Adult Adoptees 4-Part Series — Honoring a Lifelong Journey Part 1: Identity — Understanding the Adult Adoptee Experience

Adult Adoptees 4-Part Series — Honoring a Lifelong Journey Part 1: Identity — Understanding the Adult Adoptee Experience

Date Sep 09, 2026
Time 7:00 pm - 8:30 pm
Cost $ 15.00
Register Register Today

WHEN: Wednesday, September 9th, 2026

TIME: 7:00 – 8:30PM EST

WHERE: ZOOM

COST: $15 for Non-CE Version, $20 for CE Version

Center for Adoption Support and Education (C.A.S.E.), Provider #1972, is approved to offer social work continuing education by the Association of Social Work Boards (ASWB) Approved Continuing Education (ACE) program. Regulatory boards are the final authority on courses accepted for continuing education credit. ACE provider approval period: 3/3/2026 – 3/3/2029. Social workers completing this course receive 1.5 general continuing education credits.

This session explores how identity continues to develop and shift throughout adulthood for adoptees. It looks at how being adopted can shape a sense of self, belonging, and personal narrative over time, and how identity may be revisited during different life stages and transitions.

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Webinar Series 
Overview

 

Adoption is often framed as a childhood experience but for those who live it, adoption does not end in childhood. It is a lifelong journey that continues to unfold across adulthood, shaping identity, relationships, and emotional experiences in ways that are rarely acknowledged or fully understood. Adult adoptees are often left out of clinical education, public narratives, and common assumptions about what adoption “looks like.”

This interactive webinaseries, led by Tony Hynes, Ph.D., Adult Adoptee and C.A.S.E. Training + Content Development Specialist, creates space to center and honor adult adoptees — voices that have too often been overlooked in both public conversation and professional practice. It recognizes that adult adoptees navigate grief, loss, and separation not as singular events, but as evolving experiences that resurface and transform over time.

Milestones that are often assumed to be universal like forming long-term relationships, navigating estrangement from family, experiencing the illness or death of parents, pregnancy and parenting, marriage, divorce, and even becoming grandparents, can all carry distinct layers of meaning for adult adoptees. These experiences may reawaken questions of identity, belonging, and connection, while also intersecting with earlier experiences of loss and disruption.

For adoptees, this series offers a space to reflect, witnessed, and be invited to process all that being adopted means to them, while exploring what claiming belonging might look like.

For professionals, parents, prospective parents, caregivers, and clinicians, this series offers an opportunity to deepen awareness of adoption as a lifelong process and will provide ways to better support adult adoptees with insight, humility, and care.

By bringing these perspectives together, the series seeks to expand the conversation around adoption and moving beyond early life narratives to more fully recognize and respect the depth and diversity of adult adoptee experiences.

Download Timed Agenda + Learning Objectives

About the Presenter

Tony HynesTony Hynes, Ph.D.

Tony Hynes, Ph.D. was adopted by his parents, Mary and Janet, in the mid-1990s. He has been invited to be a speaker at conferences on adoption and foster care throughout the nation and has a passion for speaking up for children and families who have experienced challenges in the adoption and foster care system. He writes about his experiences growing up as both an interracial adoptee and as a child growing up in an LGBTQ-headed household in his memoir The Son With Two Moms, which has been cited in the DC family court system to inform best practice. Tony’s work and writing have been featured in The Atlantic, and he is a contributing author to books such as What White Parents Should Know About Transracial Adoption and Adoption Unfiltered.

Tony completed his master’s thesis in Sociology on the psychology of children within the same-sex headed household, and completed his Ph.D. at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County. His dissertation focuses on social connectedness among adult, interracial adoptees.

As the Training and Content Development Specialist at C.A.S.E., Tony has designed innovative training curriculums that help families and professionals respond to evaluation and assessment tools that encapsulate holistic pictures of adoptees and foster youth.

For questions, concerns, or to request accessibility accommodations, please contact
Lauren Lynch at lynch@adoptionsupport.org