On vacation I spent a lot of time watching this movie about a foster family (one of my children likes it). The movie deals with a classic (if not hackneyed) adoption plot: a family takes in a foster child to console the mother for her infertility; she's thrilled, but her husband is concerned that the child presents an unacceptable risk to the family and its resources. The husband eventually signals his approval of the foster daughter by spending a large(ish) sum of money on something important to her.
Many of these concerns were also present in Greece and Rome.* Women were not permitted to adopt as a consolation for the loss of children until the late Empire. In Greece, only adult male citizens had the right; in Rome it belonged to the paterfamilias. Rome, with its customary pragmatism about family relationships, permitted an adoption to be undone though the same process that governed child emancipation. Adoption severed relationships with the father but not the mother.
Succession in the Roman empire was often based on adoption, beginning with the posthumous adoption of Octavian by his great-uncle Julius Caesar. Galba was a little more unusual; he was adopted not by his predecessor but by his wealthy stepmother Livia Ocellina.
Roman family customs are (almost) always a nice corrective to our sentimentalization of the institution. I'm tickled by how they always provide an out, whether it's easy divorce or dissolving an adoption.
* OCD 4th ed.
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