Up until fairly recently, meaning the last ten years or so, family secrets were kept much more easily than they are today. The only risk of someone finding out infidelities, sealed adoptions and such was if someone talked. These days it is a different story altogether. With massive DNA databases and billions of people contributing to it everyday people are finding out things about their family that were secret. Siblings do not even have to do a direct paternity test now to find out if they share the same father or rather do not share the same father or that they have other siblings they never even knew about.
You read stories every day about siblings finding out about new brothers or sisters and meeting new family members for the first time. It can be quite shocking and literally turn a person’s world completely upside down to find out their family is not what they thought it was. There are now support groups popping up all over the place for people who are having a hard time emotionally processing this new information about their relationships and family.
The modern family in the age of DNA testing now is learning to cope with suddenly new family members and are trying to navigate between trying to connect with their newly found siblings and trying not to break up their nuclear family with the news that someone had cheated or lied to them and confronting their parents with the news that their parents had tried to conceal from everyone.
It is literally impossible to take a secret to the grave in the age of DNA testing. The day of reckoning is coming much sooner for cheaters and liars. The modern family is now a ticking time bomb just waiting to explode with all the secrets and messy details that the entire family will have to learn to cope with and process.
Will this teach future generations to be more faithful and less secretive? Will infidelity just be more accepted and out in the open? It is not clear just how this will shape future generations but at the moment it is clear that there simply are no secrets anymore that are safe from being uncovered. The family unit of the past is now swiftly changing to one that includes new members being found all the time even if unintentionally. Sibling DNA testing has clearly changed and redefined what the modern family is now.