Listening & Responding to Adoptees in a Time of Reckoning
The following series of 6 articles are conversations began after ICAV published the article “What Do I Want From My Adoptive Parents?” What followed was an ongoing exchange between Lynelle Long, an intercountry adoptee, and Kristin Molvik Botnmark, a Norwegian adoptive parent. Together, they explore difficult topics some families struggle to discuss openly: grief, silence, loyalty, power, identity, reunion, accountability, and what honesty inside adoptive families might look like.
These are not easy conversations. But we hope sharing them openly may help others begin their own.
This first article features Kristin’s response to Lynelle original piece, reflecting on the difficult but necessary conversations emerging as adult intercountry adoptees speak more openly about their lived experiences and the systems that shaped their lives.
An Adoptive Parent Reflects
by Kristin Molvik Botnmark, Norwegian sociologist, author, scholar, and adoptive parent of two children adopted from South Korea. Through her writing and public advocacy, she has become a prominent voice in Norway’s growing reckoning with the history and ethics of intercountry adoption.
Her Norwegian-language book Adopsjonsoppgjøret (The Adoption Reckoning, not yet translated into English) reflects on her family’s adoption journey while critically examining the broader intercountry adoption system and its impacts on adoptees and first families. The Korean edition of the book, titled To Your Korean Mother, was recently published in South Korea, contributing to ongoing dialogue between Korean families, adoptees, and adoptive parents.
Kristin writes from the perspective of both a mother and a scholar who has participated in a system now under increasing international scrutiny, particularly in relation to South Korea’s historic overseas adoption practices.
Listening to Adoptees
As I read your article, I kept thinking about how rarely these words are actually spoken between adoptees and their adoptive parents. When I was working on my book, many adoptees told me how they tried to raise these questions within their own families, only to meet silence, defensiveness, or a kind of emotional fragility that made the conversation impossible.
So when you ask, “What do I want from my adoptive parents?”, you are not only speaking personally. You are articulating a question that echoes across a global community of adoptees who are now adults and trying to understand the systems that shaped their lives. If adoptive parents are to walk beside adoptees in this moment of reckoning, we must be willing to listen to those questions without retreating from them.
Acknowledging Harm
Your text asks adoptive parents to confront something many of us were never encouraged to examine: the possibility that even loving families may have been created within structures that produced harm. That is a difficult recognition. But I believe it is necessary.
Your first point — that adoptive parents acknowledge that they may have caused harm — is perhaps the most difficult for many parents to accept. Adoption has long been framed as an act of love, rescue, or generosity. Within that narrative, harm appears almost unthinkable. Yet the reality is more complex. Even when adoptive parents act in good faith, adoption involves profound losses: loss of family, language, culture, country, and legal identity. Recognising this does not negate love. It simply means recognising that love does not erase structural harm.
Acknowledging harm is not about blaming individual parents for everything that went wrong in the system. It is about recognising that our families were created through a structure that also produced losses for others — for the adoptee and for the first family. An apology can therefore matter. It acknowledges that the adoptee’s experience of loss is real and legitimate but apology alone is insufficient. Words must be accompanied by action: a willingness to remain present in difficult conversations, to support searches for truth, and to accept that the story of adoption may become more complex over time.
Looking Honestly at the Adoption System
You also call on adoptive parents to examine the adoption system itself — its racial, colonial, and economic dimensions. I believe this is essential. Many adoptive parents trusted the institutions involved: agencies, authorities, and governments. If the system existed and was regulated, we assumed it must be legitimate. But history has shown that trust was often misplaced.
Intercountry adoption developed within profound global inequalities. In some contexts it was shaped by demand, political interests, and narratives of saving children. I myself feel ashamed that I did not recognise this more clearly when I adopted. Looking back, I do not think I was willing to see it. My desire for a child outweighed questions that were already present at the time. This realisation still haunts me today. Understanding the history can be painful for adoptive parents but without that understanding, we cannot participate honestly in the reckoning that is now taking place.
The Power Imbalance in Adoption
One point in your article resonates particularly strongly with me: the powerlessness of the child. Intercountry adoption is a life-defining decision made entirely by adults. Children have no voice in the process that determines their identity, nationality, and family. Later, when adoptees seek answers as adults, they often encounter systems that were never designed to support them.
Recognising that imbalance is crucial. Adoptive parents were not the powerless party in the adoption system. We were the empowered party, supported by an entire system that prioritised our interests. That does not mean adoptive parents acted with bad intentions but it does mean we benefited from a structure that prioritised our desire to parent over the child’s right to remain within their original family and society whenever possible.
Supporting Adoptees in Practice
For this reason, I believe adoptive parents have a responsibility to support adoptees practically and materially when they seek answers about their origins. This may include access to documents, support in searching for family, and opportunities to reconnect with language, culture, and country. These are not optional gestures. They are part of restoring something that adoption once severed. Far too many adoptees I know receive no support from their adoptive parents in these efforts. To me, that feels deeply painful — even like a betrayal.
Why Silence Happens in Families
There is another issue I often encounter when speaking with adoptive parents. Many say: “My child has never asked about these things, so I don’t want to bring it up.” They believe they are respecting their child’s wishes by remaining silent but children are highly sensitive to the emotional atmosphere in their families. They quickly learn which topics feel safe and which feel fragile.
If adoption appears to be a delicate subject, many adoptees will protect the relationship by simply not asking. Silence does not necessarily mean the absence of questions. For that reason, I believe adoptive parents carry a responsibility to open the space themselves. We cannot wait to be asked. We must signal clearly that curiosity about origins is welcome, that it will not threaten the family bond, and that the adoptee does not need to protect us from discomfort.
Creating that space is part of parenting.
Responsibility Beyond “Our Own Adoption”
There is also another argument I often hear when the current reckoning with intercountry adoption is discussed.
Many parents say: “We have no reason to believe anything illegal happened in our adoption.” I understand the instinct behind this statement. Parents want reassurance that their own family story is legitimate but whether something illegal occurred in one specific case cannot determine whether adoptive parents engage in the broader reckoning. Even if an individual adoption appears lawful, it still took place within a global system that we now know contained serious failures and injustices. Investigations in multiple countries have documented falsified documents, coercion, corruption, and structural pressures placed on vulnerable families.
When such patterns emerge, the ethical question cannot be limited to our own files. The question becomes collective: what kind of system did we participate in, and what responsibility do we carry because of that participation?
In my view, adoptive parents cannot hide from that question. If we withdraw from this reckoning, we leave adoptees to carry alone the burden of uncovering and confronting these truths. That would be profoundly unjust.
Recognising the First Family
When we adopt a child internationally, we do not only enter into a relationship with the child. We also become connected, whether we acknowledge it or not, to the family and life that existed before the adoption. Over the years I have come to understand that my responsibility is not only to my son, but also to the truth of where he comes from.
When I saw him meet his mother for the first time, something became very clear to me. A part of his story that had always existed, but had been hidden from him, suddenly became visible. Watching them sit next to each other, noticing the similarities in their gestures and expressions, was deeply moving. But it also made visible the magnitude of what adoption had done. In that moment I understood something important: my son’s life is larger than what my husband and I alone could give him.
Recognising that does not diminish the family we have built. But it reminds me that adoption did not erase his first family. Accepting this also means acknowledging something difficult: adoption created our family, but it also created a separation that my son did not choose. In that sense, what we as adoptive parents gained is inseparable from something that others lost.
A Call to Other Adoptive Parents
Your article, as I read it, is not simply a critique of adoptive parents. It is an invitation — an invitation to show up as parents with courage, honesty, and responsibility. If we, as adoptive parents, refuse that invitation, we risk leaving the very people whose lives were shaped by adoption to face the consequences of this system on their own. That is not a burden adoptees should have to carry alone.
The story of intercountry adoption does not end with the adoption itself. Its consequences will continue through generations — through adoptees, their children, and their grandchildren.
As adoptive parents, we must face that reality and we must stand beside our children (many are now adults) as they seek truth, understanding, and justice.
Kristin’s book
Adopsjonsoppgjøret (printed version in Norwegian)
Adopsjonsoppgjøret (e-book in Norwegian)
About the book (in English)
Next Week: Part 2
Lynelle and Kristin begin an honest dialogue about grief, silence, accountability, and what it means to truly listen and respond during adoption’s global reckoning.