Listening to Adoptees in a Time of Reckoning

These conversations began after ICAV published the article “What Do I Want From My Adoptive Parents?” What followed was an ongoing exchange between Lynelle Long, a Vietnamese Australian intercountry adoptee, and Kristin Molvik Botnmark, a Norwegian adoptive parent.

Together, they explore questions many families struggle to discuss openly: grief, silence, loyalty, power, identity, reunion, accountability, and what honesty inside adoptive families might actually look like.

These are not easy conversations but we hope modelling them openly may help others begin their own.

Kristin

One question that has been on my mind while reading your article is this: What kind of response from adoptive parents actually feels meaningful to adoptees? Not just in words, but in attitude and action.

Many adoptive parents say their children never raise these topics. From your perspective, what makes it easier, or harder, for adoptees to have these conversations within their families?

And how can adoptive parents participate in this reckoning without making adoptees feel they need to protect us emotionally?

Lynelle

I think it depends on where the adoptee is in their journey. What feels meaningful can vary depending on what stage of understanding and healing they are in.

When I first started thinking critically about adoption and what my parents had participated in, what I most wanted was honesty. I wanted openness about the adoption process, about motivations, and about what adoption had actually meant for everyone involved.

In many ways, the journey adoptive parents must take later in life mirrors the journey adoptees often go through earlier: coming out of what adoptees call “the fog.” That is the process of moving beyond the simple narrative that adoption is purely wonderful or a rescue story and recognising that adoption is far more complex. It can also be troubling and deeply harmful, particularly for adoptees and first families.

Meaningful responses from adoptive parents include acknowledging the power and privilege inherent in adoption. Adoptive parents gain a child, while adoptees and first families often lose something immense and usually have far less power or voice in the process. But these conversations require vulnerability and bravery from both sides. They also require safety.

Kristin

Your description of “coming out of the fog” stayed with me. I have heard the term before, but your explanation made me reflect on something I have been thinking about for some time: adoptive parents may also live inside a kind of fog.

In my experience, that fog is not simply ignorance. It is often a narrative we come to rely on in order to live with the decisions we have made. Adoption is presented through powerful moral stories — about giving a child a home, about rescue, about love. These narratives are comforting, and they are reinforced by institutions, media, and social approval. Stepping outside that narrative can feel terrifying.

If the system that created our family was unjust or harmful in ways we did not see at the time, what does that say about us? Who are we when we begin to acknowledge what we may have participated in?

Writing my recent book The Adoption Reckoning required me to confront questions that were not easy to face. It meant examining my own motivations as an adoptive parent and asking how I, as someone who considers myself ethically and politically conscious, could still have trusted a system that we now know contained serious injustices.

Lynelle

That reflection is important because many adoptees spend years trying to explain this complexity to their adoptive families, often without being heard.

Meaningful action from adoptive parents means committing to a deeper exploration of adoption itself. That includes asking difficult questions: Why did I adopt? What emotional needs or desires drove that decision? What losses did my child experience because of that decision?

For parents who experienced infertility, it may also involve confronting grief and loss that was never fully processed. In many ways, that grief mirrors some of what adoptees experience.

Without doing that internal work separately first, these conversations can quickly become emotionally unsafe.

What I often see in adoptee spaces is that both adoptee and adoptive parent come into these conversations carrying pain, fear, and vulnerability. Without emotional grounding, they can end up triggering each other rather than truly listening. That is why I often encourage both adoptees and adoptive parents to seek their own therapeutic support separately before trying to navigate these conversations together.

Kristin

I recognise much of that in myself. For many adoptive parents, infertility and the longing for a child are powerful emotional forces. Looking back, I sometimes think that longing can create a kind of moral tunnel vision. The desire to become a parent becomes so strong that we stop asking broader structural questions: Where do these children come from? What pressures exist on their families? Who benefits from this system?

We want the narrative of adoption to be true, and in many cases we accept it with surprisingly little critical scrutiny. That is difficult to admit now, but I believe it is necessary.

Lynelle

I think adoptees often feel safer when adoptive parents are willing to acknowledge complexity without becoming defensive. What helps relationships is the absence of denial, minimisation, or gaslighting.

When adoptive parents can genuinely say, “Knowing what I know now, I wish I had done some things differently”, that can create enormous space for honesty and trust. The safest attitude is when adoptive parents can remain emotionally present without making the adoptee responsible for protecting them. Because many adoptees already carry that burden. We often grow up sensing that certain emotions are difficult for our adoptive parents to hear: grief, anger, curiosity about our origins, or criticism of the adoption system itself. So we stay silent in order to protect the relationship.

Kristin

That reflection about silence affected me deeply.

Many adoptive parents say, “My child knows they can talk to us about anything.” But I have increasingly questioned whether silence really means safety. Children are extremely perceptive when it comes to emotional atmospheres. They quickly sense which topics feel fragile inside a family. If adoption appears emotionally delicate, silence can become a form of protection. The adoptee may be protecting the relationship, not indicating that everything is fine. For that reason, I increasingly believe adoptive parents carry a responsibility to open these conversations ourselves rather than waiting for adoptees to initiate them.

Lynelle

Yes. For many adoptees, silence comes at a huge emotional cost. For years we suppress parts of ourselves in order to maintain connection and stability within the family.

Eventually many adoptees reach a point where they realise nobody else is going to stand up for them. They must do it themselves, even if doing so risks the relationship. That can become incredibly painful. Especially when adoptees are then labelled “ungrateful” simply for wanting truth, accountability, or acknowledgment of loss.

Kristin

What increasingly stays with me is the question of responsibility.

Adoptive parents entered into this system. We were the adults with the power to make decisions. Yet when the lifelong consequences of adoption begin unfolding, too many adoptive parents step back emotionally, leaving adoptees to carry the existential labour of making sense of identity, loss, history, and truth on their own. I find that difficult to ignore now.

Lynelle

And yet I also think honesty creates the possibility for a different kind of relationship.

Not one built on silence or emotional protection but one grounded in truth. That does not mean these conversations are easy. They may involve grief, discomfort, accountability, and painful realisations on both sides. But avoiding those truths does not make them disappear, it simply leaves adoptees carrying them alone.

Next Week: Part 3

Lynelle and Kristin explore silence, emotional protection, and the hidden burdens many adoptees carry inside adoptive families.

They examine why difficult conversations so often break down — and what adoptive parents can do differently.