Originally published 2018-09-27.
It’s natural for people who've been adopted to wonder about their biological families and where they originate from. This curiosity usually intensifies as part of the self-discovery process which takes place in teenage years. There are sometimes health or other serious reasons, for searching for one’s real family.
Adoption is the birth of a new, permanent relationship between a child and an adoptive parent. Once this happens, there's no legal difference between a child being born into a family, or a child who's adopted.
Birth parents have different reasons for putting kids up for adoption. Some decide they want better lives for their children than they feel they can provide. Others feel their kids would do better living in another country. Some parents can’t take good care of a kid due to illness or other difficulties. Several birth parents say that having their kid placed for adoption with another family has been the most difficult thing in the world. However, that sometimes it's truly in the kid’s best interests.
This little girl’s reaction to discovering she is going to be adopted is the most beautiful thing we've seen today.
She was praying daily to be adopted, and Paige Zezulka was finally able to adopt her.
Watch the original video by Paige Zezulka below:
A deeply personal announcement
The emotional force of the video comes from the girl's response to news that matters to her. It should not be used to define how every child feels about adoption or what every family's history contains. The relationships involved are real relationships, including connections to birth family; calling only one side the real family creates an unnecessary and misleading distinction.
Let the child keep ownership of the moment
An audience can appreciate the joy while respecting that the child may later understand or share the experience differently. The clip is one moment within an ongoing family life. Its most useful invitation is to listen to children as they describe their own feelings, rather than ask them to provide a reassuring story that fits adults' expectations or an online audience's preferred ending.
Ivey’s adoption
The girl in the video is Ivey Zezulka, who was 10 when the clip was shared in August 2018. She lives in Athens, Georgia, and she and her younger siblings, Kai, 3, and Lita, 2, had spent years in foster care. The family was first approached about adopting Ivey and Kai in 2016, when the children were still expected to return to their biological parents; that did not happen, and the adoption process took about two years. Her foster parents, Paige and Daniel Zezulka, adopted all three children. They told Ivey by putting a framed note inside a wrapped gift box, and she read it aloud, “I’m going to be adopted!”, before bursting into tears. “We love you, sweetie. We’ll always be your parents,” Daniel told her. Paige hoped the video would encourage others: “Sometimes people are afraid to consider older kids, they think they may be ‘damaged.’”
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