Long-Term Effects of Adoption, Essay Example

Thesis

Adults who were adopted as children may struggle with issues related to self-esteem, personal identity, and grief associated with the lost of biological parents.

Part I

I came up with this thesis after reading several different sources related to adoption, and those issues seem to be common among adopted people, though to different degrees depending on a variety of circumstances. The long-term effects of adoption are not the same for every adopted person, and the resources I found show that there are several factors that can affect how well adults adopted people deal with issues related to adoption. One example is in open-adoption families where the child has contact with biological family members. These children sometimes have fewer problems associated with identity issues and loss compared to adopted children who do not know anything about their biological families. I do think that as I do more research my viewpoint on this may change, which may lead me to change my thesis.

Part II

Based on my reading so far, there are several different ways that adopted children can deal with issues related to adoption, and this appears to depend on how much they know about their biological parents and families. I think an interesting way to divide this into an outline will be to look at adopted people with no contact with their biological families, adopted people with some limited contact, and adopted people with completely open adoptions where they interact with their adopted families and their biological families. I will focus on research that explores issues related to the long-term effects of adoption, and also look for research that examines how adopted children respond to having more or less contact5 with their biological families. This way I could compare the different outcomes for each general category of adopted people to see how seriously some of them are affected by issues such as identity problems, grief, and self-esteem issues.