August 19, 2016
What is a “real” parent?
This question came up front and center in the Olympics this year, after NBC gymnastics announcer Al Trautwig took to Twitter and declared Simone Biles’s parents “NOT her parents.”
As reported by the Washington Post, Biles’s “mother lost parental rights during a struggle with drugs and alcohol, she and her sister were adopted by their maternal grandfather and his wife in 2000. Biles calls these people ‘Mom and Dad’ because that’s what they are, and two days after Trautwig’s tweet, she perfectly encapsulated the truth of her reality in eight simple words.
‘My parents are my parents and that’s it,’ Biles told Us Weekly.”
This particular type of judgment is one that has long plagued the adoption community, for both adoptees and adoptive parents alike. The writer in the Washington Post piece shares her own childhood struggles with this stigma:
“When [my childhood friends] learned about my adoption, they would inevitably inquire, ‘Do you know who your real parents are?’
The first time I got the question, I was confused. How could anyone think that my parents were not my real parents? What did they mean by real? It broke my 10-year-old heart that my friends thought my mom, whom I loved so much, was, what? Fake?”
The notion that an adopted individual has “real” parents implies that the individuals raising them are not real — an assertion that is both ignorant and false. Simone was right to shut down this inane and disrespectful critique.
Parenting does not mean: “having birthed a child.” Parenting refers to the role of raising, supporting, and, well, parenting a child — anyone who is the sole provider and caretaker of another individual can be their parent, whether that’s a sibling, an aunt or uncle, grandparents, family friend, adopted parent, or birth parent.
This pervasive stigma is so disappointing because it makes unfair assumptions about what it means to be a parent, it reduces the bond between a child and the individuals they identify as their parents, and it minimizes everything one has done in their effort to parent and take care of a child.
The only person who is in a position to determine whether or not someone is their real parent is the individual themselves. Let’s cut the judgment about real vs. fake parents, shall we? And in the case of Simone Biles in particular, it’s clear that her parents are the ones who have supported, loved, and encouraged her dreams and unparalleled talent — to reduce their role in her life to anything less is shameful.
