Would you have figured out you were adopted had you not been told?
I cannot believe how many people here think keeping the truth from an adoptee is ok.
Have you ever known an adoptee who wasn't told not to know or suspect?
I have to laugh. I am 5'10, dark hair, dark eyes and athletic. My mom is 5'1 Swedish with blond hair blue eyes and very dainty. I love her dearly but we are nothing alike. Yep, I would have known alright. Pretty obvious.
Do you think A parents are foolin' themselves by thinking they can hide the truth?
I am with you cruzgirl. It's pretty ridiculous and ignorant to think you can get away with not telling adoptees they are adopted. It's downright cruel in my book.
I'm 5'2", weigh a 108 pounds and have dark hair and dark eyes.
My amom is 5'10'', weighs 150 pounds and is pale with blue eyes and blonde hair.
If that isn't enough to illustrate the differences between us physically, I am Asian and she is white.
It's obvious as hell that we are not biologically related. If she tried to tell me otherwise it would be an insult to my intelligence as well as being cowardly on her part.
What does she lose from telling me the truth? Is she afraid I might want to seek my natural parents? That comes with the territory of adoption.
If you don't want to tell your children they are adopted and you don't want to deal with the tough issues and the difficult questions they will ask you, you need to FORGET about adopting.
Don't be a freaking liar. Source(s): Surprisingly self actualized adult adoptee
Yep. Not just because we were oceans apart in personality, likes, dislikes, but because I'm not the same ethnicity they are. I'm First Nations. They are white. I look like no one in my adoptive family. They are all very fair haired and fair skinned. Aside from the looks issue, I think I would have figured things out due to lack of documentation, photos, or any evidence of my existance prior to 6 months old.
yes. I think those Aparents who choose to not tell their children the truth of their origins are indeed fooling themselves, as well as setting themselves up to be loathed, not trusted, on top of having everything they ever said or did questioned when the truth does come out. I also think it's abusive and self serving to keep someone's truth from them in such a manner.
i think that a child who is told right for the start that they are adopted learn to accept it more. i was adopted and i grew up knowing it and have found it quite easy to cope with it when other friends i have who have just found out have become angry with there adopted perents.
luv hayley x Source(s): adopted child
Oh yeah, I woulda figured it out for sure. By the time I was 8 I was already taller than my amom, and almost as tall as my adad. I stopped growing at 12 (at a whopping 6'1). While I have blondish hair like my adad, we look nothing alike. I also don't resemble my amom's family (they have olive skin and black hair).
Oh, and I'm also not like my afam in personality at all, either. It was better for me just to know I was adopted, rather than feeling just like a wacky freak! :) Source(s): adult adoptee
I notice that you and a lot of other people use the word A parent instead of saying adoptive parent. It lets me know that you think little of your adoptive mother and you like to classify them in one group. As for me, I'm a black woman and my husband is a white man. We already have 5 children and we plan to adopt one for the first time. We also do not plan on telling the child its adopted. If the child needed to know who its biological family was, it would have never been given up for adoption to start with.
EDIT: My husband is Romanian with a thick Romanian accent. I am black American with an American accent. While all of our children speak fluent Romanian with accents just like their father and have good english, they have no doubt that I am their mother.
EDIT: Heather, I don't care what you think of me. And no I am not new to Yahoo Answers and seeing as how there is nothign you or anyone else can do about it. If I have a question I will ask it in any section it fits in. Seeing as how you are such an ase I'd much rather block you than have to contend with you just answering my questions to be rude or insult me in some way as I am sure you would do.
Oh wow you don't like, who gives a ****.
I would have known if for no other reason than there is no record of me until I'm six months old. My mother was camera and scrapbook crazy. There's not a snowball's chance in a hot place of her not clipping the birth announcement, taking 100 pictures of her pregnant and 500 pictures of her baby from birth to six months. She would have recorded each and every time she changed a diaper during those six months.
The fact that I outgrew her clothes when I was nine would have been a big enough hint, but the lack of documentation of the first six months of my life would have been a dead giveaway.
Not to mention that the clerk of court in the county where I was born told me I was adopted and my birth record was sealed when I went to get my BC. I already knew that, but I didn't know I had to go through the state back then. I thought I could still get a copy through the county. I was wrong, and if I didn't know I was adopted before, I sure would have known after that day.
If I wasn't told, my amended birth certificate would have been enough to question my situation. I'll rephrase that my Birth Extract would have been enough. I didn't get access to my amended birth certificate until my mid-teens.
Everyone else around me had an authentic birth document with complete details of name, date, location, parents, informant, witnesses and registrar. All I had was a piece of paper just acknowledging my existence: name, date, location, registrar and nothing else.
Absolutely. Not only do I look nothing like my a family, I don't act like them either.
While there are some adoptees who were not told until they were adults and may not have suspected they were adopted, they always knew "something was not right".
Take the animal world, for instance. We've all seen where dogs have taken an abandoned kitten and nursed it, and treated it as if were one of her puppies. But at the end of it all, the kitten is still a feline.even if the kitten is never exposed to another cat- their DNA will always shine through, because that's how DNA works, lol. Source(s): reality
I would have known. Even though we are all "white" I don't look a thing like any of them. I was taller than my mother by 5th grade, taller than my father by 8th. I have different eye color than anyone I've seen in my a-family. I have a different build, a different proportion. I would have figured it out by looks alone. Emotionally I am way different also.
I cannot fathom in this day and age that someone would try to hide this information from their adopted child. It is abusive not to tell them. Victoria, you really need to read more from the perspective of the child. You really need to hear every point of view and make up your own mind. Source(s): Adoptee, mother of 5
Yes, they're fooling themselves. Eventually, something clicks. Kids aren't stupid, and it could be something as simple as finding out that your blood types don't add up, or realizing that there is no history of your mother's pregnancy.
I can't stress this enough, Victoria:
THE ADOPTEE'S INFORMATION BELONGS TO THE ADOPTEE!
Please, please educate yourself more. Source(s): Adoptee and Adoptive Mom
While I agree that it's not *right* to keep this information from adoptees (and my children both know about their adoptions), I also think that in some cases the children would not suspect if they weren't told.
My children look enough like us that I don't think anyone would suspect they are adopted based on their looks. And there are a lot of "Late Discovery Adoptees" who seem blind-sided when they find out as adults that they were adopted. If they'd "figured it out," I doubt it would be such a shock.
Victoria... you are a new face to this section ...I particalrly do not like.
I don't think you are ready to adopt...based on your prev. questions/answers such as the below.
You want to adopt b/c you don't feel like being pregnant! Ha Ha Ha
So you would rather adopt for convience? Nice.
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Should I consider a surrogate mother?
My husband and I want another child and we already have 5. I have told him that we could adopt simply because I am done with being pregnant. My twins will be a year old soon. The adoption process takes quite a while and even if you pay all the fees you are not promised to receive a child. So I have also considered finding a surrogate mother. Would that be the best option?
Oh i think i would have figured it out eventually. But my adoption was kept inside my family(that is, i was adopted by a family member of my bio fathers)
To Victoria: Wow, you have a lot to learn. You havent the slightest idea why me, or anyone else was given up for adoption. nice to know you plan on lying to a child. And yes, not telling them they are adopted is lying. I use A parent simply as a form of short hand. A Parent for adotive parent, B parent for biological parent. Althought i've been trying to use first parent more.
Of course.
Besides secrets don't remain secrets forever and by the time they come out, all trust is gone. Source(s): The Story of the Ugly Duckling
I was told I was adopted. I knew other people who knew they were adopted. I don't know of anyone who didn't know but suspected they were. My adoptive parents were able to pick me out based on my nationality and traits so I would 'look' something like they looked. I am sure other people have done this so that they could pull off not telling the child. I think that had I not been told, I would have never guessed. I look enough like the two of them combined to have believed I was theirs.
Its crazy to talk of not telling them. They will find out sooner or later, the truth always outs, and the later it is the more distressed they are when they find out. The actor who plays Harold Bishop is the Oz soap Neighbours was middle aged when he found out he was adopted, and he was absolutely devastated. People who are told when they are little can grow up being perfectly happy about it. People who think they're bio then find out they're not, don't take it well at all!! Don't do this!!
I was 2 so I didnt need to be told, I remembered..would I have figured it out otherwise ?? Probably..but I'd never have guessed the FM was my biological mother. My AM was Indian, and I was white, and I don't look like her, but I actually look more like her than the FM.
I was an extremely tall child, narrow build, long light brown hair, blue eyes, extremely pale skin that didnt tan.
FM - 5'1", very big boned, short red hair, brown eyes, dark skin (oddly for a redhead)
AM - 5'5" but long-shape, narrow build, long black hair
I obviously have different colouring from my AM but the outlines/bone structure are similar. Our silhouettes would look like mother and daughter.
My friend had a father who was South African coloured, and a mother who was a very pale blue eyed redhead. All the children looked white, you'd never have guessed they didnt have a white father. My friend had blue eyes and dark blonde hair. So I might not have guessed I was adopted. Their father was darker than my mother.
Answers: My parents didn't tell me until was 8. I outright asked my mom if I was adopted at about 7 (she denied it then, but has since told me everything she knows). It wasn't so much that I thought I looked different... it was a document I happened to see. My aparents mirror my fparents in ethnicity and my personality so close to my adad's.
My amom's first cousin was adopted as an infant in the BSE. She's over 50 now and as far as I know, was never told by her parents. The ENTIRE family knew, so I guess someone might have let it slip. If she did find out, she has never told anyone about it.
I don't see the point in hiding the truth. It has a way of making itself known in time and the consequences can be devastating -- not the truth, but the fact that it was withheld.
ETA: Victoria -- Children are a little smarter than you give them credit for. An accent or lack thereof is NOT going to convince them they're not adopted. I don't usually tell someone they aren't ready to adopt... but I feel like I can in this case. You need some serious education before you adopt.
Oh had I not been told and had I figured it out I SIMPLY WOULD NOT HAVE CARED!! My parents are the ones who raised me! PERIOD.
Holy Cow! Who would want an adoptive mother like Victoria U? Surely not me..
I would rather The Wicked Witch of the West adopt me..she didn't pretend to be anything other than the Witch she was! And at least she was interesting...and she wore killer shoes!! LOL!
To answer your question...I was not legally adopted by my step-father, but was raised to believe he was my 'real' father. When I was told at the age of 15 that he was in fact NOT my father...I was relieved. He was a Monster!! Relieved that I did not carry his DNA. I have felt sorry for my 1/2 sibs who carry his DNA.
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Have you ever known an adoptee who wasn't told not to know or suspect?
I have to laugh. I am 5'10, dark hair, dark eyes and athletic. My mom is 5'1 Swedish with blond hair blue eyes and very dainty. I love her dearly but we are nothing alike. Yep, I would have known alright. Pretty obvious.
Do you think A parents are foolin' themselves by thinking they can hide the truth?
I am with you cruzgirl. It's pretty ridiculous and ignorant to think you can get away with not telling adoptees they are adopted. It's downright cruel in my book.
I'm 5'2", weigh a 108 pounds and have dark hair and dark eyes.
My amom is 5'10'', weighs 150 pounds and is pale with blue eyes and blonde hair.
If that isn't enough to illustrate the differences between us physically, I am Asian and she is white.
It's obvious as hell that we are not biologically related. If she tried to tell me otherwise it would be an insult to my intelligence as well as being cowardly on her part.
What does she lose from telling me the truth? Is she afraid I might want to seek my natural parents? That comes with the territory of adoption.
If you don't want to tell your children they are adopted and you don't want to deal with the tough issues and the difficult questions they will ask you, you need to FORGET about adopting.
Don't be a freaking liar. Source(s): Surprisingly self actualized adult adoptee
Yep. Not just because we were oceans apart in personality, likes, dislikes, but because I'm not the same ethnicity they are. I'm First Nations. They are white. I look like no one in my adoptive family. They are all very fair haired and fair skinned. Aside from the looks issue, I think I would have figured things out due to lack of documentation, photos, or any evidence of my existance prior to 6 months old.
yes. I think those Aparents who choose to not tell their children the truth of their origins are indeed fooling themselves, as well as setting themselves up to be loathed, not trusted, on top of having everything they ever said or did questioned when the truth does come out. I also think it's abusive and self serving to keep someone's truth from them in such a manner.
i think that a child who is told right for the start that they are adopted learn to accept it more. i was adopted and i grew up knowing it and have found it quite easy to cope with it when other friends i have who have just found out have become angry with there adopted perents.
luv hayley x Source(s): adopted child
Oh yeah, I woulda figured it out for sure. By the time I was 8 I was already taller than my amom, and almost as tall as my adad. I stopped growing at 12 (at a whopping 6'1). While I have blondish hair like my adad, we look nothing alike. I also don't resemble my amom's family (they have olive skin and black hair).
Oh, and I'm also not like my afam in personality at all, either. It was better for me just to know I was adopted, rather than feeling just like a wacky freak! :) Source(s): adult adoptee
I notice that you and a lot of other people use the word A parent instead of saying adoptive parent. It lets me know that you think little of your adoptive mother and you like to classify them in one group. As for me, I'm a black woman and my husband is a white man. We already have 5 children and we plan to adopt one for the first time. We also do not plan on telling the child its adopted. If the child needed to know who its biological family was, it would have never been given up for adoption to start with.
EDIT: My husband is Romanian with a thick Romanian accent. I am black American with an American accent. While all of our children speak fluent Romanian with accents just like their father and have good english, they have no doubt that I am their mother.
EDIT: Heather, I don't care what you think of me. And no I am not new to Yahoo Answers and seeing as how there is nothign you or anyone else can do about it. If I have a question I will ask it in any section it fits in. Seeing as how you are such an ase I'd much rather block you than have to contend with you just answering my questions to be rude or insult me in some way as I am sure you would do.
Oh wow you don't like, who gives a ****.
I would have known if for no other reason than there is no record of me until I'm six months old. My mother was camera and scrapbook crazy. There's not a snowball's chance in a hot place of her not clipping the birth announcement, taking 100 pictures of her pregnant and 500 pictures of her baby from birth to six months. She would have recorded each and every time she changed a diaper during those six months.
The fact that I outgrew her clothes when I was nine would have been a big enough hint, but the lack of documentation of the first six months of my life would have been a dead giveaway.
Not to mention that the clerk of court in the county where I was born told me I was adopted and my birth record was sealed when I went to get my BC. I already knew that, but I didn't know I had to go through the state back then. I thought I could still get a copy through the county. I was wrong, and if I didn't know I was adopted before, I sure would have known after that day.
If I wasn't told, my amended birth certificate would have been enough to question my situation. I'll rephrase that my Birth Extract would have been enough. I didn't get access to my amended birth certificate until my mid-teens.
Everyone else around me had an authentic birth document with complete details of name, date, location, parents, informant, witnesses and registrar. All I had was a piece of paper just acknowledging my existence: name, date, location, registrar and nothing else.
Absolutely. Not only do I look nothing like my a family, I don't act like them either.
While there are some adoptees who were not told until they were adults and may not have suspected they were adopted, they always knew "something was not right".
Take the animal world, for instance. We've all seen where dogs have taken an abandoned kitten and nursed it, and treated it as if were one of her puppies. But at the end of it all, the kitten is still a feline.even if the kitten is never exposed to another cat- their DNA will always shine through, because that's how DNA works, lol. Source(s): reality
I would have known. Even though we are all "white" I don't look a thing like any of them. I was taller than my mother by 5th grade, taller than my father by 8th. I have different eye color than anyone I've seen in my a-family. I have a different build, a different proportion. I would have figured it out by looks alone. Emotionally I am way different also.
I cannot fathom in this day and age that someone would try to hide this information from their adopted child. It is abusive not to tell them. Victoria, you really need to read more from the perspective of the child. You really need to hear every point of view and make up your own mind. Source(s): Adoptee, mother of 5
Yes, they're fooling themselves. Eventually, something clicks. Kids aren't stupid, and it could be something as simple as finding out that your blood types don't add up, or realizing that there is no history of your mother's pregnancy.
I can't stress this enough, Victoria:
THE ADOPTEE'S INFORMATION BELONGS TO THE ADOPTEE!
Please, please educate yourself more. Source(s): Adoptee and Adoptive Mom
While I agree that it's not *right* to keep this information from adoptees (and my children both know about their adoptions), I also think that in some cases the children would not suspect if they weren't told.
My children look enough like us that I don't think anyone would suspect they are adopted based on their looks. And there are a lot of "Late Discovery Adoptees" who seem blind-sided when they find out as adults that they were adopted. If they'd "figured it out," I doubt it would be such a shock.
Victoria... you are a new face to this section ...I particalrly do not like.
I don't think you are ready to adopt...based on your prev. questions/answers such as the below.
You want to adopt b/c you don't feel like being pregnant! Ha Ha Ha
So you would rather adopt for convience? Nice.
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Should I consider a surrogate mother?
My husband and I want another child and we already have 5. I have told him that we could adopt simply because I am done with being pregnant. My twins will be a year old soon. The adoption process takes quite a while and even if you pay all the fees you are not promised to receive a child. So I have also considered finding a surrogate mother. Would that be the best option?
Oh i think i would have figured it out eventually. But my adoption was kept inside my family(that is, i was adopted by a family member of my bio fathers)
To Victoria: Wow, you have a lot to learn. You havent the slightest idea why me, or anyone else was given up for adoption. nice to know you plan on lying to a child. And yes, not telling them they are adopted is lying. I use A parent simply as a form of short hand. A Parent for adotive parent, B parent for biological parent. Althought i've been trying to use first parent more.
Of course.
Besides secrets don't remain secrets forever and by the time they come out, all trust is gone. Source(s): The Story of the Ugly Duckling
I was told I was adopted. I knew other people who knew they were adopted. I don't know of anyone who didn't know but suspected they were. My adoptive parents were able to pick me out based on my nationality and traits so I would 'look' something like they looked. I am sure other people have done this so that they could pull off not telling the child. I think that had I not been told, I would have never guessed. I look enough like the two of them combined to have believed I was theirs.
Its crazy to talk of not telling them. They will find out sooner or later, the truth always outs, and the later it is the more distressed they are when they find out. The actor who plays Harold Bishop is the Oz soap Neighbours was middle aged when he found out he was adopted, and he was absolutely devastated. People who are told when they are little can grow up being perfectly happy about it. People who think they're bio then find out they're not, don't take it well at all!! Don't do this!!
I was 2 so I didnt need to be told, I remembered..would I have figured it out otherwise ?? Probably..but I'd never have guessed the FM was my biological mother. My AM was Indian, and I was white, and I don't look like her, but I actually look more like her than the FM.
I was an extremely tall child, narrow build, long light brown hair, blue eyes, extremely pale skin that didnt tan.
FM - 5'1", very big boned, short red hair, brown eyes, dark skin (oddly for a redhead)
AM - 5'5" but long-shape, narrow build, long black hair
I obviously have different colouring from my AM but the outlines/bone structure are similar. Our silhouettes would look like mother and daughter.
My friend had a father who was South African coloured, and a mother who was a very pale blue eyed redhead. All the children looked white, you'd never have guessed they didnt have a white father. My friend had blue eyes and dark blonde hair. So I might not have guessed I was adopted. Their father was darker than my mother.
Answers: My parents didn't tell me until was 8. I outright asked my mom if I was adopted at about 7 (she denied it then, but has since told me everything she knows). It wasn't so much that I thought I looked different... it was a document I happened to see. My aparents mirror my fparents in ethnicity and my personality so close to my adad's.
My amom's first cousin was adopted as an infant in the BSE. She's over 50 now and as far as I know, was never told by her parents. The ENTIRE family knew, so I guess someone might have let it slip. If she did find out, she has never told anyone about it.
I don't see the point in hiding the truth. It has a way of making itself known in time and the consequences can be devastating -- not the truth, but the fact that it was withheld.
ETA: Victoria -- Children are a little smarter than you give them credit for. An accent or lack thereof is NOT going to convince them they're not adopted. I don't usually tell someone they aren't ready to adopt... but I feel like I can in this case. You need some serious education before you adopt.
Oh had I not been told and had I figured it out I SIMPLY WOULD NOT HAVE CARED!! My parents are the ones who raised me! PERIOD.
Holy Cow! Who would want an adoptive mother like Victoria U? Surely not me..
I would rather The Wicked Witch of the West adopt me..she didn't pretend to be anything other than the Witch she was! And at least she was interesting...and she wore killer shoes!! LOL!
To answer your question...I was not legally adopted by my step-father, but was raised to believe he was my 'real' father. When I was told at the age of 15 that he was in fact NOT my father...I was relieved. He was a Monster!! Relieved that I did not carry his DNA. I have felt sorry for my 1/2 sibs who carry his DNA.
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