The answer is - yes. There are several reasons for that but the main one is TRUST. If you decide not to tell your child the truth, you are in a great risk that one day you will loose his/her trust. Sooner or later nearly every adopted child learns the truth and it is in your hands do decide when and how that happens.

The main rule is: the sooner, the better. One common mistake adoptive parents do is waiting until the child is old enough to understand - which, they believe, is sometimes in teen age. The opposite is the case - teen age is possibly the worst time. There are two stages of life when a child seeks his/her individuality - early childhood (around three) and puberty (around twelve, thirteen and up). In the first of these stages a child starts to realise where he/she belongs and that he/she is an individual separate from his/her parents. At the end of this stage - sometimes around four or five - the child has a solid notion of his/her self and family. You can see children at this age to "fight" with one another to protect the family honor. Anyway, this notion is a solid rock upon which the child builds his/her outside circle and from where a teenager tries to find out who he/she wants to become, it is a springboard from which he/she can try to jump into his/her own life. And, at that crucial stage, it is very dangerous to shake that board. It might happen that his/her whole life will crumble down.

It is advisable to find a good opportunity that a child can understand. The best is pregnancy. It doesn´t matter whether it is adoptive mother or any relative or a family friend. The child usually wonders what happend to mum, or aunt or that lady nextdoor that she has such a belly. That is the chance to explain how every child comes to this world from a mother´s belly, but it sometimes happens that one woman has a baby but cannot become a mum, because her life is very complicated etc. (it is a good idea not to give too many details of biological mother´s life at this stage, but yet try to explain that she couldn´t take care of the child although she loved him/her) and another woman - mum, who really wanted to be mother, decided to take care of that sweet little baby. Children at this age usually have no problem getting used to that idea and if they can feel they are loved, their self-confidence is not threatened. Later, when the child raises the question of adoption, you can add information about biological parents and about adoption circumstances depending on the age.