Revisiting my reflections from 2009 through the lens of identity, origins and children’s rights
photos: Lynelle Long as a child
In 2009, I wrote a piece reflecting on whether adoptive parents should change the names of children they adopt. At the time, my views were shaped primarily by my own lived experience as a Vietnamese adoptee raised in Australia, and by the stories I had heard from other intercountry adoptees.
I recently came across that writing and found myself reflecting on just how much my understanding has developed since then. I was already questioning the practice of renaming adopted children and understood that our names were connected to our identity, heritage and sense of belonging. But I had not yet fully understood the international human and children’s rights obligations that should underpin how we treat children, particularly those who are separated from their families and countries of origin. Today, my position is much firmer. I would not recommend changing a child’s original name through adoption.
Not simply because of its cultural significance, but because I now understand that a child’s name is part of their identity, and their identity is something they have a right to preserve. This has been a significant journey of learning, listening, questioning and advocacy. I want to share how I arrived here.
My own experience of being renamed
In my 2009 original writing, I explained:
Over 30 years ago, my adoptive family gave me an anglo saxon name because they couldn’t pronounce my original Vietnamese name. My adoptive parents believed an Australian name would make my life easier. I was growing up in a country that had only recently moved beyond the White Australia policy, and fitting in was considered important. They retained my Vietnamese name as my middle name, something I remain grateful for, and later gave me the opportunity as a teenager to change the order or choose something different. I chose to keep the name they had given me, and I have continued to use it throughout my life. But the significance of what happened was not something I fully understood as a child.
And I wrote:
In having my Vietnamese name as a second name, it did influence me to grow up believing that my Vietnamese heritage and culture was second to my Australian adopted one.
I also reflected on how my adoptive parents never learned to pronounce my Vietnamese name correctly. It wasn’t until I was in my twenties and met other Vietnamese people that I discovered I had been pronouncing it incorrectly myself. What message had I absorbed through those experiences? That my original identity was less important. That my Vietnamese beginnings were something to be accommodated within my Australian life, rather than something equally deserving of recognition and respect. I don’t believe my adoptive parents intended to communicate that message. I understand they were acting within the attitudes and knowledge of their time. But good intentions do not necessarily prevent harm, and the impact on an adopted child can be very different from what an adoptive parent intended.
Discovering that somebody had named me
One of the most significant memories I shared in my earlier writing was discovering correspondence from before my adoption that explained the meaning of my Vietnamese name and who had given it to me.
I wrote:
To know that somebody had named me, most likely my birth mother as the letter stated, was the first time I felt I must have belonged to somebody who was a piece of me!
That moment remains deeply significant to me. My original name was not simply a collection of sounds that were difficult for Australians to pronounce. It represented a connection to someone who had known me before I was adopted. Someone had given me that name and recognised me as a person before I became part of my adoptive family. For an intercountry adoptee who had grown up without knowing my family of origin, that knowledge was incredibly meaningful. It offered a tangible connection to my beginnings, to people and relationships that had otherwise been largely absent from my life.
Looking back, I can see that I was beginning to understand something important: our identity does not begin when we are adopted. We have a history before adoption, even when that history is unknown, inaccessible or deliberately concealed and sometimes our name is one of the very few surviving connections to that history.
From cultural respect to the right to identity
When I wrote my original piece, I primarily argued for keeping a child’s name because it helped preserve cultural connections and pride in their heritage. I believed adoptive parents should respect those connections and avoid treating the child’s previous identity as something that needed replacing. Today, after decades of connecting with intercountry adoptees worldwide and advocating for our rights, I see this issue much more fundamentally.
A child’s name is not something adults should feel entitled to replace simply because the child is joining a new family.
Under the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child, adopted in 1989, children have specific rights relevant to this discussion. Article 7 recognises a child’s right from birth to a name, a nationality and, as far as possible, to know and be cared for by their parents. Article 8 obliges States to respect the child’s right to preserve their identity, including their nationality, name and family relations, without unlawful interference. It also requires appropriate assistance when children have been illegally deprived of elements of their identity. These provisions are significant. They remind us that children are rights-holders in their own right. Their identities are not simply matters for adults to decide according to personal preferences, cultural convenience or what they believe will help a child fit into their family.
The 1993 Hague Convention on Intercountry Adoption also requires competent authorities to preserve information they hold about a child’s origins, particularly information about their parents and medical history, and to provide access subject to national law. Yet preserving information somewhere in an adoption file is not the same as preserving a child’s identity in their everyday life. And this is where I believe we need to question the adoption systems themselves.
The deeper problem with plenary adoption
Over the years, my concerns have expanded beyond the individual decision of adoptive parents to rename a child. I now question the legal structure of plenary adoption itself. Plenary adoption generally severs the child’s pre-existing legal parent-child relationships and creates a new legal relationship with their adoptive parents. In many countries, this process can also involve replacing the child’s original birth certificate with an amended certificate identifying adoptive parents as the child’s legal parents. Often the child’s original name is changed at the same time.
We have normalised these processes as though they are necessary consequences of giving a child a new family but why should providing a child with a new legal family require the replacement of their original legal identity? Why should recognising adoptive parents require the severance of the child’s previous legal family relationships? Why should the child have to lose one identity to gain another?
I have come to believe that all forms of plenary adoption are fundamentally inadequate in fully upholding our rights to origins, because their underlying legal structure is based on replacing, rather than maintaining continuity with, our original family relationships. This does not mean every plenary adoption involves the destruction of records or that every legal name change is automatically unlawful under international law. It means I see a fundamental contradiction between a system that legally severs our original parent-child relationships and the principle that children have a right to preserve their identity, including family relations.
Even where original records are retained, the adopted person’s connection to their family of origin is often relegated to a historical record rather than recognised as a continuing part of their legal identity. For me, the question is no longer simply whether adoptive parents should retain a child’s original name, it is whether our adoption systems are designed around protecting the child’s entire identity throughout their lifetime. I don’t believe plenary adoption adequately achieves this.
Adoption should not mean taking ownership of a child
One of the strongest statements in my original piece was:
I think we need to remember that children do not “belong” to anyone.
I still believe this today, perhaps even more strongly. In 2009, I was troubled by what I described as an attitude of entitlement among some adoptive parents – the idea that receiving a child through adoption somehow entitled them to redefine that child’s identity. I questioned why adults would want to remove the child’s previous name and replace it with one of their own choosing. At the time, I saw this primarily as a lack of respect for the child’s heritage. Today, I see it as part of a broader concern about the imbalance of power within adoption.
Adults make life-changing decisions on behalf of children who often have little or no capacity to influence those decisions. They decide where the child will live, which country and culture they will grow up in, what legal family they will belong to, and frequently what name they will carry. These decisions can have lifelong consequences. Of course, children need adults to make decisions in their best interests but parental responsibility should never be confused with ownership.
Adoption should be about adults taking responsibility for a child, not taking possession of the child’s identity.
If we genuinely believe adoption is centred on the child’s best interests, then we should begin by respecting everything that child brings with them, including the parts of their history we may not know or understand. Their identity should not be treated as a blank page on which a new family can write its own story.
What I would recommend today
If adoptive parents asked me today whether they should change their adopted child’s original name, my response would be clear.
I would recommend they do not. I would encourage them to learn how to pronounce the child’s name correctly, understand its meaning where possible, and find out who gave it to them. Where a child has been given a name by their family of origin, that name should be recognised as an important connection to their beginnings. Even where the name was assigned by an institution or where the child’s original identity is uncertain, that information should be carefully preserved, not discarded or overwritten. I would also encourage adoptive parents to question why they feel the need to rename the child. Is it because the name is unfamiliar? Difficult to pronounce? Does not fit with the adoptive family’s cultural identity? Or because they want to symbolise the child’s new place in their family? I understand those motivations but I would ask whose needs they are really serving.
If a name is unfamiliar, we can learn it. If it is difficult to pronounce, we can practise. If it reflects a different culture, we can embrace that difference rather than try to remove it. And if adoptive parents want to celebrate the child’s arrival, surely there are meaningful ways to do so without replacing a name that is already part of who the child is.
I also believe we need to respect the adopted person’s right to make their own decisions about their name as they mature. Some adoptees may choose to reclaim their original name. Others may retain their adopted name, combine names or choose something entirely different. Those choices belong to us.
My own decision to retain the name I was given does not mean I support the decision to rename me in the first place. It reflects the complexity of growing up with that name and making it part of who I am. There is a fundamental difference between an adopted person choosing their own name and adults choosing to replace a child’s name without their meaningful participation.
A journey of understanding our rights
When I revisit my writing from 2009, I don’t feel that I was wrong in my earlier reflections. I see someone who was beginning to understand the significance of what had happened to her and was trying to articulate why a name could mean so much more than adoptive parents realised. At that stage, I was speaking largely from my own experiences and the shared experiences of other adoptees. I had yet to fully understand how these experiences intersected with international human rights law, the responsibilities of governments, and the obligations of adoption systems.
Through my years of advocacy, listening to adoptees from many different countries and circumstances, and engaging with international child rights frameworks, my understanding has continued to develop. I’ve come to realise that so much of what we experience as adoptees is framed as a personal struggle with identity, belonging or loss but these experiences also raise questions about rights, accountability and whether the systems that governed our lives adequately respected us as children.
What once felt like a question of cultural respect has become, for me, a question of justice. I no longer believe that retaining a child’s original name should depend on whether adoptive parents are culturally sensitive enough to recognise its importance. It should be the starting point of a system that respects a child’s identity and origins. And we should go further, questioning why adoption laws continue to permit the legal severance of our original family relationships when other forms of permanent care could provide security without requiring that same erasure.
Our names are part of our beginnings
In my original piece, I wrote:
Sometimes our original name can be the only piece of information we know about ourselves prior to being adopted.
That observation has stayed with me. For some adoptees, their original name is one of the few remaining links to their family, country and history. For others, even that information has been lost, changed, falsified or made inaccessible.
After all these years, I have come to understand that what we are asking for is not extraordinary. We are asking for our beginnings to be respected, for our identities not to be unnecessarily altered or legally erased simply because we were adopted. We are asking for the same respect for our names, origins and family relationships that children who are not adopted can generally take for granted.
My understanding has evolved considerably since 2009, but the central concern remains. We were somebody before we were adopted. Our names are one reflection of that truth and no child should have to surrender their original identity in order to be loved, cared for and belong to another family.
Resources
What’s in a name? Identity, respect, ownership?
Confirmation that we are born as adoptees
What rights should intercountry adoptees have?
Adoption across a lifetime: why reform must move beyond the child-centric lens
Belonging: the lifelong question many adoptees cannot answer
Beyond adoption: human rights, family separation, and accountability
An incredibly powerful and thought provoking piece, thank you Lynelle! I agree with your positionality. My middle name is the name the orphanage gave to me. The sentence, ‘But sometimes good intentions still cause harm…’ resonated hugely with me. It requires a lot of inner work to accept that both can be true.