How to Talk to Your Kids About Adoption

My 4-year-old son and I have similar features. We both have dark eyebrows, brown eyes and thick dark-brown hair, though mine is salted with some gray. We also have similar personalities. We’re both very physical, like to fix things and love listening to Dave Mathews and the Counting Crows. But it’s purely coincidence. My son is adopted.

Our situation is hardly unique. Some estimates put the number of children under 18 living with adoptive parents in the United States at 700,000. That includes domestic adoptions like ours, which are private and hard to track, and foreign adoptions and foster-care adoptions, which are recorded by the government. In fact, some 2 million Americans stem from adoptive families.

Despite the growing number of adoptions in this country and, as a result, its social acceptance, I still froze the first time my son asked me, “Dad, do I have your eyes?” After a long pause, I said, “Yes, you have eyes like mine.” Then I explained to him, as my wife has several times before, that he grew in “another lady’s tummy.”

Unsure of the effectiveness of my answer, I couldn’t help but wonder if I said the right thing. Should I bring up the subject again soon, I asked myself, and, if so, how often? How prepared was I for tougher questions? How much do I tell other people about his history? These questions, I quickly learned, were common among adoptive parents. And while the answers are as different and unique as the children themselves, experts increasingly encourage parents to start talking about adoption early, keep the conversations positive and ongoing, and be receptive to their children’s questions and reactions.

Here are some strategies for talking to your kids about adoption:

Introduce the subject at age 3 or sooner.
Just 20 or 30 years ago, adoption was more of a mystery, one that many parents didn’t reveal until the child was 9 or older, says MaryAnn Curran, director of social services for the World Association for Children & Parents, one of the nation’s largest international nonprofit adoption agencies. Today, very few parents wait that long because research has shown that a more gradual introduction of the subject keeps better pace with the child’s own growth and psychological abilities.