Adoption

A "Shared Fate": Life in the Adoptive Family

By Donna McCloskey

Becoming a parent through adoption is a very different experience from becoming a parent through procreation. As obvious as this fact may be, it is one that adoptive parents sometimes want to deny. This is understandable, especially if it awakens painful memories of pre-adoption losses from infertility or miscarriages. On top of past losses, the adoptive family must also live in a society that tends to think of them as not quite a "real" family.

While David Kirk—himself an adoptive father—would be the first to assert that adoptive parents deserve their "full place in the cultural sun of family life," he is also the maverick sociologist who, in his 1964 book Shared Fate, encouraged adoptive parents to acknowledge the differences between themselves and other parents.

In his 1995 booklet, Looking Back, Looking Forward, Dr. Kirk admits that, "When Shared Fate first appeared, it ran counter to much that was practiced in adoption, by parents and even by professionals. Most believed it was best for adoptive families to try to simulate 'natural' families, in other words to practice 'rejection of difference'." But being different does not mean being second-rate.

Dr. Kirk's own experiences with adoption, as well as his research with adoptive families in both Canada and the United States, were the paths that led to his "shared fate" theory. In a recent paper ("Adoption in a New Key", 2000), he says, "Shared Fate showed that adoptive families tend to function best if they do not try to simulate natural families." In fact, "The superiority of 'acknowledgment of difference' over 'rejection of difference' has become accepted as fact in the literature of adoption. But the question, 'In what sense is acknowledgment superior to rejection of difference?', is often ignored."

Dr. Kirk goes on to say that it is the acknowledgment of shared differences that "helps in making child and parent into a cohesive family unit. It helps, but is not sufficient. Living and working together in a 'shared fate' atmosphere should over the long haul create a distinct family ethos, and with it a sense of common destiny, a jointly made history—experienced, remembered, and retold."

Two excerpts from Dr. Kirk's writing will help clarify what is meant by an adoptive family's "shared fate." The first excerpt is again from Looking Back, Looking Forward:

"Shared fate" is an ongoing process, with somewhat opposite developments for parents and children. On the one hand adopters begin to settle down into routines of everyday life, forgetting about obstacles and their special parenthood. On the other hand the adopted child, growing in understanding of what "being born-into-the-family" and "being adopted-into-the family" mean, may grow restless. That is why adoptive parents must remind themselves from time to time how they got where they are. They will need such reminders in order to remain sensitive to the child's quest. That, however, does not mean that adoptive parents should constantly or frequently remind their child that he or she is adopted. The "shared fate" approach means that parents must make themselves available to the child and that they recognize the call if and when the child "rings the bell."

Like their adoptive parents, adopted children have, by definition, also suffered a loss. Even if they were adopted at birth and have never known their birth mother or father, they may at times feel that something is missing. Absent birth parents can become shadow figures to be mourned and wondered about at different times throughout life. The issue of missing parents is one way in which the child feels "different" from other children, and just one of the issues that adoptive parents must be prepared to address "if and when the child 'rings the bell.'"

The second excerpt—this one from Dr. Kirk's book Adoptive Kinship (1985)—raises the issue of the child?s identity and place in the adoptive family:

How do our identities come into being? How do we learn to become the people we become over a lifetime? The sociological view, first fully formulated by G.H. Mead, is that it begins by what he called "role-taking," namely taking the attitudes and views that others have of us as our own, by learning to see ourselves through their eyes, and acting by means of their standards. This view makes the process of socialization, of child-rearing and later adult learning, into the mechanism by which personal identity is shaped. Since the family is the forum in which, for the majority of people, these early learnings take place, we can regard the family as crucial for the creation of individual identity. There the person is given those earliest significant experiences, which make up the core of the social self. The family provides for the developing person a matrix of belongingness. One becomes similar to the others in the family because one is considered to belong with them, and accepts that view.

When an infant is born into a family, typically the members [have] one query: whom does s/he resemble? It has often seemed to me that these people are not so much concerned with some particular likeness as with membership and belongingness. They may really be asking whether the new member resembles others in the group sufficiently to become one of them. Any external likeness is taken as reassurance that all is well. Nonetheless, the questioners would probably admit that they themselves are not unimportant in making the new member into the likeness of the group. They would probably recognize that their ways of speaking and walking, their gestures and their preferences enter the life of the newcomer so that they themselves are crucial in helping to form his or her identity. Of course what also irritates some of them is that the new member does not simply become a composite likeness of them all, but also remains to an extent new, separate, and strange—marking him or her as an individual.

In fact, once the ground of belongingness has been assured, the growing child can afford to note and act out his or her own separateness and individuality with impunity. The family is thus of prime importance as the setting in which one becomes identified with a group of special people, people among whom one gains an identity both as a member and as a separate person.

Let us consider a factor that aids in this process: parents and [their biological] children have a strong tie to each other, a tie that they know existed before their social intercourse began. That is so because they have in common a bio-social past which makes them each part of a long line of kin. It is this prima facie connection that the adoptive parent-child relationship lacks. In societies where adoption is a valued and common pattern of parenting, the lack of the blood tie may mean little; in North America it [means] a great deal, surprising as that may appear. Thus adoption must in some way reflect this lack.

At this point I want to tell of an event which occurred in my own family [in 1955]. Our daughter Francie, then not quite five, had pressed to have the story of Cinderella read to her at bedtime. Evening after evening she asked for it, and then she would have nightmares and wet her bed. [My wife] Ruth Kirk began to suspect a connection between Francie's insistence on the story and her nightmares and bedwetting. But before Ruth could decide how to deal with it, Francie made the overture herself. She said casually, "Mommy, if I had a stepmother, what would she do to me? Would she be cruel?" Recognizing in this question our little daughter's struggle with the meaning of her adoption, Ruth replied: "Francie dear, I too am someone like a tepmother. I was unable to bear you in my body, but I love you very, very much. Perhaps there are stepmothers who are bad, who would be mean to their children. Cinderella's stepmother was a very bad mother but only because she did not love Cinderella."

Why bring up such dangerous stuff, I thought at the time. Who knows what Francie might make of it? Why emphasize a difference that we all know is real for adoptive parents and children? I wanted to interrupt Ruth and change the subject, but somehow I thought better of it. And it was good that I held my peace, for after a pause during which Francie seemed occupied with her toys she said: "Now I can have a good dream." And so it seems to have happened, for the bedwetting and the nightmares did not recur. I was aware that something important had occurred, but did not realize that this event was a preview of what subsequent research was to tell me impersonally: it was really a demonstration of "shared fate" in action.