Who is entitled to your child’s story? Part 3

Continuing about our kids’ stories and who owns them …

It’s not only casual contact with strangers that can cause uncomfortable moments where parents must choose just exactly how much of their children’s stories are for broadcast to a wider audience than those in the home. Family members may feel entitled to the “whole scoop” and demand every single detail of not only the process of your adoption, but also your child’s entire history.

Keep in mind that widely distributed stories of abusive backgrounds, poverty, abandonment and such may come back to haunt a child, even within the confines of family. Cousins have long memories, and a time may come when your child’s history would provide ammo.

Great Aunt Tilly’s birthday party may be the occasion for teasing Billy Junior about the time he wet his pants in church, and for bringing big-shot Cousin Bob down a peg with recollections of his preference for pink dresses as a toddler, but speculation about just why your kid’s birth mother may have left him in the gutter moments after birth should not be part of any family get-together.

(Unless you’re fortunate enough to be part of an open adoption, there’s no way anyone could have a clue about this, anyway, so even in conversations with your child you should be very careful about formulating conjecture when it comes to the part of a story you can not, in truth, have real information about.)

And speaking of birth parents, how much of your child’s continuing saga are they entitled to? Do adoption agreements that require parents to supply photos and reports to birth parents infringe on a kid’s right to privacy?

That’s the topic of the next post …

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