TikTok helps adoptees find a new community to explore joy, family, and belonging

Emily Paluska was adopted at eight months old from South Korea, then grew up in a Midwestern rural town with her adoptive parents.

“I couldn’t have asked for a better childhood,” she says. “My parents were extremely involved in my life and I never felt anything but love and support. I wasn’t treated differently than my other biological siblings.”

Her TikTok account features recipes from Korea (which she uses to connect with her homeland) alongside content about transracial adoption. The latter is when a child is adopted into a family of a different race than their own — a subject close to Paluska’s heart and identity.

“There are so many adoptees like me that want to feel like they’re not alone while they process their complicated feelings about discovering where they came from,” she tells Mashable.

TikTok’s often provided a space for users to create or find a community with similar interests, and adoption TikTok is a testament to this. Despite its known shortcomings, the platform is proving to be a portal for such conversations and community-building. Niche, sometimes stigmatized subjects have found a home here, be it childfree TikTok or a support network for keloid awareness.

Adoptee TikTok, a collective of TikTokers sharing their adoption stories, is reaching monumental numbers. The hashtag #Adoption itself has 2.8 billion views. More niche hashtags like #AdoptionJourney, which has 170 million views and focuses on the voices of adoptive parents, and #AdopteesofTikTok at 57.4 million views, tell individual stories of adoption and everything that accompanies the process.

The videos in adoptee TikTok are overwhelmingly informative, and promote stereotype-shattering conversations, as the subject can be cloaked in typecasting, stigma, and assumptions. With this in mind, adoptee TikTokers have embarked on a mission to speak out about their past, their present, their families, and their shared experiences — including conversations around mental health and trauma.

Alison Roy, a consultant child and adolescent psychotherapist and author of A for Adoption, told Mashable that adoption TikTok is a function of people seeking and providing support in equal bouts, speaking to “when families and adoptees think about their stories and bring their shared stories together, finding ways to talk about their losses, rather than living in their trauma.”

“That’s why people use these online mediums, and it’s really important that people do find ways to connect in healthy ways,” Roy adds, noting that storytelling and sharing experiences are often tools used in conjunction with therapy and external forms of support.

TikTokkers like Paluska, for instance, have found TikTok to be a medium through which she can connect her own stories with the lives of so many others.

“My hope is that by talking about it more, it can both educate those who aren’t familiar with transracial adoption along with helping to connect other adoptees that have been searching for others just like them,” she says.

Paluska’s videos also touch upon the complications of this kind of adoption, noting how some ingrained notions of adoption include that of the “white saviour” narrative, for instance.

“International adoptions especially are often framed like, ‘look how terrible your home country is, thank goodness you were brought to America.’ It definitely feeds into the whole ‘white saviour’ narrative,” she says. “I would encourage anyone who is looking to adopt a child outside of their own race to be fully committed to integrating your child into their native culture,” she says. “Speaking as an adult adoptee, it will save your child a lot of hurt and confusion if you help embrace where they came from when they’re young.”

“It’s about factoring in the right support for families, keeping in mind different people, different families,” she says. “These issues require the capacity to reflect.”

Paluska’s exploration of her roots has led to some backlash online, which stems from entrenched ideas around adoption. She’s faced this response both while growing up and across the internet where she shares her story.

“Some thought I was trying to claim that I was a different race than my own so that’s been frustrating. I’ve also had people question why it matters that I want to know where I came from that just because I’m genetically Korean, it doesn’t mean I have to learn about Korea. For the record, it absolutely matters. Comments like this are why so many adoptees feel like they don’t belong anywhere,” she says.

Like Paluska, Taylor Shennett, a Chinese adoptee, creates content on TikTok advocating for conscious adopting — similar to conscious parenting, in which a parent lets go of their own ego and desires to create a two-way relationship and channel of communication.

With adoption, this can mean being open to your adoptive child asking questions about their birth parents and roots — and answering with care and transparency. In doing so, Shennett says adoption can become a positive, healing experience. Her videos take a deep dive not only into her own adoption story but the institution itself, and the varying emotions that accompany the process. She cites resources for adoptive parents, and advocates for supporting and listening to adoptees with an open mind.

Aubrey Hoover also counts herself amongst TikTok’s adoptee population. While her content doesn’t just focus on her adoption story, she’s touched upon it with a poignant video about her birth mother, with whom she connected after discovering her on Facebook.

Discovering her birth mother is a facet of open adoption, a type of adoption in which the biological and adoptive families can access limited personal information and make contact. This form of adoption has become increasingly common since the 1970s in the U.S.

“For a lot of adoptees, we do often think about where we came from. Even since finding my birth mom, I often wonder about how she feels about the life I currently live,” Hoover tells Mashable. She explains that TikTok allows her to express her feelings about being adopted.

“Continuing to be open on social media really will provide adoptees with relatable content to process and heal any and all issues they have with the subject,” she says.

TikTokkers within the adoptee realm frequently mention their continuous healing processes, and often share advice on managing mental health. Bella Baskin is another such content creator, who addresses the emotional weight of her adoption, while speaking to the wonderful experience she’s had with her adoptive family.

“There is a lot of emotional baggage that comes with being adopted,” she says.

These are the sorts of conversations scattered through Baskin’s account, peppered between deeply honest stories of her relationships, family, and snippets of her daily life. Baskin was adopted into the Baskin family, of Baskin-Robbins fame.

“I was adopted into a really cool family,” she says. “But being adopted into a loving family is [the most] important. As adoptees, we’re a lot more sensitive and needing of attention. I’m lucky my family has always treated me like their own.”

Like other creators within adoptee TikTok, she acknowledges the assumptions people unfamiliar with adoption often apply to the subject.

“Throughout my life when I’ve told people I’m adopted, I’ll either get ‘I’m so sorry’, which supports the false belief system of there something wrong with me, or self-pity, or ‘I wish I was adopted'”, she explains. “A lot of people are naïve to the emotional issues that come along with being adopted.”

Breaking down such false beliefs sits at the core of adoptee TikTok, while elevating the perspective of those who have been adopted themselves. For many, it has been a joyful, liberating process. As people openly navigate their experiences, they form bonds with those who have similar narratives.

“It has been amazing hearing other people’s stories. I think it’s made all of us feel less alone,” Paluska says. “We may feel lost and adrift in trying to connect to our roots but we’re all mutually feeling the same thing so it makes it feel a lot less lonesome.”