth-control-failure son" or "This is Mary's caesarean-section daughter.")"

That makes me laugh.  And the answers are...

1.  Do you have any children of your own? NOT- if you must ask, say biological children.

2.  She's never been able to find her real family. NOT- again use biological.  Are the people that raise you a fake family if you're not biologically linked?

3.  They have two children of their own and an adopted child. NOT- they just have 3 children.

4.  We just had a visit with her birth parents. POSITIVE

5.  Our adopted child just graduated from college with a degree in business. NOT- Ha! Can you imagine after raising a child for 22 years feeling the need to specify they were adopted?!

6.  I was placed for adoption. POSITIVE- this is my favorite one because I learned an interesting piece of history that I will attempt to pass on.  The opposite of this statement would be: I was put up for adoption.  The term "put up" is negative because it comes from the days when children in need of families were placed on trains and taken to cities where anyone could go and adopt them.  The children were raised in the air or "put up" and people would call out if they wanted the child.  Not quite the process we went through...This is a sad piece of adoption history and agencies cringe at the term "put up".

7.  An adoption plan was made for Jimmy. POSITIVE

8.  My parents were not the natural parents to my sister. NOT-in general these qualifiers aren't necessary, but again there is nothing unnatural or fake about adoption.

I hope you found this interesting.  Some of these examples are easy to say and I know I've made mistakes.  Steve and I are not easily offended and certainly do not want people to be worried about what they say in front of us.  We hope this post is perceived in the informative way it is intended (i.e. we don't want to sound preachy).