In the United States, legal adults have the Constitutional right to change their given name. However, a name change regarding a child will prove to be more complex.

To change a child’s last name will require the consent of the parents. Because fathers have the traditional right to have their children bear their last name, he will have to provide for consent for the name change. However, if the father has abandoned legal obligations to the child, such consent will not be needed.

Situations involving the name change of a child will ultimately be determined by the courts at a judge’s discretion. A formal petition or application to change a child’s last name will be required, which is to be filed with the local county courts. An affidavit of consent will be needed from the father, which is to be signed and notarized along with the formal petition.

Upon submitting all proper documents, the courts may hold a hearing in order to determine the nature of the name change and will make a decision based on the reasons provided by the parents.

In order to find out more about an adopted child’s biological parents, an adoptee and/or their family will need to know what their names are. Birth parents may actually be able to help searchers out with this part of the operation, though, for they too may be looking for the children they gave up for adoption.

As far as domestic adoption goes, a number of organizations can help in the search for birth parents. If that strategy proves to be a dead end, it may be time to overturn a seal on the record of one’s domestic adoption. An adoption record will contain details on a child’s original place of birth, date of birth and the true identities of a child’s biological parents. 

In most states, an appeal to a court will be needed for specific identifying information on birth parents, but for general questions about the physical characteristics of the parents, even to the extent of their race/ethnicity, adult adoptees may be allowed permission to reveal their adoption records.   

Beyond merely finding out the name of a child’s birth parents, an adoptive family might also seek to learn more about his or her whole birth family. While this moves a bit beyond the conventional frame of domestic adoption and though it may be relatively time-consuming, a little genealogical research might help satisfy some people’s curiosity. Searchers should see what they can glean from public records, and if they find the whereabouts of the birth parents or close relatives, they may even desire to meet with them.

Although families are encouraged to not give up hope in trying to find out more about domestic adoptions, they also should prepare for negative outcomes. A search may very well turn out to be fruitless or the child’s biological parents may be deceased, and thus, the child may never meet them.

Irrespective of adoption and finding biological parents, adoptive parents of foreign-born children should try to communicate the need for all people to find out what cultural and societal elements made them what they are today.

In engaging in a genealogical search or even a historical study of a child’s people, adoptive parents might want to make this into a bonding experience and try to find out more about their own people and family tree. They may also use this activity as an educative session to reinforce the idea that racial concepts of “black” and “white” are not very descriptive qualifiers.     

Confronting the concepts of race, culture and nationality during a search for biological parents, adoptive parents may also take the opportunity to touch upon how discovery of one’s own cultural heritage may also involve discovery of less savory implications of attention to our differences. In particular, parents may wish to (delicately and age-appropriately) discuss social problems like racism and discrimination, and in accord with their beliefs, may wish to talk with their child about the good in accepting people for who they are. 

As important as finding cultural heritage and finding biological parents are, though, it is just as essential that parents help older children after the adoption preserve their cultural knowledge. To help ease children into a new life in a new country, adoptive parents may choose to cook traditional foods from that child’s country, learn some of their first language, or construct games and other activities around cultural symbols familiar to the children.

Reunions usually occur at the request of the adoptee once he or she reaches adulthood. For adoptees, the excitement and anxiety over reaching out to a biological parent may cause them to want to run right out and show up at the parent’s house or place of work.

However, especially after such a long time between the decision to place one’s child and the initial contact is made, this news may be startling and potentially upsetting to some biological parents. Consequently, adoptees are advised to send a letter as something of a “heads-up” to their birth parent expressing their desire to meet. 

As for the biological parent, though he or she might claim the adopted child is his/hers through a biological relationship, in terms of age the child is anything but and should not be treated as such.

Also, though a reunion between adoptees and biological parents might be completely amicable, birth parents should prepare for their children to be somewhat angry with them for giving them up for adoption and want an explanation. Above all, birth parents should also be up front with regard to their expectations and needs, and honest in response to direct questions from their children. 

While an adoptive parent clearly is not a biological parent, he or she too may be involved in the reunification process, if nothing else as a system of support for the adoptee at his or her request. Nonetheless, adoptive parents should never be expected to take control of the situation. If anyone should take the lead, it should be the adoptee. Furthermore, adoptive parents – from a distance – should show their support for their child’s quest. 

Adoption reunification is not guaranteed to work out perfectly. Biological parents may not wish to be a part of their child’s life and vice-versa. Just the same, there is all the potential in the world that a reunion may go well if all parties ease into this transitional moment and show due respect for one another. 

Adoption families tend to go through a trend that at first leans towards keeping their child safe and away from any possible dangers including possible exposure to their biological family. Adoption families, specifically those with their child born in China, will often know little to nothing about their child’s origin. If anything, parents will know the area or region of China in which their child was born.        

At a certain age in conjunction with the parents’ graces, adopted children begin to wonder about their birth. This notion tends to be strongest in international adoptions as the children often bear no resemblance to their adoption families and are reminded of their true heritage on a daily basis.

In order to ease anxieties and false hopes, adoption families will often travel to their child’s country of origin as a vacation and casually search for indications of a possible link with their biological family. The chance of finding the child’s origins beyond cultural and historical information remains highly unlikely and should not be emphasized. Odds of finding the biological parents of an abandoned child proves to be the most difficult of tasks and requires pure luck. 

Another consideration for adoption families finding biological parents is travel restrictions and difficulties in navigating far-stretches of the world. Northern China provides an expanse of poverty and desolation with little internal infrastructure, making any true determination of lineage nearly impossible. Also, areas with political instability or in the midst of a power struggle should not be traveled to until the situation settles. The safety of the child should always be paramount regardless of their hopes of finding a biological match.

Adoption families need to work together as individuals to quell certain anxieties about searching for a child’s biological parents. It can often be a sensitive subject for both parent and child as the child feels it to be their right to meet their biological parents, while parents often feel offended by their child’s desire or nervous about their expectations.