This is day 19 of National Adoption Awareness Month, so this is my daily post to amplify the voices of adoptees.

I will start this post acknowledging I am not on TikTok. I’ve never done a TikTok Challenge. I am not a significant part of TikTok’s demographics: 80% of its 80 million monthly active users are between 18 and 34 years old. Did you know that TikTok users spend an average of 52 minutes a day on TikTok? And that users age 4 to 15 spend an average of 80 minutes a day on it? Wowsers. I got those statistics here.

So. I think it’s gonna catch on.

This post is about Adoptee TikTok. No doubt there is a wide range in terms of attitudes and perspectives in the videos shared by adoptees. Adoptees are not a monolith, and neither are their videos. TikTok is one more social media platform to share thoughts about adoption, and the videos indeed contain multitudes, as both What Whitman and Bob Dylan have said..

A recent Mashable article, “TikTok helps adoptees find a new community to explore joy, family, and belonging,” said that “adoptee TikTokers have embarked on a mission to speak out about their past, their present, their families, and their shared experiences — including conversations around mental health and trauma.” (The trauma link is in the original Mashable article.)

The hashtag #AdopteesofTikTok has had some 60 million views. That said, one Twitter user, Conversations About Adoption (@caa_on_Youtube), posted this:

Social media has a vise-like grip on the formation of attitudes, including toward issues like adoption. TikTok is one powerful player in this, especially among young people.