SERIES: Seven Core Issues in Adoption and Permanency – Loss
SERIES: Seven Core Issues in Adoption and Permanency - Loss
Published on:
Feb 05, 2026
Category
Loss & Grief
Adoption, foster, and kinship care are often spoken about in terms of hope, permanency, and love. While those truths matter deeply, they are only part of the story. Beneath every permanency journey are complex emotional realities.
In this series, we will explore Seven Core Issues in Adoption and Permanency by Sharon Kaplan Roszia and Allison Davis Maxon, which expands on the foundational framework developed by Sharon Kaplan Roszia and Deborah Silverstein.
These seven interconnected issues of Loss, Rejection, Shame & Guilt, Grief, Identity, Intimacy, and Mastery & Control offer language for experiences that are often felt but not always named. Together, they help us better understand the impact of separation, transition, and permanency across one’s lifelong development.
Throughout this series, you will hear from a range of voices within the adoption constellation including adoptees, first/birth parents, adoptive parents, and adoption-competent professionals. Each perspective adds depth and nuance, reminding us that no single story defines adoption. By centering lived experience alongside clinical insight, we aim to deepen understanding, reduce stigma, and support all members of the constellation with honesty and compassion.
We begin where every adoption and permanency story begins: with loss.
Defining Loss
The word “loss” is often used in connection with events such as sports, jobs, homes, or money and does not usually have a positive association attached. The Merriam-Webster Dictionary defines loss as:
- the act or fact of being unable to keep or maintain something or someone
- the harm or privation resulting from losing or being separated from someone or something
- an instance of losing someone or something
Seven Core Issues in Adoption and Permanency: Loss
In Seven Core Issues in Adoption and Permanency by Sharon Kaplan Roszia and Allison Davis Maxon, loss is described as what “begins the lifelong, intergenerational journey in adoption and permanency.”
Loss is listed first in the seven core issues because that is where every foster, adoption, or kinship story starts, and it acts like the hub of a wheel to which all the other issues are connected. The loss begins the moment a child or youth is placed for adoption or in foster care. They lose their first/birth family in the sense that they are no longer living with them and being raised by them. Depending on the situation, they may not have communication or connection with them. This may lead to other losses, such as loss of siblings, loss of relationships with previous teachers and schools, loss of culture, and loss of groups or communities, and may include experience more ambiguous loss, like loss of birth order.
Loss Across the Adoption Constellation
The child experiencing adoption, foster, or kinship care is not the only one who experiences loss. The birth/first parents lose the ability to raise their children, and often lose all connections to them. They may lose the dream of motherhood/fatherhood and what they pictured for their life and future, and the role they thought they would play.
The adoptive parents also experience loss in various forms, including losses experienced during infertility struggles, loss of a genetic or biological connection to their child or children, and loss of how they envisioned the family they would have. For children who are placed in kinship care, specifically a grandparent’s care, the grandparents may be dealing with the loss of their own child and with their changing roles.
Although the degree to which loss shows up may ebb and flow throughout life, everyone in the adoption constellation has some relationship to it.
“…I began making my family and relatives from clay, putting my hidden cries and fears inside. After I made all the family members I had lost, I closed my box as if I were saying good-bye for the very last time.”
“Adoption is founded on loss, but from this loss can emerge the most profound love. A joining of families, birth and adoptive, shows children that love multiplies. Love is not a pie with limited slices. It exists in both the roughest patches and brightest times. As children grow, they can hold space for this nuanced understanding of their story and the love and loss that co-existed.”
As my colleague Kylie Golden writes, loss is not something those connected to adoption simply “get over”—it is something they feel, carry, revisit, and try to make meaning of across their lifetime. Loss impacts everyone in the adoption constellation, and cannot be ignored. Like the hub of the wheel, it is connected to all of the other core issues in adoption and permanency.
At C.A.S.E., we provide adoption-competent mental health care that honors the full complexity of lived experience in adoption, foster, and kinship care—where love and loss can coexist, grief is not minimized, and children and families are supported with honesty, compassion, and specialized understanding. Naming loss is about making space for healing, connection, and lifelong support rooted in what those connected to adoptive, foster, and kinship care truly need.
Stay tuned for the next article in the Seven Core Issues series on Rejection by Rachel Shifaraw, C.A.S.E. Creative Content Specialist and Adult Adoptee.
