An adopted infant may have the opportunity to fully learn trust, where as an older child may have been shuffled from foster home to foster home as an infant, thereby never learning trust. Even though Trust v. Mistrust is a major stage of development, "the greatest psychological risk for adopted children occurs during the middle childhood and adolescent years" (McRoy. 1990).
             As children grow and change into adolescents, they begin to search for an identity by finding anchoring points with which to relate. This is the fifth stage of Erickson's model, which is called Identity v. role confusion. This is the time when "teenagers work at refining a sense of self by testing roles and then integrating them to form a single identity, or they become confused about who they are. The gradual re-shaping of self-definition that unifies the various selves into a consistent and comfortable sense of who one is, is an identity" (Myers.1999). Unfortunately, adopted children do not have a biological example to which to turn (Horner & Rosenberg, 1991), unless they had an open adoption in which they were able to form a relationship with their biological families as well as their adoptive ones. Also key to the development of trust is the ability to bond with adoptive parents. The absence of a biological bond between the adoptee and adoptive parents may cause trust issues in the adoptee (Wegar, 1995).
             Baran (1975) stated, "Late adolescence . . . is the period of intensified identity concerns and is a time when the feelings about adoption become more intense and questions about the past increase." Unless the adopted child has the answers to these arising questions, identity formation can be altered and somewhat halted. McRoy. (1990) agrees with this point: Adolescence is
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