Shouldn't adopted children be more grateful?

I had an interesting conversation at work today.  Co-workers and I were sharing those typical parent tales of woe.  The high cost of a smile when it comes to the financing of braces.  The fact that one of the co-workers son's started college, dropped out and is now going to try it again, leaving his parents with decidedly mixed feelings and some expensive bills to pay. Another co-worker shared stories of trying to find a decent safe and not too pricey car for her daughter, now a first time driver. 

Added to the "war stories" was a bit of undercurrent of frustration on the parts of the parents sharing them.  They felt their children had no recognition of their sacrifices for their childrens betterment. The kids had no gratitude as one mom put it.  Then one person looked at me and said "but surely adopted children are more grateful."

I was floored and in my usual foot in mouth fashion said "Why?"    The answers ranged from me "giving them a better life" to "rescuing them" to a lot of stammering.  And just to be clear, this was not a conversation of a bunch of middle class white folk. We were a diverse group ethnically and socio-economically.

I said that I didn't think my kids were "grateful" for being adopted.  In reality at least one of the 4 probably wished very much that adoption had never had to be part of his life experience. That does not mean he doesn't love us, love his siblings or his new life.  But he LOST a life too and I was pretty sure there were lots of times he wanted that life back.

My eldest is "grateful" in a rather clinical way.  He is autistic and has studied his native land with the kind of perserveration that autistic people devote to a passion.  He determined when he was about in about 8th or 9th grade that he likely would not be alive had he remained in his native land.  He could see that the economic disadvantages he was laboring under combined with his autism were a recipe for disaster.  However, that doesn't mean he is grateful to me per se.  It is a very sort of emotionless assessment that he has made.

My two youngest don't have any frame of reference for this as yet. They understand adoption at its most basic level.  But I doubt that gratitude will be part of their equation either. In the stunned silence that followed this,  I tried to explain that by and large kids are not grateful.  They don't have the life experience to see what we give up and  put off so that they may have experiences they want or that we feel will be of benefit to them.  It means about as much to them as if we showed them the cost of buying organic green beans and touted the benefits of them.  My kids don't care about green beans!  They care about popsicles.  And they aren't even grateful for popsicles!  They just expect they will magically appear in the freezer for enjoyment on a hot summer day. 

I suspect that "gratitude" on the part of children, comes along when our children have children themselves.  That is when they will remember summer picnics, when the nights watching fireworks or sitting around a campfire in their youth are remembered and rejoiced in.  And that is what my goal is--joy enough to pay forward to the next generation.  You can keep the gratitude.