"Do I have to tell my adopted child the truth?" This is a question that faces every adoptive parent. Filling a much-needed gap in the adoption literature regarding communication with adopted children, Telling the Truth to Your Adopted-Foster Child provides parents with the important knowledge of why adopted children need to know the truth about their past. The authors offer practical guidelines and tools that parents can use in communicating with their children the circumstances of their past. This book presents the developmental stages of how children understand adoption and what needs to be said to a child age appropriately. The authors suggest how to share with children the painful and difficult issues regarding their circumstances, birth family and background. The goal is to provide a gateway into life as emotionally and psychologically healthy adults, with solid foundations for identity and self-esteem.

Informative and compassionate, September 10, 2003

Keefer & Schooler have given us an excellent and substantive guide on numerous issues concerning adoption, notably how to tell children about adoption, how to handle adolescents' feelings. Unlike some other writers who think that children as young as 2-1/2 can understand and conceptualize the ideas of birth and adoption, Keefer and Schooler recognize that only by age eight do children have the ability to think in abstract terms and begin to understand the meaning of adoption. (In their book, Openness in Adoption, Exploring Family Connections, Harold D. Grotevant and Ruth G. McRoy found that only at the mean age of 10.5, age range 8.0-12.1, is the adoption relationship fully understood with its characterized permanency.) Schooler's description of the adoptee's various developmental stages is worded such that it appears all adoptees grieve, go through stages of anger and during adolescence experience an identity crisis. The adopted youths 'identity may fluctuate with their current fantasy of the birth family.' I am puzzled by our daughter who insists that she has never suffered an identity crisis. She has grown up with many adopted children, some of whom suffered such a crisis, others did not. Some studies of identity crises in adoptees and nonadoptees have shown no significant differences between the groups, so that 'adoptive status itself cannot produce a negative identity.' One study showed that nonsearchers had more positive self-concepts than searchers and overall self-esteem, identity, family self, physical self, self-satisfaction. These nonsearchers had less concern than searchers about their own background.
But research results are like see-saws: One result says green, the other says red. It's bewildering and cause for caution not to generalize. Gisela Gasper Fitzgerald, author of ADOPTION: An Open, Semi-Open or Closed Practice?