A Q&A with Amy Trotter, Holt’s post-adoption services director and an adoptee from Vietnam, and Elliot Bliss, a Korean adoptee and Holt’s adoptee programs supervisor, on the importance of adoptee voices and adoptee-led research — and how they have informed and strengthened adoption and post-adoption practices.
Q: What kind of research are adoptees doing?
(Amy): There is a lot of great research that adoptees are doing that’s really looking at the outcomes and the impact of adoption. We are seeing research in the areas of identity, grief and loss, psychological and emotional wellbeing, transracial adoption, birth family search dynamics, the need for support, and the importance of connection.
Q: How and when did adoptee-led research start to develop and start to pick up momentum.
(Elliot): There is a lot of great research on adoptees and the impact of adoption on children, but a lot more research has been published by adoptees within the past decade or so. I think of researchers like JaeRan Kim, whose research includes studying families who adopted children with disabilities, Susan Branco, who created the “adoptee consciousness model,” and Hollee McGinnis, who researches how early life experiences affect adoptees’ long-term health and wellbeing.
(Amy): We’ve seen an increase in adoptee research as the current movement and need for adoptees is expanding from initially seeking and being in community, to still wanting to be in community, but also seeking social and systematic change. Over the years we’ve seen a growing number of adoptees enter the research/scholar field and start to examine the historical and current dynamic and impact of adoption.
Q: Why is adoptee-led research important?
(Amy): We have learned and are still learning a lot about the long-term impact of adoption on the emotional, social and psychological wellbeing of adoptees. Before professionals started hearing more from adoptees, there was this thought that adoption was just a one-time act, a child was placed through adoption and it’s done; this thought is very one-dimensional and more in the direction of the adoptive parent’s voice. Adoptee-led research is lending more dimension and texture to adoption. Adoptee-led research is additionally supporting the notion that adoption is this lifelong process and it affects adoptees throughout their whole lives.
We’re learning more and more about some of the long-term implications of adoption and I think it’s really helping families to look at it from an adoptee point of view. We want families to be successful, and we want to help parents be able to be there for their adopted children.
Amy Trotter, Director of Post Adoption Services
Q: So how has all this research influenced adoption practices?
(Amy): We are starting to see more of a shift happening in adoption. It’s so exciting to see more adoptee voices and adoptee-led research coming to the forefront. This change is really reshaping the lens of how we view and understand the bigger implications of adoption practices. The dominant narrative is definitely changing, and there is so much we can learn from this transformation. As professionals, it helps us to better prepare families to raise healthy children.
Q: How have adoptee voices and adoptee-led research informed the development of post-adoption services?
(Amy): For Holt, the importance and value of adoptee voices has impacted aspects of post-adoption services. Holt has a post-adoption team primarily made up of adoptees. There are several post-adoption programs that don’t have adoptees on the team or leading it. Our leadership understands the value of, if we’re going to provide these services, we need to have adoptees in these roles helping to guide us.
Q: How does having a post-adoption team made up of adoptees make a difference?
(Elliot): I think it makes a difference in that we are able to advocate for the needs of adoptees and the diverse perspectives that we hear on a daily basis. We are also able to say that as adoptees speaking to adoptees, we understand and we are here to support you.
I also think of how [adoptee voices at Holt have encouraged] training and education not only for parents, but for staff. … Now I think it’s for the most part pretty accepted that adoptees can love their adoptive families, but also hold grief and loss for their birth family and their culture that they lost. And that it’s okay to have both those feelings.
(Amy): We’re learning more and more about some of the long-term implications of adoption and I think it’s really helping families to look at it from an adoptee point of view. We want families to be successful, and we want to help parents be able to be there for their adopted children.
Did you know Holt provides support to all adoptees?
Every adoptee has a unique and complex life experience. Holt strives to support all adoptees, regardless of their placing agency, by providing help with birth search, citizenship and more.
We have always believed that more counseling is needed , both pre and post for parents but also for the children. It may be because we have been uniquely prepared for the roll of parents of adopted children because of our own childhood experiences and can better understand their needs.
Do not just counsel the adoptee without counseling the parents too.