You've found a lost relative. Now what?
Every week on Explain It to Me, Vox's call-in podcast, we answer the questions that matter to you most. When we got a question from a listener named Hannah, it piqued our interest. She wanted to know: How do you find a long-lost relative?
'I was raised by my mom,' she says. 'I knew my dad was out there somewhere, but I never really gave too much thought about it because I did have a pretty full life.' By the time we spoke with her, she had found her father online and reached out to him. But it raised an entirely new set of questions. 'I never gave much thought to, 'Okay, so now what?''
Journalist Libby Copeland has spent a lot of time thinking about those next steps. She's the author of The Lost Family: How DNA Testing Is Upending Who We Are, a book that looks at the ways at-home DNA testing has shaped families. 'This whole question around the distinction between biological and non-biological family and roots and identity, it's everything to me,' Copeland told Vox. 'I think it's so intrinsically connected to existential questions around who we are and how we get to decide what to be.'
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On this week's episode, we discuss with Copeland how to find family, the way at-home DNA tests have changed things, and what to do if you come across an unexpected relative. Below is an excerpt of the conversation with Copeland, edited for length and clarity.
You can listen to Explain It to Me on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get podcasts. If you'd like to submit a question, send an email to askvox@vox.com or call 1-800-618-8545.
Has this reporting changed the way you think about family?
Definitely. I grew up in my biological family, so I'm not someone who was donor-conceived or adopted. But spending so much time talking to people who don't have a genetic connection to the families that they were raised in, it's really interesting to hear just how much pull that genetic family has over you.
In my family, we were able to connect with ancestors in Sweden, and then we traveled there and we're able to connect with a second cousin of my dad going back a hundred-and-something years from when our relative had emigrated. That made the world seem so much smaller and so much more intimate. It made history feel present to me. It made me feel like the past wasn't over.
If someone's taken one of these at-home DNA tests and they realize they have a family member, how should they go about trying to connect with them?
It very much matters who it is and how much knowledge you have going into it. It's often easy to start with the person you're finding [through the test] just because they're the immediate connection. But if you're finding a half-sibling and you know that's because you share a father in common, a lot of [experts] will recommend that you start with the father first.
'The danger of the promise of DNA testing when it's used like this can be that we interpret it in a simplistic way.'
Very often, there's a secret at the heart of your own origin story if you're one of these folks who's gone to DNA testing either looking for family or making a discovery. People are advised to start with the person at the center of it because they often want to have agency over their own narrative, and connecting with that person first allows the best possible chance of them then introducing you to other people.
What's the proper way to go about this? Do you show up on their doorstep? DM them on Instagram? Write a letter?
When I was writing The Lost Family, I talked to people who did show up on someone's doorstep or make a phone call and it can be quite challenging and disruptive. You want to do it on terms that allow the other person as much control as possible, because in this situation, very often, there's a disconnect of knowledge. For instance, the seeker knows they exist, but their genetic father may not know.
Very often, the best possible way is to write a letter. The tone of that letter is something that you want to think really carefully about, because there's different ways you could go. You're not necessarily trying to make a really intimate connection right away, but you could share a little about yourself, share a little bit about what you're looking for. You could start small and build a relationship from there.
Let's say you're in a situation where you find out who your parent is, but you know, it's hard to find them. You can't find a number, they're not on Facebook, but their kids are. Should you contact them? Like what do you do in that situation?
You might say something like, 'Hey, I see we're genetically related based on our DNA test. I'd love to connect and learn a little more about how we're related. Are you interested?'
There's also this question of, 'How do I ask my dad, 'Why didn't you ever come see me?'' without coming off too intense?
This is the mystery of a lifetime. People talk around that question for decades without ever fully asking it. I interviewed a woman who wasn't told she was adopted. She didn't find out until she'd had some life-altering surgery that it turned out she might not have needed if she'd known her full medical history. When she finally did find out the identity of her biological father, she reached out to him in a number of ways. He was not terribly responsive, and then she finally called and got him on the phone, and he was so dismissive. He could not at all give her what she wanted. He would not even confirm that he knew for sure that she was his daughter or that he'd even dated her mother.
She cried a lot when we spoke, and it was because she had these questions that could not be answered. Her biological mother had passed away a few months before she discovered her identity. And the real question she wanted to ask her biological mom was, 'Did you ever look for me? Did you ever think about me?' And in the absence of being able to ask her, the daughters of her mother did not want to believe that she existed. They didn't want to believe that her mother had placed a child for adoption.
In a perfect world, you would form a relationship and get to know them, right? But it very much matters what the secret is at the heart of your own identity story. Because the nature of that can alter people's willingness to embrace that you exist.
There's the question of what you do with that. I also think there's the question of what people are looking for when they're looking to connect with new family. Are you trying to figure out where you got your eyes? Where you got your personality?
All of it, right? I want to see someone else whose face looks like mine. I want to see someone else whose eyes look like mine. I want to have the experience of looking and seeing myself, the way I see myself in a mirror, in somebody else. If you're adopted, you may never have had that experience. It's profound. I interviewed a man who had been a donor in the 1970s. And he had, the last time I spoke with him, 21 children through donor conception, and then he had two biological children that he'd had with his wife.
They talked, and some of them are quite close to him. Some of them do have Thanksgiving dinner with him. And they talked about how they would get together and go to a bar, and they would just be completely struck by their mannerisms or their mutual love of music. It blew them away. And they were like, 'Okay, yes, DNA is not destiny, but man, is there something to be said for the power of genetics.'
How much we should make of the similarities we see in family when it comes to personality traits? Do genetics really tell us who we are and who we're going to be in this way?
The danger of the promise of DNA testing when it's used like this can be that we interpret it in a simplistic way: 'The blueprint for my future means I'm inevitably destined to be XYZ.' And that's not true. I have seen cases where people were so eager to find family that they read into things and found patterns that weren't there based on their assumption of genetic identity.
In all of this talk of found family, we haven't really talked about managing the existing family you have. How do people juggle that desire to find out about new family members without unintentionally hurting or alienating the people who have been there for them all along?
I talked to a lot of people who were seekers, and some managed to do this really well. It's incredibly reductive to think about this as a nature versus nurture thing — you can have room in your heart for both. You can have your dad who tucked you in at night; he fathered you and he still fathers you. There's another man out there, though. And to him, you owe half your genetic data. He's your biological father and we don't have the language for that.
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Vox
26-06-2025
- Vox
The hidden pressure messing with teen birthdays
is a senior correspondent for Vox, where she covers American family life, work, and education. Previously, she was an editor and writer at the New York Times. She is also the author of four novels, including the forthcoming Bog Queen, which you can preorder here This story originally appeared in Kids Today, Vox's newsletter about kids, for everyone. Sign up here for future editions. Birthdays are supposed to be fun. You eat cake, you open presents, maybe you have a party. They can also, however, become a source of pressure and anxiety. And for many teens today, birthdays are a time when the public nature of social media and the private joys of friendship awkwardly collide. Teens often post celebratory photos or messages on their Instagram stories for friends' birthdays, Kashika, 19, told me a few weeks ago in a conversation about kids and friendship. Then the birthday kid will reshare those posts to their own account. The number of posts you share 'forms an image of how many friends you might have,' Kashika explained. Kashika, a contributor to the podcast This Teenage Life, remembered seeing classmates share tons of birthday stories, and thinking, 'Oh my God, they're so popular.' Then, on her birthday, not a single person posted a story for her. 'I felt really bad,' she said. The birthday post (or lack thereof) has become a common source of anxiety, according to experts who work with kids. Teens report 'feeling a lot of pressure to post for people's birthdays, to post in a certain way, to post efficiently, effusively,' Emily Weinstein, executive director of Harvard's Center for Digital Thriving, told me. On the flip side, teenagers worry about having enough people post on their birthdays to 'signal that you have people who really care about you' or to 'show that you have a sufficient number of friends,' Weinstein said. Birthday wishes are one way that teens feel pressure to 'perform closeness' on social media, posting photos and messages of affection publicly 'both as part of being a good friend and as a way of validating their own social acceptance and connectedness,' Weinstein and Carrie James wrote in their 2022 book, Behind Their Screens. Performing closeness isn't new — teens used to decorate one another's lockers for birthdays, Devorah Heitner, author of the book Growing Up in Public: Coming of Age in a Digital World, told me (we did not do this at my school, and now I feel left out). But social media adds a new layer of labor to kids' already fraught social lives, forcing them to make calculations about how to celebrate their friends online — and how to respond if their friends don't do the same for them. The pressure to post Birthdays on social media offer a whole buffet of new stressors, kids and experts told me. For one thing, posts are easier to quantify than locker decorations. 'You can literally just count the likes or count the reposts,' Heitner said. 'That's very vivid.' Even posting on other people's birthdays can be nerve-wracking, kids say. 'I used to post for every friend that I had,' Divya, 19, told me. But then she realized that other kids were only posting birthday stories for friends who had posted birthday stories for them. 'It felt very weird,' Divya said, because she didn't personally care if someone had posted a birthday message for her or not. There's also pressure to make your birthday post reflect the level of your friendship. 'If someone is your best friend, you have to make it extra special,' Divya, a This Teenage Life contributor, told me. 'You have to just do it for the sake of making your friends feel special on social media.' That pressure to craft the perfect birthday post that communicates the specialness of a friendship is part of a larger pattern, experts say. On the one hand, 'social media offer compelling opportunities to validate relationships and show public support for others,' Weinstein and James write. On the other, 'when so much of posting is an expectation and over-the-top compliments are the norm, being authentic can feel nearly impossible and knowing what's authentic can be like reading tea leaves.' The pressure to perform closeness can be exhausting and annoying, kids say. One 17-year-old, Michelle, told Weinstein and James that she'd recently gotten stressed because she liked a friend's photo but couldn't think of a comment right away. 'I get really nervous about it too, because I have to think of something quick, and it has to be something really good,' she said. Once she'd engaged by liking the post, the clock was suddenly ticking. 'There's definitely expectations to comment on a post.' Especially among younger teen girls, 'there's a feeling that if we are close, people should know we're close,' Weinstein said. 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Yahoo
24-06-2025
- Yahoo
How summer camp became an American obsession
Summer camp. It's where kids go every year to make friends, find their long-lost twin, or even evade a slasher wreaking havoc on the campers and counselors. At least, that's what pop culture would lead you to believe: For the outsized space they take up in our consciousness, going to camp for the summer isn't actually all that common. 'It has never been the case that the majority of American children went to summer camps,' says Leslie Paris, an associate professor at the University of British Columbia and author of the book Children's Nature: The Rise of the American Summer Camp. 'The first camps were founded by urban middle-class men,' she told Vox. 'They were concerned about white boys who they saw as not getting enough outdoor adventure and the kind of manly experiences they would need to be — in the minds of these adults — the nation's leaders for the next generation. They were worried about the effects of urbanization, and they were nostalgic for an earlier day when more boys had grown up in rural places.' How did camp begin to be available for more kids? And if so few people actually attend, then why does summer camp have such lasting cultural influence? Those are just a few of the questions we posed to Paris on the latest episode of Explain It to Me, Vox's weekly call-in podcast. Below is an excerpt of the conversation with Paris, edited for length and clarity. You can listen to Explain It to Me on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get podcasts. If you'd like to submit a question, send an email to askvox@ or call 1-800-618-8545. How did camp expand beyond the audience it was originally created for? The YMCA movement became involved, and by the turn of the century the movement started really ramping up. Not only because more YMCA camps were founded, but because different organizations got involved and more groups of American adults thought this camp idea would be great. By the turn of the century, you've got small numbers of women leading groups of girls out into the wilderness. Many of the women who started camps were college-educated and saw leading girls and giving them adventures as a kind of passion. Then there were urban organizations that began to say, 'This would be great for impoverished working-class kids who never get out of the city at all,' and began sending groups of kids out into the country, often for shorter stays than at private camps. In the early 20th century, you've got a bunch of new movements: the Boy Scouts, the Girl Scouts, the Campfire Girls. And then there are different ethnic and religious groups: Jewish Americans, Catholic Americans, who think, Let's start camps for our own kids, and they do that as well. By the early 20th century there's a bevy of different kinds of camps organized for a wider variety of kids to give them an experience of the outdoors. You write in your book that 'this triple nostalgia — for the American past, for camp community, and for individual childhood experience — is critical to understanding why camps have figured so influentially in American culture and in former campers' lives.' I'd love for you to talk about that a little bit more. One of the things I talk about in my book is that camps were a place where children learned nostalgia, that camps taught them a version of the American past. I think many of us are familiar with a use of Indigenous cultural practices that was often quite superficial, but that was meant to introduce non-Indigenous children to one aspect of the American past. Camps were often a place where children were exposed to ideas about what the American past had been, and then as more generations of children attended camps, they themselves brought those kinds of nostalgic memories with them, throughout their lives. When they had a chance, many of those former children sent their own kids to camp. So this became a kind of a nostalgic cultural practice that for many adults reminded them of the first time that they had an adventure away from their parents, away from their families. It's so interesting you talk about Indigenous culture and how that's been used at camp. It makes me think of that scene in where Wednesday's at camp. Why does camp feature so prominently in pop culture if so few of us went? You could ask, Why are so many children's novels premised around an orphan? I think the fact that the kid is an orphan in these novels allows them to go off and have adventures and do things that many kids raised in families would not necessarily be at liberty to do. And I think camps have often represented that space, a space that's at least ostensibly protected, where kids have more free play and can have exciting adventures and develop peer relationships that are outside of the norm. And that piece lends itself really well to popular culture. Camp is so specific. How did you choose this as an academic subject? I knew that I wanted to work on American childhood, which was still a pretty small field in the 1990s, when I started this project. There wasn't a major scholarly book about the history of summer camps at the time and it seemed like a wonderful way to write about something that would be fun to work on. One of the things that I look at in my book is how camps illuminate the ways in which childhood was being transformed in the late 19th and early 20th century. That's so interesting. I imagine that changes at summer camp also reflect changes in American childhood overall. I'd love to hear in broad strokes about some of those changes. How have we seen camp and therefore childhood change over time? One of the main changes that I look at is the rise of the idea of protected childhood. That childhood should be a time apart and children should be protected from the adult world. The late 19th, early 20th century is the same time when you see laws restricting children's labor. There's an emphasis on child protection that's emerging during this period, and camps are one of the early sites of this new idea that children are deserving of spaces apart, time apart, and also that they're deserving of vacations. Although many of the elite kids who attended more expensive private camps were certainly going to have vacations whether or not they went to summer camp, some of the working-class kids at the turn of the 20th century who attended summer camps had never been on a vacation outside of the city. Summer camp has become this huge business these days in the United States, $3.5 billion annually. How did that happen? The camp industry has had to be nimble and change over time, especially since the 1970s, which was a time when many camps struggled and a number failed. The camping industry underwent some structural changes. One of these was the rise of specialty camps: Basketball camp, computer camp, gymnastics camp, dance camp, theater camp — camps that were focused on a really specific interest emerged in the late 20th century. Another issue was that many families who could afford private camps were starting to juggle more different opportunities. 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New York Post
24-06-2025
- New York Post
‘Chivalry is dead': What men just aren't doing anymore
Is Chivalry dead? After a grown man practically trampled me to get on the bus recently, I'd be inclined to say yes. He was in a suit and fun socks (boring finance bros tend to think quirky socks make them look fun), and he was on the verge of elbowing me to get a seat. I was unnerved by his rugby scrum approach to public transport, it was a bit much for 8 a.m. and buses come every 10 minutes – but I wasn't shocked It wasn't very chivalrous, but is that even a thing anymore? Is men letting women go first on public transport a dead concept? Did it die when we started advocating for fair pay and the rights to our bodies? Is the price of equality that men just aren't that polite anymore? I want equal pay and men to follow the Titanic rule of women and children first. 3 In modern times, chivalry refers to being polite and showing kind, respectful behavior, usually towards women. Dusan Petkovic – Not that you're asking for a history lesson, but to catch you up, the word chivalry originated in the Middle Ages, and primarily referred to the code of conduct for knights. In modern times, it refers to being polite and showing kind, respectful behavior, usually towards women. Such as holding the door open, allowing women to enter rooms first, and men offering to give up their seats on public transport. Does that still exist in 2025 though? Or is it a social normal we've outgrown? When hit Sydney's streets to get answers, the response was fairly divided by gender. In general, men claimed chivalry still exists, and most women admitted they didn't see enough of it anymore – if at all. 'I definitely think chivalry is dead. I think the attitude of men in general just isn't great,' one woman proclaimed. 'I think so yeah. I don't see it as often as I should,' another woman echoed. One young woman in a funky hat said she didn't think it was dead but conceded it is definitely 'changing.' What does chivalry look like to her in 2025? Well, less holding open on doors, and more making someone a Spotify playlist. Men, on the other hand, think chivalry is still a thing. 'I think it is still there and I think it should still exist,' one young man argued, but then admitted that it had morphed. 3 In general, men claimed chivalry still exists, and most women admitted they didn't see enough of it anymore – if at all. Pixel-Shot – 'Compared to how our parents saw it, it is not where it used to be,' he added. Meanwhile, two young men responded with a firm and concise 'no' when asked if they thought chivalry was dead. There were also quite a few men that declined to be filmed that admitted they thought chivalry was alive and well, so there's clearly a disconnect between men and women on the subject. Men think they are being chivalrous, but women say they just aren't seeing it in their daily lives or, if they are witnessing it, they're certainly not seeing enough of it. It fascinates me that we've achieved men not opening doors for women far faster than we've achieved equal pay. 3 One young woman in a funky hat said she didn't think chivalry was dead but conceded it is definitely 'changing.' InfiniteFlow – In Australia, there's still a stark 12.1 per cent gender pay gap. The conversation about chivalry is clearly part of the cultural Zeitgeist at the moment. A woman in the UK posted a video of herself standing on the train and then filmed a bunch of men sitting while she stood and it amassed millions of views. She set the clip to Lorde's song 'Man of the Year', which is being used on TikTok at the moment to call out poor behaviour from men. People online were divided over the clip. Many saw nothing wrong with men not standing up for women, suggesting that chivalry isn't a thing anymore. 'I'm confused- are you pregnant? Disabled? Injured? If you aren't, and they got there first, are total strangers, they don't owe you a seat,' one person said. 'What's the issue here?' another asked. 'Men don't owe women anything,' someone else argued. However, there were others who claimed the video was proof that 'chivalry is dead.' 'And they push you out of the way to get the seats too,' another said. One woman claimed: 'When I was pregnant the same thing happened. Only old ladies would offer to give up the seat.' The chivalry debate certainly isn't settled, and at this point, I'd just settle for a grown man not elbowing me to get a better seat on the bus.
