Adoption/identity

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Adoption And Identity Formation
There has been an enormous amount of research conducted about adoptees and their
problems with identity formation. Many of the researchers agree on some of the
causes of identity formation problems in adolescent adoptees, while other
researchers conclude that there is no significant difference in identity
formation in adoptees and birth children. This paper will discuss some of the
research which has been conducted and will attempt to answer the following
questions: Do adoptees have identity formation difficulties during adolescence?

If so, what are some of the causes of these vicissitudes? Is there a significant
difference between identity formation of adoptees and nonadoptees? The National

Adoption Center reports that fifty-two percent of adoptable children have
attachment disorder symptoms. It was also found that the older the child when
adopted, the higher the risk of social maladjustment (Benson et al., 1998). This
is to say that a child who is adopted at one-week of age will have a better
chance of normal adjustment than a child who is adopted at the age of ten. This
may be due in part to the probability that an infant will learn how to trust,
where as a ten-year-old may have more difficulty with this task, depending on
his history. Eric Erickson, a developmental theorist, discusses trust issues in
his theory of development. The first of Erickson`s stages of development is

Trust v. Mistrust. A child who experiences neglect or abuse can have this stage
of development severely damaged. An adopted infant may have the opportunity to
fully learn trust, where as an older child may have been shuffled from foster
home to group home as an infant, thereby never learning trust. Even though Trust
v. Mistrust is a major stage of development, the greatest psychological risk for
adopted children occurs during the middle childhood and adolescent years (McRoy
et al., 1990). As chi...