Adopted Women as Mothers: through the filter of adoption experience

Jeanette Elizabeth Conrick
2016
Adoption in one form or another has always been part of the fabric of Australian society and thousands of adoptions have been legalised in the State of Victorian since the proclamation of its first adoption legislation in 1928. Despite a growing body of international knowledge about the life outcomes for those with an adoption status little is known about the experiences of adopted women at the life stage of parenting children. This research will contribute to redressing this deficiency. The
more » ... rent inquiry has heard directly from twenty-one Victorian women about their own lived experience as mothers. To answer the research question that was posed, semi-structured interviews were conducted with sixteen participants. The resulting qualitative data was analysed in a variety of ways, initially through examination of each participant interview and then across interviews, using thematic content analysis. The codes, categories and themes that resulted were evaluated by a focus group of five participants who had not taken part in the interviews and also by two independent, social work inter-raters. The study shows that each participant was an experienced mother with children spanning a number of developmental stages of childhood. Each woman was well embedded within the normative range of Australian mothers in terms of the stability of partnerships, education level and employment trends, and their approaches to parenting were consciously informed by their adoption status. Mothering emerges as a time of confrontation and review for this group of women. Through their own children's childhoods, they engaged with memories of their early lives and the losses they and their own two mothers had experienced. Biological parenthood was the first choice for each woman in this study, and all expressed a high level of commitment to their family of procreation. They consciously sought to be the 'best mothers' they could be and to actively address any issue that might negatively impact on achieving this. The desire to be [...]
doi:10.4225/03/58523831bcfd2 fatcat:ccnaec2xmngefav5bzdshkp3la