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Telling anyone about the discovery that you’re a Non-Paternal Event (NPE) is hard. The responses are varied, reflecting the other’s discomfort. Telling your kids they have different and new biological family adds an extra layer of difficulty to an already challenging situation.
That difficulty is perception — usually distorted by our fears and anxieties. Often, we think our kids are unable to handle the truth of difficult issues, but that’s really our own inability coloring our perception. Choosing to keep kids, even other family members, in the dark about your discovery, may not be very different than your parent’s choice to keep you from knowing the truth. Ask yourself if that is a pattern you would like to repeat; perpetuating secrets, with consequences that play out in the long term.
Be very clear about your reasons to perpetuate a secret like family identity, which affects more than just you. To help balance the decision-making process, here are 4 key points to consider when kids are involved.
1. Kids are more perceptive than you think. With the exception of infants, kids at every age understand in their respective developmental ways when the status quo has changed in the family. The developmental stage is responsible for whether they can articulate their understanding, so it manifests in behavior first for the very young. Children are dependent on their parents for everything so they are sensitive to the shifts in their parent’s functioning. Without guidance on how to handle the stressor, children will often internalize responsibility for the parent’s upset. Appropriate for the me-centered nature of children. Kids with rejection sensitivity may be even more sensitive than their peers.
2. Kids are more resilient than think. Whether it’s healing from a broken bone or a trauma, kids' resiliency helps them bounce back faster than adults. Likely due to an evolutionary mechanism to ensure the survival of the species, our young must be able to withstand stress or they won’t make it to a reproductive age. I do not include severe trauma or neglect in this approach because of the impact of a child’s ability to thrive, much less cope.
If you are the parent of an adopted child or NPE child that doesn’t know the truth about their birth story yet, it is essential you develop a plan to disclose the truth when they are developmentally ready to receive it — not when you are ready to tell it. Waiting until you feel comfortable is part of the distortion. With you there to guide them, answer questions and provide acceptance, you reinforce their resiliency.
3. Ultimately, it will not change the way they feel about your known family. Known family is a descriptor used in conjunction with birth family or bio family to delineate the differences between the family that raised you and the family you have discovered. Your NPE journey has changed the way you feel about yourself, and probably the way some family communicates with you. Ask yourself if anything has changed about the way you feel about your birth certificate father, the man who raised you, now that you have this discovery. Presuming your childhood was positive, does this discovery change any of that? Learning you are not full siblings is shocking but does it change the way you feel about them; love them any less? If your child’s relationship with their grandparent was positive before the discovery, chances are very high it will remain that way after the discovery.
There are certainly situations when known family threatens to disown the NPE precisely because the discovery of the secret is so threatening. Of course, that will affect the children negatively because they are being forced to appraise what is wrong with their parent that the family has vilified them. Kids are naturally self-centered, so if something is bad about their parent, then something is wrong with them too - the product of their parent. In a situation where the adult NPE has been cut off or villainized, I find it is essential to be developmentally straight forward with kids.
In less extreme cases, grandparents may request that kids not be told, to prevent the kids from feeling any different about them. As if the relationship a grandparent had with a grandchild magically disappears with the knowledge that there is no biological connection; negating the very real emotional connection they do have. When things are out in the open, there is no festering of secrets in dark places where they grow in power. Explore your parents' fears and coach them to trust your judgment as the kids’ parent and as the one in control of the narrative now.
4. Keep an open-door policy. Children thrive when they are allowed to inquire or explore. Discovering DNA surprises is a journey that triggers many questions along the way. It’s too big to fully comprehend the first day. Kids will have questions come up weeks and months later just as you did. Treat everything with honesty and respect and when you don’t know, simply say so. When we are not allowed to ask questions our assumptions take over, paving the way for distortions too.
My children were 12 and 9 years old at the time I told them, and I had been holding the secret of the discovery for close to 10 months. Not knowing what to make of the discovery myself, I didn’t want to disclose it without verifying it first. That quickly turned into waiting until I made contact with my bio father before I said anything. Keeping the secret was very uncomfortable, but it felt right to disclose everything at once to the kids, rather than keeping them baited throughout the long process.
Once I met my bio father, I resolved to tell them immediately — I told them two days later when I had collected my wits. All difficult topics are made easier with sweet treats so I plied them with our favorite smoothies and laid everything out for them. I did not offer the details of my conception because that would have adverse effects on their view of their grandmother. With the passing of birth certificate father several decades before, I did not have to contend with how he would feel about the discovery or how the kids would see him. Precisely because they never met my father, their joy at having a new one to fill part of his very deep void was the best example of resiliency. My son, the oldest, said, “You mean I have another grandfather? Cool!”
