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”
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From The Blog
The Flying Circus Inside My Head
The mother who raised me was an addict. She and my father adopted me, but I’m not sure why. In 1962 when you got married, you started a family. Those were the rules. Never mind that my mother had already begun her dark slide into depression and addiction. The dual...
Preparing To Seach
(Shared with permission from Dr. Joe Soll, Psychotherapist, Author and founder of the Adoption Counseling Center in New York, NY) If one wants to learn how to fly a plane, one takes flying lessons. Ground school first, then flying with an instructor, then when...
Gayle’s Story
I'm married to Matt, and I'm a petite little thing, and I don't cycle properly. We married later in life. I was 28. We started looking at adoption immediately because it took us a year and a half to get pregnant with our first son, Jacob. We started looking at...
Shellie’s Story – Adoptee, Birth Mother
My story is the age-old tale of black and white, my mother being white, my father black. It goes back to the story of an older man with a younger woman. She was a teenager, got pregnant, and had me. She tried to keep me for a while, but for whatever reason, she...
The Power of Words
My Mother Didn’t Want Me. My Mother Couldn’t Keep Me. Sit with those two sentences. Feel the differences implied by their words. In one, you are rejected and abandoned. Discarded. Given away, never to be thought of again. The other gives a different view. Being unable...
Tina’s Story
My father was black. My biological mother was white. My adoptive family is all white. So, it wasn't like they could pretend I had been born from them. My earliest memories of being adopted are my parents talking about it and explaining that they went someplace, and...
Mel’s Story – A Birth Father
I had left college in 1967, which turned out to be one of those things where I realized this is not where I'm supposed to be. I'm busy finding a place, finding work, paying bills, and living where the University of Vermont is. Which is much more appealing to some...
The Things You Learn
The Salvation Army had made two attempts to reach my birth mother. They sent two letters, three months apart, one in April, not long after we had located my mother Barbara, and then another one in July. They, like myself, had also left two voice mails at the phone...
“I’m Abopted!”
That’s what I just might have said to you when I was about the age of three or four and just been introduced to you, “Hi, I’m abopted!”. With my smile on my skinny little frame and pixie-cut brown hair I proudly announced what I believed to be a badge of honor. And it...