In 2006 I helped my 25-year-old son Jamal locate his biological families. I hoped this reunion would help him overcome some of the challenges he was wrestling with on his path to adulthood. I was thrilled when the families of both his white mother and his black father welcomed him. But I was unprepared for the discovery of how much he had in common with his birth parents: not just appearance, but also many personality traits, talents and problems.

When I adopted in 1981, I believed -- like many social scientists and adoption professionals at that time -- that nurture was everything, each infant a blank slate awaiting parental inscription. Even when Jamal was a young child, I recognized that this idea was too simple, that my son had many attributes different from those of anyone else in my family. Still, I was surprised by these reunion revelations.

The adoption theory that I'd absorbed over the years never mentioned genetic heritage. Jamal's difficulty finding his way as a young adult, I was told, might stem from a number of psychological factors. First was the loss of a birth mother with whom he had bonded in utero -- a "primal wound" that supposedly made it difficult for him to bond with an adoptive mother. This idea never resonated with me, for we always had a close connection, with a lot of emotional and verbal sharing. Even in our most troubled times, we never lost contact, and he often confided in me. If anything, I saw him as too close to me, his only parent.

More compelling was the idea that he had been affected by the fetal environment of a stressed teenage birth mother, who probably drank and smoked. This, possibly combined with a weak sense of self deriving from a loss of ethnicity and family history, especially prevalent in the transracially adopted, might help to explain why he chose a life outside the mainstream, one that for many years involved heavy marijuana and alcohol use.

None of these theories, however, prepared me for the shock of finding that my son's birth mother and father -- out of touch with each other for 25 years -- had both struggled with drug addiction throughout their lives. I was especially surprised because in my phone conversations and a visit with them, I had seen that they (like Jamal) were charming and intelligent people. I learned, however, that substance abuse had taken a toll on their lives, especially the father's.

Reunion has helped Jamal secure a stronger sense of self, especially since he found mixed-race heritage on both sides. His mother married another black man and had three more biracial children, and his father's extended family is multiracial as well. But reunion also added many complications to his life as he has tried to reconcile the heritage of what he calls his "three families." Only gradually, through moving to Louisiana for six months and living first with his birth mother and then with his birth father, did Jamal acknowledge their shared substance abuse problems. This realization led him for the first time to enter a recovery program, something his birth parents have never done. He sought to overcome the negative part of his birth heritage so that he could build on the positive. Recently, I asked Jamal how he was different from his birth father.

"Not a heck of a lot," he replied. "But I have better tools."

Jamal's reunion experience led me to undertake my own search, a quest to understand genetics and how they might impact adoption. Perhaps I hoped to find that nature is everything, and that I could let go of my parental guilt for his problems. As a social scientist with little biological education, I began by looking at science journalism, then turned to the original research. I found that genetics alone could explain neither Jamal's positive behavior nor his addiction; genes provide only probabilistic propensities, not predetermined programming. They provide probabilities for behavior and risk factors for disease but do not indicate whether any individual will sustain a behavior or succumb to a particular mental or physical disorder, or how severe the disease might be.

I found other research that surprised me, especially an interdisciplinary field that I'd never heard of, called behavioral genetics. Though it's not focused on adoption per se, many of its findings are based on the study of adoptees. While I had not known about this field by name, I had heard of some of its more infamous practitioners, like those at the turn of the century who advocated selective breeding and forced sterilization. I also knew about a few more recent behavioral geneticists who published controversial studies of racial differences in IQ. But now I discovered that behavioral genetics had gained legitimacy as a science for its studies on individual differences.

Behavioral genetics tries to explain how much of the variation among individuals' cognitive and psychological traits can be attributed to genetic heritage and how much is due to the environment. Their major methodology is a natural experiment that separates genetic heritage and environment by comparing the similarities and differences among adoptees, adoptive parents, and biological parents, and also between biological and adoptive siblings. In addition, behavioral genetics studies identical twins raised apart. In studies over a number of years in many different countries, researchers concur that identical twins separated at birth and adopted into different families, compared with identical twins raised together by their biological parents, are still very similar on a number of measures of personality, temperament, intelligence, interests and susceptibility to physical and mental disease. Additionally, identical twins raised apart are more similar than fraternal twins raised together.

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Adoption and Genetics: Implications for Adoptive Parents ...

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