Sometimes, I think that parents underestimate their children. They try to withhold information until they think their child can handle all of the nuances of the issue. It’s pretty hard to hide adoption from a Korean adoptee. It doesn’t take a genius to figure that you don’t look like Mommy and Daddy at a very young age. I don’t see this as a disadvantage. It starts the dialogue young and becomes a regular part of their world.

However, parents do often hide how much they know about the birthparents. It’s not malicious. It’s a parent’s way of protecting their child. Though every child is different and every child reacts to the information with different degrees of emotion, here is the reason I have for sharing all of the information that you have upfront. In the absence of fact, a child will create their own fiction or fantasy.

Let’s face it. Even though we were born in Korea, it’s still a foreign land to the adoptee. We don’t live there and we have no frame of reference to make it common place. In the minds of a child, Korea can take on a fairy tale quality – an exotic place that is full of wonderful people and wonderful places. In short, it becomes perfect.

This is why I advocate sharing information and teaching your child about Korea. When a child creates elaborate scenarios in their minds, finding out the facts can be disturbing and, at the very least, disappointing.

Luckily for me, I have my parents to use as a resource. A lot of parents are the first in the family to adopt from a foreign country. I have my parents (who raised two reasonably adjusted Korean adoptees) to turn to when it’s time for me to make decisions. I can remember being very young and my mother would tell me about being adopted and she would tell me what she thought my birth mother was like. In my case, we didn’t have any facts, but my mother did her best to humanize my birth parents and make them less of a mystery.

Along that same line, as parents of adoptees, I think we need to be careful about how we teach our children about Korea. Korea is a wonderful country with wonderful people, but it isn’t better or worse than it is in the United States or any other country. In our drive to introduce our children to the culture of their birth, we may create a world that doesn’t really exist. As an adoptee, I can’t stress enough the importance of helping to create that balance between fact and fiction.