Author. Adoptee. Advocate.
Jean Kelly Widner
Jean Kelly Widner is an author, researcher, and passionate advocate for truth in adoption narratives. Her background in professional writing empowers her to tell complex stories with clarity and compassion. Jean writes with the goal of giving voice to those often left out of the adoption conversation—birth parents, adoptees, and families shaped by the system. The Adoption Paradox is the result of years of personal interviews, research, and emotional courage.
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The Adoption Paradox: When Love Isn’t the Only Answer
The Adoption Paradox challenges the romanticized narrative of adoption. Jean explores the deep emotional and psychological impacts adoption has on all parties involved. Drawing from real-life stories, expert interviews, and in-depth research, this book invites readers to examine adoption through a new lens—one of nuance, trauma-awareness, and healing.
Subtopics to include:
- Why the “happy ending” is more complex
- Key themes: identity, loss, love, and justice
- Why this book matters now more than ever
Meet the Researchers
Behind The Adoption Paradox is a dedicated team of researchers who helped bring clarity, context, and compassion to the stories within these pages. With diverse backgrounds in psychology, sociology, child welfare, and historical research, this team worked closely with Jean Kelly Widner to ensure that the book is not only emotionally resonant—but also factually grounded and ethically sound.
Their work includes in-depth interviews, cross-referencing state and national adoption laws, analyzing patterns in adoption-related trauma, and helping identify systemic issues that continue to affect adoptees, birth parents, and adoptive families today.
Their contributions helped shape the book’s most critical insights, from the hidden costs of closed adoptions to the mental health impact of identity loss and family separation. Their combined efforts elevate The Adoption Paradox from a memoir into a collective truth—a tapestry of stories supported by evidence, empathy, and a fierce commitment to justice.
The team’s mission is clear: to open hearts, inform minds, and change the way adoption is discussed, studied, and practiced.
Reviews
This Powerful Book Will Change Lives: Having read countless adoption books by adoptees, by adoptive parents, and by birth mothers, I began reading Jean Widner’s The Adoption Paradox never dreaming how it would affect me. Not only was I immediately captivated by Widner’s excellent writing skills, but I was enthralled by her obvious commitment to educate and open readers’ eyes about the history and complicated story of adoption and its aftermath. This powerful and important book is filled with reliable facts regarding all types of adoption and softened, yet made more intense, by heartfelt interviews with adoptees, birth parents, and adoptive parents throughout the book. At times I was stunned and at times I read with tears in my eyes and a heaviness in my heart. Widner’s research is unquestionably admirable and all-inclusive, and her voice is undeniably the one that needs to be heard not only by members of the adoption triad, but by all professionals in the field of adoption, and the public who have bought into the old and tired “all adoption is beautiful” theory.
~ Laura L. Engel, Birth Mother and Author of You’ll Forget This Ever Happened-secrets, shame, and adoption in the 1960s.
Jean Widner does a wonderful job of exploring the multiple perspectives and complexities of adoption. She digs deep into the lives of many types of adoptees who hold the paradox of being loved by one family and yet holding grief and relinquishment trauma from another.
~Sharon Stein McNamara Ed.D., L.P.
Putting Adoption in Perspective by Jean Kelly Widner is well-researched, thorough and well-documented. Even while she is addressing some of the systemic failures and missteps regarding the way adoption occurs in the USA, her book serves as an invitation for both why and how we can do better by families and adopted persons. Readers will find much to digest. They will find themselves both learning as well as unlearning.
As they begin to recognize the “Adoption Paradox” they will begin to appreciate the deep dualities in adoption and will move beyond the myth of adoption is a totally benign choice. Instead, they will understand the urgency to help preserve families and reduce the number of adoptions so that adoption will be a last resort not the first solution for helping struggling families.
—Gayle H. Swift, author, “Reimagining Adoption: what Adoptees Seek from Families and Faith”
Upcoming Readings & Events
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From The Blog
The Flame
Runner Up: Jean Kelly Widner Boulder City, Nevada Congratulations, Jean! Jean’s Bio: Jean Widner is a professional writer and business owner of a small-town media outlet, BoulderCity.com. She has worked retail and co-owned two successful e-commerce companies and now...
A Loving Launch
This past Saturday, May 31st in Boulder City, a group of special friends, supporters and contributors to the book, The Adoption Paradox, gathered to celebrate and share our stories. I’m proud this work has brought together so many different voices and...
Reclaiming National Adoption Awareness Month
What does it mean to be truly child centered when considering adoption? It begins with listening, sincerely and without dismissal, to the adoptees involved. Most importantly, being child centered in adoption means that the interests of the adults are set aside, and...
Who are Modern Birthparents?
Demographics, Myths, Lies and the Real Truth The paradoxical treatment of birth mothers is even more confusing than what adoptees experience. Adopted children are told that their mothers loved them so much they gave them away, selflessly, to be raised by someone else...
The Door Left Open
Mother’s Day is a triggering day on the calendar for many people. For those of us impacted by adoption, it can be ten times that on the Richter scale. As an adoptee who has sought more information about my first mother, I’ve now compiled a cluster of anniversaries...
Exploring The Primal Wound
Within the sub-culture of adoption, few theories are as celebrated and simultaneously controversial as “The Primal Wound”. The book with the same name, written by Nancy Verrier in 1993, calls out the idea that separating an infant from its mother is always inherently...
Native Americans and The Indian Child Welfare Act (ICWA)
This is an excerpt from Chapter 4 of "The Adoption Paradox" on the History of Adoption. The tales of the atrocities of the U.S. government against Native Americans are lengthy and well-known. There are two key aspects to note when one looks at any policy regarding...
The Flame
From deep inside the womb, I know both love and sadness. They ripple through my blood, my bones, and intertwine to create the essence of me. This invisible truth sits inside, certain, a spark that will not die. Like the campfire that no matter how much dirt or...
I Got Blueberry Pancakes
This is a guest post, written by Dirk Uphoff Back in the Summer of 1968, my family and I went on vacation to visit my Aunt, Uncle and Cousins. This was not our typical Summer vacation of fishing up North. This particular summer vacation, we drove the entire way from...