Birth parent grief after adoption (relinquishment)
Grief in a birth parent after their child was placed for adoption, whether the decision felt free, pressured or was made for them. The child is alive and growing up elsewhere, so the loss has no ending, few people may know about it, and for many in the decades of closed adoption, secrecy and shame came with the arrangement.
What drives it
The loss stays open because the child is alive: every birthday marks a year of a life the parent cannot see. Useful for identification because the grief often goes unrecognized by others and by the parent, may grow with time instead of fading, and tends to be heavier when the adoption was closed or the parent had little real choice.
How it shows
Work
Pulling back every year in the week of a date nobody at work knows about. Flinching at an adoption storyline in a training video. Being asked ‘do you have kids?’ and never knowing which answer to give.
Relationships
A partner or later children who were never told. Contact with the adopted child, where there is any, bringing joy and fresh loss in the same afternoon. Relatives who arranged or pushed the adoption and still won’t speak of it.
Self
Notice the date your body remembers before you do. Notice whether you count yourself as that child’s mother or father, and whether anyone else does. Notice the age the child would be now, and what you imagine they know about you.
What tells it apart
Ambiguous loss (Boss): A child who is alive and out of reach is a form of ambiguous loss. Relinquishment grief more likely adds the parent’s own part in the decision, chosen or forced, and the secrecy that often came with it.
Grief after miscarriage, stillbirth or neonatal death: Both may center on a baby and a birth. In relinquishment the child lived and is growing up elsewhere, so the grief more likely carries questions about the child’s life now.
Shame: Shame was built into many past adoptions through secrecy. Shame may be the closer fit when the hardest part is the fear of being found out, and grief when it is missing the child.
A test
Ask whether the parent has ever told the whole story to anyone, and how their year moves around the child’s birthday. Grief that sharpens on that date and has had nowhere to be spoken may be relinquishment grief, however long ago the adoption was.
Questions to carry
- On my child’s birthday this year, what did I do with the day?
- What have I never said out loud about the adoption?
Go deeper
- Read: The Other Side of Sadness, George A. Bonanno, 2009, revised 2019. Written for readers by a psychologist who has followed bereaved people for years. He questions the idea that grief moves through set stages and argues that most people come through a loss with more resilience than expected. Much of it rests on his own group's studies.
How strong the research is
moderate. A review of 12 studies (Askren and Bloom, Journal of Obstetric, Gynecologic, and Neonatal Nursing, 1999) described a grief reaction particular to relinquishing mothers that resembles ordinary grief but often persists as chronic, unresolved grief, with possible long-term physical, psychological and social effects, and found little known about what helps. In 213 Australian women who had placed a first child for adoption when young and unmarried (Winkler and van Keppel, 1984), about half reported a sense of loss that grew over periods of up to 30 years, strongest at birthdays and on Mother’s Day, and the group reported more adjustment problems than matched women. In the Minnesota Texas Adoption Research Project (Christian, McRoy, Grotevant and Bryant, 1997, and later waves), birth mothers in fully disclosed adoptions reported less adoption-related grief than those in confidential ones. In 505 Australian mothers separated from a child under past adoption practices (Kenny, Higgins, Soloff and Sweid, Australian Institute of Family Studies, 2012), very few felt the adoption had been their choice, over half had symptoms suggesting post-traumatic stress, and close to a third scored for a likely severe mental disorder, though the study could not say how much of that came from the adoption. These samples are mostly volunteers, and all of these studies are of mothers.
Where it comes from
Kenneth Doka (editor), Disenfranchised Grief: Recognizing Hidden Sorrow, 1989. Winkler and van Keppel, Relinquishing Mothers in Adoption: Their Long-Term Adjustment, Institute of Family Studies, Melbourne, 1984. Australia’s Senate inquiry into forced adoption, 2012, and the national apology by Prime Minister Julia Gillard on 21 March 2013