January 28, 2025
Mainstream adoptee narratives highlight struggles around education and learning. Research shows that adoptees struggle with school attendance, have lower attainment, and are twice as likely to not be in education, employment, or training as the average population. These are important issues that those working with adoptees need to address, as too many children are being failed by the education system.
However, I had a different experience. I received the ‘gifted’ label at school, defined as exhibiting intellectual abilities higher than the average. My experience wasn’t any harder or even the same compared to other adoptees — I have significant educational privilege, both in having a degree and also in enjoying traditional education. However, it does highlight several themes of adoption that may resonate across stories, times, and individuals. In addition, I hope it encourages more narratives of adoptees having a positive relationship with education and even achieving highly. Please take whatever resonates with you, and leave the rest.
My relationship with learning has been lifelong. I often struggled to fall asleep as a child, so I would spend my nights devouring any kind of book I could get my hands. Growing up, I had many interests: from football to singing, dancing, history. What’s more, I was usually pretty good at them — other than art, which I hated.
In primary school, I had a good relationship with education, because I deeply enjoyed the process of learning about the world, and school offered that learning. There definitely was an element of competitiveness with the other high achievers in my class. I enjoyed the race of being the first to finish, whether it was cross country or the reading scheme. As long as I was winning, I felt a sense of pride and self worth.
During secondary school, my love of learning took a back seat to surviving the social dynamics of an inner-city comprehensive. I was small for my age, and was bullied by several other boys. I applied my mind to finding strategies to protect myself, such as being the class clown and using my high achievement status as an ‘above than’ barrier. Throughout my GCSEs, there was a sense of academic limitation: I was not being pushed as much as I could. Even though I was around the top of my class in most subjects, I felt that I was being overtaken by others in more academic, excellence-focused environments.
A constant background theme was the desire to escape my circumstances and not being defined by my past. I had an innate sense that education was a route to freedom, empowerment, and most importantly, being listened to. I did not want my past to limit my future.
At sixth-form, I joined a prestigious boarding school, hoping to unlock my potential in an environment that would support it. I leapt fully into the system of hierarchy: high-achieving students and school monitors wore special uniform that marked them out as superior. Badges and button denoted house captaincy and proficiency in music and sport. I tried to excel at everything: going to the gym, practising piano and joining the choir, as well as studying hard for my A-levels. Yet, on results day, I didn’t get the grades I wanted. It was soul crushing. When I tell you I literally cried all day, I literally cried all day. The fragile structure I had built over the chasm of my adoptive trauma completely shattered, and I had to start my sense of self all over again.
Looking back, there are two lenses through which I view my childhood experience of education. The first lens centres the traumatic separation I endured from my adoption and its downstream effects. Like many adoptees, I grew up with low self esteem and toxic shame, internalising the lie that I wasn’t good enough for my biological parents. Early in my educational experience, I found that one way of alleviating that pain was through the praise I received for being good at things. I ended up practising music not out of enjoyment, but because I enjoyed the warm words of affirmation of my teachers and parents. Adults definitely projected their goals and dreams onto me. I was viewed as a blank slate, when in reality several factors were steering my sense of self from before I was born.
However, once the other children caught up, and I started having to work, it felt that not receiving praise was the same as failing. A perfectionism and self-critic complex followed: I spent the second half of my childhood believing that I would never meet my potential.
Moreover, my giftedness also helped me stake out a place in my adoptive home. I found my achievement a predictable way of receiving attention, especially when my adopted brother arrived. I was 7 when he joined us at age 5. Feeling threatened and replaced by this similar mixed boy who looked like me, I resolved to get even better so that my parents could no longer ignore me.
All-in-all, I found my giftedness quite a lonely experience in my adoptive family. Even though there was ethnic mirroring — I looked like my sisters, even though they were my adoptive parents’ biological children — there wasn’t as much interest mirroring. No one in my family was especially musical and sporty, other than my adopted brother. I had to attenuate my feelings and my energy to fit into the social dynamic and find my place in the family. I was naturally gifted at music, and sometimes my parents would get me to perform songs when guests were around, even when I didn’t want to. I felt guilty and rude when I didn’t, but I also felt like I was an object for their benefit.
This ties in nicely to the other lens I view my educational experience: neurodivergence, and the different way my brain functions from what is considered typical. I struggled a lot with social interaction growing up. Even now, there seems to be many elements or cues which I don’t pick up on. In contrast, education seemed to be a much easier and stable way of understanding the world, compared to the flux and subtext of social encounters.
A lot of my childhood survival strategies centred around masking my feelings, and fitting into many situations that just didn’t work for my brain or nervous system. This ties into racial and gender stereotypes: I felt emasculated by my bullies, and was uncomfortable in white or black environments due to my mixed heritage. I tried applying the logic of learning to socialising, practising social cues and confidence in the mirror. I remember getting to sixth form and consciously learning which TV shows and music would make you friends in a white, middle-class space. However, experience teaches you that you can’t “solve” a relationship. Instead, one needs to engage more deeply and kindly with yourself and others.
After many years of narrative therapy, EMDR therapy, and self-work, I have healed greatly from the various traumas of my adoption and childhood. Moreover, embarking on the journey of DNA tests, adoption files, and reunion has given me a much more holistic sense of my identity outside of achievement. Education-wise, I also did well at university, which allowed me to release my unhealthy obsession around academic achievement. I feel much more able to relax in the knowledge that I am intelligent, but that it doesn’t define me, or that there’s a constant standard of excellence I need to attain.
In conclusion, there are many narratives of adoption and education, all with their challenges and joys. Even my experience, with all of its educational privilege, interacted with my trauma and need for identity in an unhealthy and painful way. It’s easier said than done, but it’s vital that parents recognise the strategies that adoptees are using to survive, and remind them of the unconditional love that will allow them to heal and grow in the years to come.
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