Hoping Love Can Bridge a Great Divide

Permissive parents or pervasive violence? The availability of drugs or recklessness of the young? A toxic culture or a few bad seeds? I expected that my column last week on the murder of two suburban teens by a classmate would unleash the usual back-and-forth among readers over who or what was to blame.

What I did not expect was that adoption would be fingered as the culprit in this tragedy. The convicted killer, Michael Demirdjian, 16, was adopted as an infant, a fact that made its way into virtually every news story on the case. He’d had an unremarkable upbringing--safe home, doting parents--but veered off track when he turned 13, just after he learned he’d been adopted.

He fought at school, feuded with his parents, had trouble keeping friends. He felt angry and full of rage, he admitted to a probation officer. Typical adolescent angst? That’s what his broken-hearted parents believed, but not what some readers of my column seemed to see.

“I don’t know if this will be any consolation, but the adoption issue goes a long way in trying to understand his behavior,” wrote Harriet Bay, the mother of two adopted kids, now grown. Bay is also an educator who works with troubled teens, many of whom are adoptees. “All I can say is that love and good parenting can’t erase the initial fact that ‘someone didn’t want me.’”

It’s a notion as troubling as it is intriguing--the idea that the separation of a child from its birth mother creates a rupture so profound, the reverberations last for life. That bumps hard up against the conventional view that adopted children can be absorbed seamlessly into new families; that comfortable lives make up for biological loss.

The theory--put forth in the 1993 book “The Primal Wound: Understanding the Adopted Child” (Gateway Press) by therapist Nancy Newton Verrier--follows decades of studies that have found adopted children more likely to have behavioral problems, learning disabilities and emotional troubles than other children, no matter how stable their adoptive families. Those differences have traditionally been blamed on the genetic contributions of birth parents, or trauma that may have preceded adoption.

But some researchers now believe “the fact of adoption” can predispose a child to emotional instability; that unresolved feelings of loss can lead to low-self esteem and insecurity. According to adoption research, more than three-quarters of adult adoptees report feeling “abandoned” by their birth parents. Many say they are “overly sensitive to issues of loss” and have trouble forming close relationships.

Symptoms of “attachment impairment” typically show up in adolescence, therapists say. Although any teenager is apt to rebel, feel out of place and struggle with issues of identity, adoptees face a special challenge, says therapist Marlou Russell, author of “Adoption Wisdom: A Guide to the Issues and Feelings of Adoption” (Broken Branch Productions).

“What adoptees walk around with, whether they’re aware of it or not, is the truth that, whatever the story, on some level, your mother didn’t want you. If that’s not addressed, the pain has to come out one way or another,” she says. “I’m never surprised when adoptees act out in a hostile way, hurting themselves or someone else.”

But Russell--who was adopted as a baby and now counsels adoptive families--says those feelings can be ameliorated. “Adoptees have to process their loss, just like you’d process any loss. And that means their adoptive parents have to acknowledge it.”

Recognize that it is natural for adopted children to wonder about their birth parents, she advises. “Let them know you’re not threatened by that. Encourage them to ask questions. Help them understand the facts. Provide a safe space for the feelings to come out, so they don’t have to go underground.”

The “primal wound” theory is controversial not just for its lack of scientific grounding but for its impact on adoptive families. Millions of families have grown through adoption, and their ranks are increasing as options expand. There are adoptions by single parents and gay couples, international adoptions, transracial adoptions, foster care adoptions and open adoptions, where birth parents remain a part of their children’s lives.

As a society, we no longer regard adoption as a secret that stigmatizes parent and child, but as one of many ways to create a family no less stable or more fragile that any other. And adoptive parents are working to counteract stereotypes that subtly assign their families second-class citizenship--such as gratuitous mentions of adoptive status in news stories.

Still, old attitudes die hard, as my e-mail reveals. “I somehow feel the type of woman that chooses to give up her child too often has something wrong,” wrote one grandmother. “This antisocial or dysfunctional trait, whatever it is, must somehow be inherited.”

Another reader, an adoptive father, speculated that “the type of girl who rejects abortion for adoption” may have a kind of emotional disorder that encourages defiance and produces particularly difficult kids. One man insisted that kids like Michael Demirdjian are doomed, because their birth parents are “scum” and the circumstances of their births inflict damage that even loving adoptive parents “could not overcome.”

Some worry that publicity over the travails of a handful of adopted children is souring some on the idea of adoption. “I know a lot of people struggling with infertility,” Bay said. “And they are opting for anything but adoption--doing test tubes, egg donors, surrogates.... They just consider adoption too dicey.”

As if raising children--however they join our families--isn’t dicey anyway.

Many of us have special challenges--single parents, the working poor, grandparents raising their children’s kids--and statistics stacked against us. And children with emotional and behavior problems can be found on any family tree.

Isn’t what adopted children need what my daughters also require of me? That I listen, tell the truth, provide them with security. That I give them the freedom to vent their fears and the space to figure who they want to be. That I teach them--as they teach me--that life provides no guarantees, but family offers limitless possibilities.

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Sandy Banks’ column is published on Tuesdays and Sundays. Her e-mail address is sandy.banks@latimes.com.