Abstrakt
At present there is an increasing tendency towards elimination of the numbers of children staying in institutional care. An infant institute cannot substitute the early care of people who dedicate themselves individually and responsibly to their own (biological) or adoptive (non-biological) child right from the beginning.
The same can be said about children's homes, although the quality of life in children's homes of so called "family type" seems to have improved. Therefore, the main objective is to find ways of providing family life for as many children as possible.
However, mere deinstitutionalization does not mean that the numbers of adopted children will increase in the future. The overall decline in fertility is a well-known fact and even medical development in the field of assisted reproduction is not omnipotent.
What's more, many of the used methods are questionable from the medical, psychosocial, and ethical point of view. Thus, substitute family care, including adoptions, is still in the centre of the experts' and general public's attention.
There is no doubt that adoption generates critical situations whose solution depends on the individual maturity of adoptive parents and their motivation to take care of the child. In the Czech Republic a new Civil Code is being prepared, which is supposed to come into force on the 1st January 2014.
The Code should ensure to a child the right to know that he/she has been adopted. According to the new law the fact should be communicated to the child before he/she starts attending basic school.
Is the new law in accordance with the opinion of child psychologists? When a how should the adoptive parents tell the truth to their child? What should be avoided in their communication? The aim of the article is to give answers to the suggested questions and to map the problems of telling the truth in the context of identity of an adopted child.