This comment by Eloise really made me smile — as I say in my reply, we don’t think it’s necessary to label the difference between adopted children and biological children at every single opportunity.

After writing that reply, I thought it would be worth writing a blog about this sort of thing. Actually, that’s a lie: after writing that comment, I went to bed because it was late but when I woke up this morning, I thought I should write this blog about it ;)

Anyway, yes, we make an effort not to call kids “X’s adopted son” or whatever whenever we refer to them. The parent/s have a much wanted child and the child has a loving parent or parents - it doesn’t matter how that all came about. We tend to do the same with step-children and half-siblings too - unless the people in question stress the step/half nature of the relationship. They are “so-and-so’s daughter” or “$random_star’s brother”.

This is part of our generally bigger effort to not pad out stories with useless tidbits of information when it’s just not appropriate: unlike many other outlets, we didn’t mention the Kate Hudson/Dax Shepard kissing pictures in the whole Owen Wilson suicide coverage (and I blogged about why); we try not to include random notes about people’s personal lives in an article about their new film; and similarly, we won’t label people by their sexuality (or religious people by their religion; or vegetarians/vegans by their non-meat stance; or substance abuser by their addictions…) at every opportunity unless it’s explicitly relevant to the story at hand.

When things *are* relevant, we provide links (usually to our old stories) wherever possible but everything else just smacks as filler and/or unwarranted labelling to define the person as “other”, compared to the mythical constructed concept of what is “normal” - which is both completely unnecessary and damaging in our opinion.