" Unless the adopted child has the answers to these arising questions, identity formation can be distorted and somewhat cut short.
Adolescence is a period when young people seek an integrated and stable ego identity. This occurs as they seek to link their current self-perceptions with their "self perceptions from earlier periods and with their cultural and biological heritage. Adopted children sometimes have difficulty with this task because they often do not have the necessary information from the past to begin to develop a stable sense of who they are. They often have incomplete knowledge about why they were abandoned and what their birth parents were like, and they may grieve not only for the loss of their birth parents but for the loss of the part of themselves.
In essence, it seems that the adolescent's identity formation is damaged because he holds the knowledge that his "roots" or his "essence" have been severed and remain on the unknown side of the adoption barrier. .
In most of the studies surveyed, the researchers are in agreement about one fact. Essential to the adopted adolescent's identity development is the knowledge of the birth family and the circumstances surrounding the adoption. Without this information, the adolescent has difficulty deciding which family (birth or adopted) he resembles. During the search for an identity in adolescence, the child may face an array of problems including resentment toward the adoptive parents, rejection of anger toward the birth parents, self-hatred, trans racial adoption concerns, and feelings of rootless ness.
While searching for an identity, adolescents sometimes are involved in a behavior which psychologists term "family romance." This is not a romance in a sexual manner, but slightly a romance in the sense of fantasizing about birth parents and their personal qualities. Horner and Rosenberg (1991) stated that "the adopted child may develop a family romance in order to defend against painful facts.
