Good American Family is a show that was recently added to Netflix. Its rise in popularity is primarily due to the story behind its creation. While it was based on a true story, how much is true? The story is about a girl with a rare dwarfism disease that causes others to believe that she is much younger than she is. Everyone thinks she’s a normal girl who’s looking for a family. She lies about her age to get adopted by a family to get them to pay for her surgeries, and especially squats in their homes. But even the lie itself was a lie, because Natalia Grace was a child when she was adopted and was abandoned by her adoptive parents when she was just 10 years old. After all, they believed she had been lying about her age.
What Really Happened?
Natalia Grace was born on September 4th, 2003, and is currently 21 years old, according to People.com. It is not known what happened to her birth parents, but she was put in a Ukrainian orphanage. There, she was diagnosed with a rare type of dwarfism called spondyloepiphyseal dysplasia congenita. According to The Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, spondyloepiphyseal is “a rare genetic disorder that results in short stature and skeletal anomalies that primarily affect the spine and long bones of the arms and legs. A form of dwarfism, children with SEDc often have vision and hearing issues.”
At first, Natalia Grace was adopted in 2008 but returned to an adoption centre two years later in 2010 because of her “disruptive behavior,” according to People.com. Later in 2010, she was adopted by the Kistine Barnett and Michael Barnett, who became her new parents in real life and the recreation seen through ‘Good American Family’. This good American family would later be charged with neglect of a dependent.
Kristine is the first to catch on to her daughter’s antics in the show. She is suspicious of her daughter at first because her daughter’s behavior is off. Still, as time passes, she realizes that much of her documentation is contradictory and incorrect. She found out her daughter has adult teeth while at the doctor’s. Also, according to Forbes, the family found out that Natalia had been on her period, even though she is supposedly only 8 years old. Periods usually start between the ages of 10 and 15, so this was very suspicious to Kristine Barnett.
Over a year, Kristine and Michael have reported their daughter, Natalia Grace, and a trial was held in 2012. According to the detective in charge of their case, Natalia’s certificate was fake, so the Indiana court changed Natalia’s birth year from 2003 to 1989, making her appear to be no longer an eight-year-old but a 22-year-old. Due to these results, Kristine and Michael were no longer in charge of Natalia, and they left her in an apartment in Westfield, Indiana, where she lived by herself.
Natalia has appeared in a documentary about her, called ‘The Curious Case of Natalia Grace’, where she talks about her life and what happened. In the documentary, she discusses how, in 2023, her actual birth year was confirmed using medical tests and DNA analysis. They found that Natalia was truly born in 2003. Meaning she was truly just a child the whole time. According to Newsweek, Kristine and Michael Barnett were charged with neglect of a dependent in 2019 but did not serve time in jail. In 2022, Michael was found not guilty, and in 2023, charges against Kristine were dropped. Natalia Grace is now 21 years old and continues to tell her story.
