Adoption and Identity Formation

Adoption has many effects on families; identity formation is one the most important stages that a child has to form during the ages of adolescence. It is a lifelong process but it is mainly formed between the ages of 13 to 18. Forming an identity can be very difficult for an adopted child because leaving all the struggles that they will be already facing, the formation of identity will add another conflict in their lives. Parents can help adopted children by establishing a sense of identity and by exposing them to cultural background.

If a child has issues or problems when forming their identity, than they might end up being in identity confusion. In this research, the main question that is going to be answered is; “How des Adoption Affect Identity Formation in a Negative way? The adoptive parents do not usually think of identity formation of the adopted child, they try to make their kids get assimilated into the new environment and encourage them to totally forget about their past which disables them to answer the question; “Who am I”.

It is also a fact that the usage of drug and alcohol are seen very often on adopted adolescents. The focus in this literature review is going to be on the adopted adolescents and their process of identity formation. The main methods that will be implemented in this research will be conducting interviews, collecting surveys and making group observations. There will be many limitations while conducting my research. First of all, a detailed study cannot be done due to the shortage of time.

There are also not much quantitative research groups and the participants are very limited. Solutions to these limitations could be getting started as soon as possible to not be worried about the limitation of time. Finding enough participants to complete my survey would also be helpful. Interviews are also a huge contribution and even though the sample groups are limited, there will be enough participants that are going to be taken into consideration.