When Adoptive Parents Stop Talking and Start Listening

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What happens when adoptive parents enter adoptee spaces and hear things that are difficult, angry or painful?

Charlyn Spiering doesn’t believe the answer is to get defensive. She believes it’s to listen.

Charlyn is the host of Adoption Uncovered and the mother of five children, both biological and adopted. She joins Corey and Kendall for a candid conversation about raising adopted children, talking openly about first families, respecting the parts of an adoption story that belong to the adoptee, and recognizing that even well-intentioned parents are going to make mistakes.

Charlyn shares her family’s experience raising Aaron, her son adopted from India, and the effort to incorporate Indian culture into their family without claiming his identity or story as their own. She also discusses Aaron’s feelings about potentially visiting India and connecting with his first mother, including an important reality that sometimes gets lost in adoption conversations: not every adoptee wants the same kind of reunion or relationship.

That opens up a fascinating conversation with Kendall about his own childhood. Kendall always knew he was adopted, but as a kid he still identified with the Native American heritage of his adoptive father. That connection wasn’t biological. It came from the man who raised him and the things they loved together.

Charlyn also has a family discovery of her own. She was in college when her father revealed that she and her brother had Jewish ancestry, something previous generations had deliberately kept quiet. Years later, DNA testing helped uncover more of that missing family history.

Corey, Kendall and Charlyn also get into closed adoption, searching for biological family before consumer DNA testing existed, disability and international adoption, the complicated question of first-family contact, and why adoptive parents need to make adoption something their children can actually talk about.

And because this is Family Twist, the conversation eventually includes Indian food, homemade potato pancakes, Billie Eilish, K-pop, Spotify playlists and the music our parents and children use to let us into their worlds.

Charlyn says something during the episode that sums up her approach to entering adoptee spaces:

“I want to learn. I’m not here to tell you stuff.”

Sometimes listening is the most important part of the conversation.

Listen now to Family Twist and hear an adoptive parent, an adoptee and two podcasters get honest about adoption, identity, culture and who gets to tell the story.

Remember, family secrets are the ultimate plot twist.

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