Someone Should Have Saved Joan Crawford’s Adopted Daughter From Her Parenting Methods

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Joan Crawford adopted Christina in 1939 when she discovered she couldn’t have her own children. After her death, this daughter revealed that her life with Joan Crawford wasn’t as much of a fairytale as everyone believed. Take a look at the early life of Christina Crawford and her mother’s parenting rules. Read on and find out whether her rules were really that bad.

Couldn’t Have Children

Joan was very eager to become a mother, but that didn’t happen during her first marriage to Douglas Fairbanks Jr. This lasted from 1929 to 1933, when she decided to end it and got a divorce. She married Franchot Tone in 1935 and wanted children, but, again, that wasn’t to be.

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After the second marriage ended in 1939, she knew that having children naturally wasn’t meant to be. It was at this point that she decided adoption was the best option and adopted a 10-day-old baby girl.

The First Adopted Child

When Joan Crawford discovered that she couldn’t have children during her second marriage, she decided to adopt a child. This was when she adopted Christina, the first of five adopted children through the years. She adopted the baby girl from an unmarried teen mother from Los Angeles, California.

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According to Christina, her biological father was a married man in the navy, and her mother was still a teenager. Joan Crawford adopted this baby through a baby broker in Nevada because social services denied her adoption in California.

Determined to Have a Child

Although Joan Crawford was at first denied the adoption of a child, she didn’t let that stop her from starting a family. That was when she pursued adoption through another state where she had more success.

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Her determination made it possible for her to adopt Christina just after her second marriage. It took Joan a while to decide what to name the new baby, but after some uncertainty, she settled on Christina. This is how she found a child of her own at long last.

The Next Child

This event took place around a year and a half after adopting her baby girl while married to her third husband. At this stage, she decided to expand the family and find another child to adopt. They settled on a boy, but something they never expected happened.

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The biological mother of the boy decided that she wanted her baby back and was awarded guardianship. Joan and her new husband, actor Phillip Terry, were stunned by this development.