nts make things for the child the more he will resort to fantasy" (Baran et al., 1975). This is yet another argument for open adoptions. Again, if the child knows the circumstances of his adoption and other pertinent information about his biological roots, he will have an easier time forming an identity in adolescence. It is also noted that, " .. . young adoptees are vulnerable to feeling 'different' or 'bad' due to them comments and actions of others" (Wegar, 1995). This is to say that the child will feel more accepted, and that his adoption is not a stigma if his adoptive parents have the conviction that being adopted does not make the family 'bad', and it does not mean that the adoptive parents are failures because they could not have biological children. Sometimes the negativity of adoptive parents about the circumstances of the adoption can be sensed by the adoptee, thus causing the adoptee to believe that there is something wrong with being adopted. Once again, this can cause identity formation problems, especially if the adolescent believes that he is inferior or bad because he is adopted and not 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) writes: 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 non-adopted youth have found no differences in adequacy of ident...
