Seven Core Issues in Adoption

The experience of adoption or separation from a child has lifelong impacts that can also affect future generations.

Developed by Sharon Kaplan Roszia and Deborah Silverstein in the 1980s, the Seven Core Issues is a conceptual framework that describes seven common emotional experiences triggered by adoption: loss, rejection, shame/guilt, grief, identity, intimacy, and mastery/control.

According to Silverstein and Kaplan, these core issues impact all members of the ‘adoption triad’—adoptees, birth/natural parents, and adoptive parents—throughout the lifespan, regardless of the circumstances of the adoption or the characteristics of the participants. The issues span not only the entire lives of those directly involved in adoption, but future generations, as well.

Recognising and working through these seven core issues in adoption can be confronting but ultimately an enriching and hopefully healing experience for members of the adoption triad.

This brief table outlines the Seven Core Issues as experienced by an adoptee, a birth/natural parent and an adoptive parent. In their 2019 book, Sharon Kaplan Roszia and Allison Davis Maxon expanded the Seven Core Issues to include foster care, kinship care, donor conception, and surrogacy.