They’re sick of hearing “You should be grateful.”
During the 90s and early aughts, you probably knew of a family who adopted a baby girl from China. At the time, the One Child Policy limited the number of children in Chinese families, and many Chinese kids were adopted by Western families as a result. (According to the State Department, American families adopted about 81,600 Chinese children from 1999 to 2018). The media narrative around this focused on adoptive families saving babies and young children from bad circumstances.
Content creator Taylor Shennett was one of these babies — she was adopted from China at nine months old by American parents: “[My parents] chose to do international adoption because my aunt saw a video about the One Child Policy and the overflow of girls in China,” she tells Katie Couric Media.
But adult adoptees like Shennett say that the narrative around adoption focuses too much on gestures toward an infant in need. She’s turned to an unexpected platform to speak out on how you probably use the wrong words when you describe the experience of adoption. And there’s also a chance you’re not really hearing adult adoptees when they discuss some of their less-than-pretty experiences.
By now, you’re familiar with the silly trends (like funny filters, songs, and dances) that TikTok has popularized. But adult international adoptees use TikTok for serious advocacy — and they’re reaching a real audience. The hashtag “adoptiontrauma” on TikTok currently has 92.8 million views while “adoptionstory” has a whopping 836.2 million views.
These creators are fed up with the fantasy that non-adoptees have about adoption. You know the fairytale about generous adults saving cute babies and small children and giving them a “forever family,” a la Daddy Warbucks and orphan Annie? Well, these adult adoptees pointed out that this narrative conveniently ignores the ugly, uncomfortable, or even unethical aspects of adoption. And this toxic positivity, they insist, can be dangerous. They’re using the popular social media platform to shed light on that.
“Just be grateful” misses the point
“People expect adoptees to just be grateful,” Shennett says. “I know this from experience and from reading my [TikTok] comments.”
The thing is, Shennett is grateful. “For me,” she says, “adoption was the answer. People who were living in China were not adopting babies from China. Without my adoption, I would’ve just aged out of the orphanage. In my specific orphanage, when I was there, there were over 400 babies in two rooms.”
And though she feels legitimately grateful, people outside of her supportive, loving adoptive family still made her feel ostracized: “Growing up, it was hard to hear that my sister looked identical to my parents. Because we were so close in age, a lot of people thought that I was her friend and not part of the family. It was nothing that my parents did. It was not a separation they were causing. It was what other people were imposing on our family.”
Of course, two feelings can exist at once — she can feel both thankful and hurt, but she feels pressure to ignore those less pretty feelings.
Sharing her adoption story on TikTok has provided some validation. ”I posted a video of my family bringing me home from China and it blew up overnight. It has 11 million plus views on TikTok alone. I’ve been able to connect with adoptees all over the world,” she says.
Abby Hasberry, LMFTA, is a therapist who specifically works with adoptees — but she’s also a Black adoptee raised in a white household. Her parents initially hoped to adopt a Vietnamese orphan — a common gesture when refugee, orphaned Vietnamese children were being placed for adoption during and after the Vietnam War. Once they realized that the international adoption process would be too costly, they domestically adopted Hasberry — and isolated her from the Black community.
Like other adoptees, she feels her experience is oversimplified by outsiders because she was adopted as an infant. Non-adoptees disregard her isolation as a transracial adoptee (a person raised by a family of a different race) not to mention the complicated question of why her parents wanted to adopt a “trendy” child but chose another route when they couldn’t afford it.
“It’s like we never grew up to be adults who then question the system,” Hasberry says. “We’re always these adoptive kids who need help, support, and families.”
Toxic positivity glosses over painful experiences
Creator Melissa Guida-Richards points out the story we tell about very young adoptees ignores the trauma of separation. When we think of young adoptees as blank slates who won’t be affected by the change, we conveniently avoid the subject of pain.
Guida-Richards was adopted at five months old from an orphanage in Colombia. Her American family, however, concealed the adoption until Guida-Richards discovered old adoption paperwork while on a trip home from college. Guida-Richards — who’s written a book and a forthcoming workbook to advise potential adoptive parents — was suddenly being told as an adult that her parents had saved her.
“But it wasn’t as simple as my parents plucking me out [of Colombia], and there we go — happily ever after. I still had a family [in Colombia.] And people don’t realize that even babies adopted as infants have trauma from that maternal separation.”
Guida-Richards also points out that her adoptive family’s joy comes at the expense of her birth family’s loss of a child. Her birth mother didn’t have the resources to raise her, and Guida-Richards feels that the decision to part with an infant out of necessity shouldn’t be diminished.
“It’s this endless cycle,” she says, referring to the separation from her birth mother. “My birth mother placed two other kids for adoption. And so if adoption is ‘happily ever after,’ why is it that one family is struggling and has to experience this repeated trauma?”
She finds it hard to reconcile the pressure to be purely positive with the reality that her biological family had experienced a deep loss: “I’m just supposed to feel grateful that my [adoptive] parents took me in.”
Ryan Hanlon, Ph.D., president and CEO of the National Council for Adoption, a nonprofit that provides resources for adoptive families, birth families, and adoptees, says that when someone is adopted, “there was something that broke that in [that] first family that [required] an adoptive placement.” Whatever the cause, something in a family was fractured enough that they relinquished a vulnerable child.
The impulse to remind adoptees of all the good they have in their lives can also have dangerous ramifications. Katarina Daniels was adopted from Ukraine at 3 years old. Daniels points out that there was neglect and instability in her Ukrainian orphanage. But pressure to always be grateful conditioned her to accept a terrible reality: After being adopted, she was abused.
“I needed to excuse the abuse that I experienced in my adoptive family because anything was better than being in an orphanage,” Daniels says. “I was saved from the orphanage. I learned to be OK with the abuse because the abuse meant that they hadn’t left me.”
“I think that for many adoptees, [a savior narrative] instills that they have to accept everything about their adoption because everyone is telling them that they were saved.”
Why TikTok
While Daniels has talked a lot about her trauma on the platform, she also uses it to share resources: “I’ve introduced people to Saving Our Sisters and the Family Preservation Project, organizations that help expecting mothers keep their child. They provide emotional support and tools, like helping out with diaper expenses and providing access to jobs.”
For Guida-Richards, it’s about community. “About two years ago, I was introduced to adoptee TikTok through a friend,” Guida-Richards says. “I thought, You know what? Let me try it out. This app seems to be helping a lot of people. A few of my stories went viral. I shared about being a late discovery adoptee and my experiences with my parents. I would respond to other videos of potential adoptive parents and share nuances of [adoption] that people don’t think about.”
As a therapist, Hasberry values how the platform prevents isolation: “Many adoptees grow up not knowing another person who was adopted. We need people like us who have shared experiences. When people have shared experiences, it normalizes your experience.”
Dr. Hanlon isn’t surprised this conversation has flourished on TikTok. “The field has really grown in the last decade or so,” he says. “We’re hearing more from those who have their own personal experience having been adopted. They’re now adults and they’re trying to teach others what worked and what didn’t.”
What adoptees want you to know
There isn’t one universally true narrative of adoption. The outdated culture of silence extended into the 21st century and affected adoptees like Guida-Richards, who had to grapple with a later-in-life disclosure about their birth stories. In contrast, Shennett always knew she was adopted and her parents even moved to China for a few years to help her experience her birth culture. Compare that to adoptees like Daniels who are taken into a toxic, painful environment as a kid without anyone else to advocate for them. The variable outcomes are part of the reason that adoptees on TikTok also have ideas on how they’d change the rules.
Hasberry says that if adoptive families don’t want to gloss over trauma, part of that work should involve resources to support their adopted kids’ heritage: “If you’re bringing a Black or a Latino kid into your all-white home and you’re expecting them to assimilate, you need to put yourself into that kid’s position and take your family to that community. You need to be more uncomfortable than your kid.”
As adoptees speak up about adoption, Daniels also says it’s important not to shut down those uncomfortable conversations by saying that adult adoptees on TikTok are trying to tarnish adoption as a whole.
“People think that we’re not prioritizing the children,” Daniels says. “But we were the children.”
