The story of the origins in Italian books for adopted children

The purpose of this qualitative study is to identify the main representations of the process of the international adoption through a comparative analysis of the Italian fairy tales and stories used to talk about their adoption to adopted children, from 4 to 10 years old. The sample of the study includes 50 Italian fairy tales and stories, written since 1995 up to now, that tell the adopted children something about their origin and their adoption. The verbatim of the tales and the stories were analyzed through content analysis, using a computer assisted text analysis program (T-Lab). The main results show the very different images of the various protagonists - adoptive parents, adopted child, birth mother, birth country, “bridge” caregivers (operators of institutes, or houses for children or foster families in the birth country…), social and legal operators both in the birth country and in the adoptive one… The two moments of the "beginning" of the story and of its "happy ending" result topical, together with the crucial description of the “first meeting” and the attribution of responsibility to someone for the child’s abandonment. The representational quality of the narrative productions created by adoptive parents or used with them in the post adoption groups is very important because it is one of the tools that communicate the image of adoption to adopted children. It can vary from a polarized image - all the positive pertains to the adoptive world and all the negative to the world of the origins - or a better integrated image, with positive aspects both in the adoptive and in the birth worlds.