Understanding the Adoptee Experience in Parenthood
Parenthood is transformative for everyone — and for adoptees, it often brings powerful emotions tied to identity, belonging, and loss.
Becoming a parent can resurface questions about origin stories, family history, and what it means to nurture a child when your own beginnings hold unanswered questions.
Research from the National Institutes of Health underscores why this moment matters. Adoptees face a silent public-health crisis, with significantly higher rates of suicide attempts and substance use disorders than non-adopted peers. Major life transitions, like becoming a parent, can intensify emotional vulnerability.
Every adoption begins with separation. Even in loving families, the loss of connection with a biological mother is a foundational trauma. For adoptees who become parents, pregnancy and birth can resurface these early imprints — often right alongside deep joy. Holding space for both is essential.
Many adoptees enter pregnancy without access to family health history or genetic background. For some, their child is the first biological relative they’ve ever met — a moment that can feel healing, overwhelming, and deeply emotional all at once.
“Big Feeling Days”
We use the term Big Feeling Days to describe moments when love, grief, and identity rise together. For adoptees, these often include:
Deciding to become a parent
Discovering a pregnancy
Experiencing birth and postpartum transitions
Holding a child for the first time
Breastfeeding and bonding
Joy and grief can coexist — and both are valid.
How to Support Adoptee Parents
Support begins with awareness. Providers and loved ones can help by:
Normalizing emotional complexity and nuance
Acknowledging the person as “adopted” in health records
Encouraging community and therapeutic support if helpful
Encourage exploring of resources- there is a growing number of podcasts featuring the voices of adult adoptees, and later this year Adoptee Identity will launch the first well-being app for adoptees!
About Adoptee Identity
Adoptee Identity is an identity-centered well-being platform for adoptees and others with biological unknowns, including donor-conceived and late-discovery individuals.
Our mission is to transform the well-being of adopted people, and those connected to them, by delivering identity-centered tools that foster belonging, emotional clarity, and lifelong connection. We equip individuals—and the workplaces that support them—to understand adoption and identity discovery as a lifelong journey, not a one-time event.
To learn more about Adoptee Identity, purchase resources, or join our platform waitlist, visit www.adoptee-identity.com or email Founder/CEO, Zoë Hansen-DiBello directly at zoe@adoptee-identity.com.