Adoption And Identity Formation

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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 children grow and change into adolescents, they begin to search for an identity by finding anchoring points with which to relate. Unfortunately, adopted children do not have a biological example to which to turn (Horner & Rosenberg, 1991), unless ...

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were like, and they may grieve not only for the loss of their birth parents but for the loss of part of themselves.
In essence, it seems that the adolescent’s identity formation is impaired because he holds the knowledge that his “roots” or his “essence” have been severed and remain on the unknown side of the adoption barrier.
The identity struggles of the adolescent are “part of a human need to connect with their natural clan and failure to do so may precipitate psychopathology” (Wegar, 1995). Also in agreement with Wegar, McRoy, and Baran is Frisk. Baran et al. (1975) wrote, “Frisk conceptualized that the lack of family background ...

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