Adoption TikTok: Building Community and Critiquing the U.S. Adoption System

“Adoptees are told to just be grateful that we were chosen. And yet so many of us are struggling.”

When Alé Cardinalle first met her biological mother and siblings, she was surprised by how familiar their love felt. Born in Brazil, Cardinalle was adopted by a New Jersey couple when she was an infant. On the eve of her 28th birthday, Cardinalle found and contacted her birth mother on Facebook, and the two women arranged a reunion in Brazil.

The flight to Brazil tested Cardinalle’s nerves. She was traveling thousands of miles to visit a home full of strangers in a country she did not remember. “But my mother pulled me into her house and pulled me onto her couch and into her lap, even though I was probably almost twice her size,” Cardinalle tells Teen Vogue, laughing. “She looked at my fingers and looked at my toes and, like, it was just so primal to me. Like how you would look at your baby.”

More family members poured into the living room, half-siblings, and a stepfather who all greeted Cardinalle breathlessly between hugs. “It was just such an abundance of love,” she recalls.

Later, Cardinalle asked the question that had burdened her for entire adult life: Why did her birth mother choose adoption?

“She was a vulnerable person with few options,” Cardinalle explains.

Cardinalle’s birth mother — orphaned when she was just a teenager — took a job as a live-in housekeeper and nanny in a wealthy family’s home. When the family’s matriarch learned that Cardinalle’s mother was pregnant, she quickly arranged an adoption. After the birth, Cardinalle’s mother fell into a deep depression. Her mother’s boss prodded her to return to work, suggesting that Cardinalle had probably died.

“It broke my heart wide open,” Cardinalle says, recalling her birth mother begging her for forgiveness.

Cardinalle’s adoption, the country she had to leave behind, the shape of her life: All of it could be traced back to poverty. A few years after Cardinalle's birth, her mother fell in love with and married a man and left her housekeeping job. The couple raised two children in a home of their own.

“We are all indoctrinated into this overly positive narrative about adoption, right?” Cardinalle says. “We see it in movies and kids' movies, this trope of adoption being a beautiful thing.”

But her story didn’t feel beautiful. Her birth mother’s pain had transformed Cardinalle’s already shifting understanding of adoption. While some women choose adoption because they don't want to be a mother, others lack the emotional support or financial resources to raise children, even though they very much want to.

Today, Cardinalle shares her story on TikTok under the handle @wildheartcollective_. She is part of a growing community of adoptees who use the social media platform to shed light on the trauma and economic pressures that have shaped their adoption experience. The hashtag #adopteesoftiktok has garnered tens of millions of views.

“Adoptees are told to just be grateful that we were chosen,” Cardinalle says. “And yet so many of us are struggling.” Researchers from the University of Minnesota found that even if a child is adopted in infancy, adoptees are at an elevated risk for some mental health disorders.

TikTok creator and adoptee Mia Huijskens has a simple refrain: Adoption itself is trauma.

Huijskens, who uses the handle @miathaicha on TikTok, says she feels as though her parents tried to raise her exactly the same as their biological children. She was born in Haiti, where her biological mother, after struggling with safety and hunger, took her to an orphanage. An American family adopted Huijskens a few months before her third birthday.

“I had trauma that they weren’t prepared for,” Huijskens says. “I had seemingly random temper tantrums and outbursts and would cry myself to sleep. It took years to finally get an adoption trauma-informed therapist who sat me down and told me, ‘Adoption is trauma.’”

It was hard for her to digest. Huijskens, like Cardinalle, loves her adoptive family and is grateful for the resources and protection they’ve provided. But after years of reflection and intensive therapy, she has reconciled her love for her adoptive family with the pain of the adoption itself.

“The initial loss of my mother, the struggles with feeling like I must not have been good enough to keep, even though I know she loved me and I’ve met her, constantly feeling obligated to be grateful, and never able to truly let myself publicly feel the sadness,” Huijskens says. “All things that stem from being put up for adoption.”

Huijskens and her fellow adoptees frequently use TikTok to advocate for the benefits of making all adoptions open, a practice where the biological family remains in contact with the child after the adoption is finalized. The Child Welfare Information Gateway, a federal service under the Department of Health and Human Services, lauds open adoption as a means of connecting an adoptee with their medical history and cultural background. That can include access to important information such as risk for disease or medical conditions, as well as connection to one’s ethnic background, ancestry, and birth family.

“I love my adoptive parents, but they were definitely not prepared to raise a Black child in America,” Huijskens says of her white adoptive family.

Research also suggests that open adoption can reduce the grief that many birth mothers experience after giving up a child for adoption. As of 2018, open adoption agreements are legally binding in only 29 states. In the rest of the country, an adoptive parent could unilaterally choose to close the adoption and cut off contact with the child’s biological family without facing legal repercussions.

James Greenberg is an adoption attorney in New York, where open adoption agreements are viewed as a legal contract. He offers an example of the kind of step a birth mother can take to maintain connection: If, say, the two families agree to meet once a year on the child’s birthday, but the adoptive family cuts off contact with the birth mother after the child turns a year old, the birth mother could use the courts to force the adoptive parents to uphold the terms of the open adoption.

“They have the burden to talk to their attorney and talk to their [adoption] agency representatives and… to go to the court where the adoption [was] finalized,” Greenberg says. “They would have that information and make a motion to compel them to adhere to this contract.”

But many adoptee creators on TikTok raise concerns about how costly the process of a court battle is for biological parents who are already facing financial pressure to choose adoption. Cardinalle, now a social worker, and pregnant with her first child, points to the low number of infant adoptions in countries like Australia. She believes the robust social safety net there allows low-income families to provide for their babies. “Some of those countries can literally pay when a baby is born,” Cardinalle says. “What we see in those countries is extremely low rates of infant adoption.”

Cardinalle, Huijskens, and other adoptee creators on TikTok are frequently confronted with claims of insensitivity for discussing the difficulties of being adopted. Both women say they’re used to commenters accusing them of not fully considering the pain of couples in same-sex partnerships or prospective parents who deal with infertility.

Says Cardinalle, “I understand firsthand the desire to be a mom, to be a parent.” She struggled with fertility issues and had an ectopic pregnancy before her current healthy pregnancy. Still, she and her fellow TikTok creators ask skeptical viewers to center children in their conception of adoption.

“I very much know the feeling of having to raise a child and the fear of possibly not being able to do that,” Cardinalle says. “With that said, adoption should not exist to be a supply of children for [people] wanting to be parents.”

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