raised in his biological family. “The literature on adopted children has long documented particular and sometimes intense struggles around identity formation, and suggests that in many ways adopted children follow a different developmental course from children who are raised by their biological parents” (Horner and Rosenberg, 1991). While most of the studies I read found that adoptees have difficulty in identity formation during adolescence, I did find an article which refutes this point. Kelly et al. (1998) write: Developing a separate, autonomous, mature sense of self is widely recognized as a particularly complex task for adoptees. While many scholars have concluded that identity formation is inherently more difficult for adoptees some recent comparisons of adopted and nonadopted youth have found no differences in adequacy of identity formation, and a study by Stein and Hoopes (1985) revealed higher ego identity scores for adoptees. Goebel and Lott (1986) found that such factors as subjects’ age, sex, personality variables, family characteristics, and motivation to search for birth parents accounted more for quality of identity formation than did adoptive status. In conclusion, it is difficult to say who is right in their beliefs about adoptees and identity formation. The research I have reviewed has mostly shown that adoptees do have quite a bit a difficulty forming an identity during adolescence, and that this difficulty can be due to a number of factors. Negative parental attitudes about adoption can have a negative affect on the adoptee. The issue of open versus closed adoptions will forever be a debate, but the research does show that the more an adoptee knows about his birth family and the circumstances surrounding his adoption, the easier it will be for him to form an identity during adolescence. Most of the researchers who wrote about the family romance seemed to do so in a negative manner, when in fact I b...
