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GETTING TO THE HEART OF
ADOPTION
By Michael Colberg As an adoptive parent and an adoption professional who often speaks publicly about adoption, I get a lot of calls from people who want to adopt. I recently had an experience that was pretty disturbing. A preadoptive couple left word on my office answering machine asking that I give them a call. I returned the call but didn’t hear back from them for several weeks. I eventually spoke with the wife who explained the delay. She went on to tell me that the reason that they had not called back sooner is that they “almost had one but at the last minute it fell through”. This statement, made by someone who was perhaps an otherwise intelligent person really startled me. I was, at the time, on Cape Cod - an area well known for its fishing. The day before I had been walking along the beach and heard a young boy who was fishing with his grandfather say exactly the same thing! “Grandpa I almost had one and it got away!” Hearing the same thought expressed by these two people, one a child wanting a fish and one an adult wanting a child really got me thinking about how we as a society view adoption. Adoption is not well understood and this failure to appreciate the ongoing and complex nature of adoption often causes a lot of unnecessary pain for birth and adoptive parents and for their children. This article is intended to help pre-adoptive and adoptive parents gain an awareness of adoption and help them understand their experiences and their feelings in a way that respects both their short and their long-term needs. The article will begin by discussing why adoption is not well understood and then discuss some of the factors that can enhance our understanding of adoption and help parents make choices that are good for themselves and for their children. How do we think about adoption? There are many of us who think of adoption as a way of becoming a family - period. We want to become parents, fail to become biological parents and move toward becoming parents through adoption. We focus on becoming a family rather than being a family. We overlook both the fact that parenting through adoption is not a replacement for parenting through biology and the fact that adoption is not an event. Placement is an event. Adoption is a word used to describe the ongoing relationships that result from moving a child from one family – his biological or birth family – into another family – his adoptive family. How is our understanding of adoption shaped and how is it perpetuated? There are many factors that play important roles in shaping our perceptions. First, the ways in which the media portray adoption are often sensationalized and limited to the period of time immediately before, during and after placement. Second, our society places emphasis on results and focusing on the “getting” of a baby as an end result fits this model. Third, money plays an important role in the world of adoption and affects how we understand adoption, how placements are made and who has influence. Fourth, preadoptive parents typically focus on becoming adoptive parents as quickly as possible rather than taking the time to learn about the differences between the various types of adoption and about what it means to be a solid and adoption sensitive parent. Fifth, we do not understand that families formed through adoption are different in many ways from families formed through biology. Sixth, we do not know how to identify adoption related feelings and behaviors and often fail to understand that what we are experiencing has its basis in adoption. Each of these factors plays a significant role in shaping the understanding of adoption. THE MEDIA As it has become a more common and visible method of building a family, the media has focused a lot more attention on adoption. Unfortunately, this attention has done little to educate either society as a whole or families whose lives are affected by adoption about the nature of adoption in general and more specifically about what is normal and natural for families formed through adoption. Adoption has become a frequent topic of conversation on talk shows, has been the theme of several major motion pictures, and has been repeatedly featured in soap opera story lines. There have been many books written about adoption by authors whose knowledge base is shaped by and limited to their personal experience as a birthparent, an adoptive parent or an adoptee. For the most part, our understanding of adoption is anecdotal. We are exposed to a melange of adoption related stories and offered little or nothing in the way of context. We take in each story with little awareness of what it really means, and how to understand it in context. It is not possible to gain from this coverage an understanding of the ongoing nature of adoption or even an awareness that there is anything particularly complex to understand. The media is filled with sensationalized “human interest” stories that focus on the form rather than the substance of adoption. We have all heard about birthparents who have changed their minds, attempted to be reunited with the children that they placed for adoption and filed suit to regain the right to parent. We have watched TV movies and news stories about black market adoptions, and we know about the many children in other countries suffering from the effects of severe abuse and neglect who have been brought into this country and adopted. We have heard about the large number of children languishing in foster care and have been led to believe that once they are freed for adoption and adopted, their lives will become simpler and happier. We have been directed not to see adoption as an ongoing process but rather as an end point. A FOCUS ON END RESULTS Our society places great emphasis on accomplishing goals as quickly
as possible. “When can you get that to me?”, “What’s the earliest that we
can close this deal?”, “You know, I really like what you’re saying, but
Mr. Smith told me he can deliver it sooner.” These are the conversations
that propel our society forward. We need to accomplish our goals sooner
rather than later. How does this apply to adoption? Almost all of the
prospective adoptive parents with whom I speak ask the same three
questions that were on my mind as we began our journey: What agency or
attorney did you use?, How long did it take? and How much did it cost?.
All of these questions have an underlying sense of urgency to them and
although they are important questions, they are questions that focus on
the short rather than long term well being of those affected by adoption.
All of these concerns become moot as soon as you become a parent. They
have no relevance whatsoever from the first day of parenthood forward. The
reality is that we have directed our attention toward the wrong goal. Our
goal should be to become the best adoptive parents that we can become. In
order to do this we need to learn about what role adoption will play for
our families throughout our lifetimes. THE ROLE OF ADOPTION PROFESSIONALS When prospective adoptive parents become involved with an adoption professional, they are hiring that person to help them become parents. They feel the loss and sadness present for those who have tried and are unable to conceive. They often believe that adoption will erase these feelings and they transfer their hopes and expectations onto adoption. Even though adoption is by nature, complex, prospective adoptive parents bring with them the same simple goal that they have had since beginning their journey toward parenting. They want to become parents. They plug adoption into their already well formed search machine. Prospective adoptive parents often disregard their own intuition, relying instead on the advice of adoption professionals. People yearning to become parents typically do not stop to educate themselves about adoption, and are more inclined to listen most closely to those who limit their conversation to promising that their journey will soon be over. Unfortunately, one end result of not understanding the complexities inherent in adoption is not being aware even of the existence of complexity. This applies to preadoptive parents and to adoption professionals as well. Adoption is not a part of the curriculum in either law school or schools of social work. There is little if any academic training to educate attorneys, judges and social workers (the professions most often involved with adoption) about the complex nature of adoption and most of them learn about adoption while on the job. This lack of professional training means that their understanding of adoption is often limited to their personal observation and experience. Few of these professionals have any understanding of what the long-term developmental challenges are that confront families formed through adoption. Without this overview, it is difficult, if not impossible to guide families toward what will be in their interest over the long run. Adoption professionals who focus exclusively on getting the best for their client at a particular moment in time fail to realize that their client’s needs will change and that they will, over time, be best served only when the adoptive placement takes the best interests of all triad members to heart. During the period of involvement with adoption professionals - typically attorneys or social workers - the goals held out to be most important by preadoptive parents are their short term goals - the formation of a family through adoption in the shortest amount of time possible. Prospective adoptive parents’ more long term goals - creating the healthiest family possible and doing the best parenting job possible are often brushed aside in the race to become parents. It is important to remember that parenting includes encouraging a child to value all of his/her heritages and working to enable a child to feel comfortable enough to be able to come forward with even their most difficult or painful questions and concerns - Why didn’t my birthmother want me? Why didn’t you just give my birthmother money so she could take care of me?, Why did you take me away from her?. Parents will find it is easier to handle the difficult questions when they are proud of how they went about the adoption process. It is easier to help a child value both birth and adoptive heritages when the adoptive parents respect and honor their child’s birthfamily. Quite often those who keep their eye on the long term goals find that they pay less attention to the speed at which they become a family and instead spend time considering what form of adoption is most right for them and whether it feels right to move ahead with a particular potential placement. Too often I have had people in my office who struggle to live with the decisions that they made based on speed and have ended up attempting to parent in a situation that is not really right for either themselves or their children. Many ask “Why didn’t anybody tell us what to expect?” The answer lies in our focus on speed to the exclusion of thoroughness. The information does exist to help all prospective adoptive parents become knowledgeable and the kind of educated consumers that they would expect themselves to become before investing resources in projects that hold far less import than the responsibility for parenting a human being. THE “AS IF” NOTION Our culture tends to treat all families alike regardless of how they were formed. Families created through adoption have different challenges to face than those faced by families created biologically. Because we do not understand that families formed through adoption are different, we expect that once an adoptive placement has occurred the newly formed family will function “as if” it were formed biologically. As differences emerge family members may feel ashamed and as if they are doing something wrong. When an individual blames himself for something he perceives as not right he is less likely to speak out and demand that his family, his community and his culture take notice. He is less likely to demand that his children’s schools pay attention to his children’s needs. Because adoptive parents want to do a good job as parents, they may try to fit in and may be less likely to identify, acknowledge and respect those of their own and their family’s needs that come from adoption. Adoptive families often think that it is their duty to blend in and pretend that they are like families formed biologically. The end result is that society continues on, harboring within its midst an undiscovered minority population - one with unique challenges and characteristics. Society has little interest in accommodating a minority group’s needs unless confronted directly by a demand for recognition. Ironically, the fact that few people are aware of what they are looking at serves to perpetuate their lack of awareness. Families formed through adoption just kind of blend in and although our numbers continue to grow we find that our challenges remain a hidden, but very present factor, not only in our lives but in the life of our society. THE ADOPTION “LENS” When trying to understand why we remain oblivious even to the need for adoption awareness it is essential that we understand that many of the individual and familial struggles that in fact stem from adoption are not, on the surface, obviously adoption related. They become visibly connected to adoption only when viewed with an understanding of adoption. These challenges emerge slowly, over time, and become larger and more dramatic as the child ages. It is, quite often, only as they enter and move through their teen years that it becomes apparent that much of what is happening has, at its root, adoption. I have rarely encountered an adoptee, birthparent or adoptive parent who enters my office telling me that their adoption is really bothering them today. Instead, being unable to understand and express their discomfort verbally, many young adoptees act it out by engaging in behaviors that can be self-destructive. In addition to dramatic behaviors like substance abuse, gang membership and truancy, young adoptees might express their feelings more subtly. They might take an especially long time to settle in after transition. They might be particularly upset if left off of an invitation list. They might have an outsize need for control. They might have difficulty sustaining relationships. Triad members often suffer from feelings of anger, grief, sadness or confusion. These feelings, though experienced by the population at large, have a special poignancy for those touched by adoption. Unless therapists and adoptive parents are trained to understand how their child’s behavior is related to adoption, it is hard to trace many difficulties affecting families formed through adoption back to adoption itself. Yet it is, quite often, only when someone understands where their feelings come from that they are able to understand them, accept them, and move on. EMPOWERING FAMILIES THROUGH ADOPTION Now that I have discussed that adoption is more complicated than it is generally thought of as being and why this misperception exists, I want to emphasize that forming a family through adoption can be an enormously rewarding family building method. There are a number of advantages to building a family through adoption. People have a chance to explore the meaning of family and what it means to be a parent in a very conscious way. Parenthood is not something that is happening to them, they need to take action to make it happen. It is a wonderful opportunity to begin to pay attention to why an individual wants to parent and what parenting might encompass. Preadoptive parents have the opportunity to take the time to find out whether a particular situation creates a comfortable fit between expectations and realities and between challenges and talents. Adoptive parents can benefit from understanding some important concepts that can help them make sense of adoption and empower them so that they can have the best experience possible and become the best parents that they can be. THERE ARE MANY DIFFERENT FORMS OF ADOPTION There are many forms of adoption and each form brings with it its own set of strengths and challenges. There is domestic adoption and there is international adoption. There is infant adoption and there is older child adoption. There is open adoption, there is closed adoption and there are all of the adoptions that fall between these two poles. There is special needs adoption. There is sibling set adoption. There is private adoption, agency adoption, foster adoption and kinship adoption, There is legal adoption and there is emotional adoption. Take the time to learn about each form of adoption. What do the differences mean? Do some forms of adoption feel more “right” than others? What are the benefits and challenges of each form of adoption over the short and long-terms? Preadoptive parents should take the time to educate themselves about the characteristics of each of these choices so that they can make decisions which will best support themselves and their children over the long run. Prospective adoptive parents are well served by seriously considering what their ideal family looks like. Are we talking about one child or several? Are we talking about a newborn or an older child? Some preadoptive parents start out wanting to adopt a single child and end up adopting a sibling set. Some prospective adoptive parents want to provide a family that allows siblings, who might otherwise be separated, to grow up benefiting from their sibling connection. Some prospective adoptive parents do this not because they want to but because they fall in love with one of the children and their sibling is part of the package. Placement venues make every effort to place siblings together and this situation therefore is more common than we would like to think. It is important to understand that there are a couple of levels of
adoption. There is legal adoption and there is emotional adoption.
Emotional adoption is adoption of the heart. It is when you come to
understand that you are truly a family in the deepest sense of the word.
In cases where the sibling is included because they have to be, we find
that although the sibling has been legally adopted, they may not have been
emotionally adopted. This means that the adoptive parents do not take the
sibling into their heart as their child - a feeling that is invariably
communicated to the child him/herself. The results are often disastrous.
It is vital that preadoptive parents adopt each child both legally and
emotionally. Human beings deserve to be loved on their own terms.
Preadoptive parents are also able to consider whether they are drawn toward domestic or international adoption. Some parents choose international adoption because of their strong connection to a particular culture and some choose it for less appropriate reasons. Some prospective adoptive parents turn to international adoption because they believe it is faster and some so that they can avoid dealing with “the birthparent issue”. Although many adoptees do not feel the need to seek out their biological families, many do. Preadoptive parents need to understand that, after a certain age, the decision to search lies with the adoptee. It is becoming easier and easier to search internationally. Many families have returned to Central America in search of their children’s birthfamilies. Although it was, until quite recently, considered impossible, many Korean adoptees are returning to Korea and successfully searching for their birthparents. The advent of DNA testing will make international searches commonplace in the coming years. The bottom line here is that it will become more and more possible for those adoptees who want to search to successfully locate their birthfamilies regardless of whether they were adopted domestically or internationally. It is important to understand the additional tasks that are present when parenting through international adoption. Parents’ job is to help their children value all of who they are which is hard to do if they adopt internationally from a country with which they have no deep affinity. There are currently many adoptees coming to this country from China. Consider their experience. When they go out into the world, they will be viewed and treated as being Chinese and need to be prepared. Part of their job is to make sense of having been placed out of their family of origin and their culture of origin. Families are at an advantage when parents can help their children understand the nature of their culture of origin. This is more helpful than simply learning the language or eating the food of that culture. Understanding how the history, the politics and the economics have converged to create a climate that produces so many international adoptions is useful. Although their experience happened to them, it did not happen because of who they are or because of something that they did. It helps children understand that their experience is complicated and that they have the support of their adoptive parents as they try to claim and make peace with that part of their heritage. It is also important to help children understand how the Chinese placements are made. Many people describe the Chinese infants as having been abandoned. More careful analysis points toward a different conclusion. There are many stories of children who have been very carefully placed at certain locations by birthparents who want to make absolutely certain that someone receives their child. This is hardly an abandonment. It is another form of placement. When a child is led to believe that they have been “rescued” by their adoptive parents, they may well have a hard time valuing their beginnings. When one of an adoptive parent’s goals is to help their child make sense of their story and find value in all of their heritages, the child benefits enormously. It is easier for adopted children to successfully integrate all of their heritages if their adoptive parents understand that theirs is a bi-cultural family. They are no longer an American family with a Chinese child, but rather a bi-cultural family whose members come from both China and the U.S.. This means that the Chinese culture and heritage is important within the household alongside the American culture and heritage. We unfortunately make assumptions about who people are based on what they look like. We can prepare our internationally adopted or interacially adopted children by making their heritage a part of their families’ lives. It is helpful to be able to introduce role models, for example, pediatricians, teachers or extended family members from the child’s culture of origin so that the he or she has the opportunity to see a variety of adults from the same background engaged in the same task - making sense of bi-culturalism. In this way the child has the opportunity to normalize their bi-culturalism and can grow up knowing that they are encouraged to figure out for themselves who they are and what pieces of themselves come from which culture. When a parent adopts outside of his or her racial background it is important to understand the role that racism plays in the life of the parent, his or her partner’s life, his or her extended families’ lives and in the life of the community in which the family lives. Go through this exercise imagining not a baby, but a teenager. Will a child of a different race have others of his or her race present within their family, school or community? Will they be included as other children in their class begin to date? What roles do adults of the same race play in the life of the family or community? A distraught mother called me a year or so ago and sought advice around her daughter’s truancy, drug use and promiscuity. I asked her about their life as a family and tried to help her look at it from her child’s point of view. Her daughter was wrestling with her biological heritage. She was not exposed to any peers from her racial background. She had no adult role models with whom she shared her race. In the life that her parents had built, people with her racial background were perceived as drug using, promiscuous and unsuccessful. This teen was trying to make sense of who she was and where she fit in. Her race was a part of who she was, and she was trying to reconcile her birth and adoptive cultures. Some preadoptive parents adopt older children because they have a desire to parent a child who has been through a rough time. They understand what is involved with an older child placement and they have the skills and desire to create a family with an older child. Others feel as though they have a better chance of being selected as parents if they open themselves up to a category of child deemed “hard to place”. Although they may have an easier time adopting, they are often surprised by the additional challenges present for an adoptee who has a history of neglect and/or abuse and who may well have had to adjust to numerous foster placements over the course of their young lives. Preadoptive parents must demand complete information about the children that they may adopt. They must receive the help that they need to make sense of the information that they are given and be supported as they assess their desire and their ability to parent a particular child. Older children need parents who have been prepared to face the additional layers of complexity present in these adoptions. In older child placements and in all adoptive placements attention should be paid to preparing the adults and the children for life after placement. Families formed through adoption deserve the kind of ongoing support systems that will help them meet the challenges that they will face. We need to be clear about how each form of adoption is different from the others. Preadoptive parents need education and complete information so that they can make decisions about the rightness of the “fit” between themselves as parents and any particular situation. The factors discussed above are just a couple of examples which are presented to help preadoptive parents begin to think about the form of adoption that is most right for them. Each layer of diversity brings with it a responsibility. In order to be successful, parents must acknowledge, become comfortable with and feel able to discuss with their child any and all of the difficult feelings that are present when a child feels different from his or her parents. ADOPTEES, BIRTHPARENTS AND ADOPTIVE PARENTS REMAIN CONNECTED FOREVER Members of the adoption triad - adoptees, birthparents and adoptive parents should realize that they remain in relationship forever. Sometimes these relationships exist in fact and other times they exist in our fantasies. Only in truly open adoptions do these relationships exist in fact and the triad members have direct relationships. In all other relationships created by adoption, the relationships remain fantasy based. Adoptees wonder about their biological parents - Do they ever think about me? Why didn’t they keep me? Adoptive parents wonder about the birthparents - What has happened to them? Do they regret their decision to place their child for adoption? Might they reappear? Birthparents wonder about the adoptees well-being. They may wonder whether the adoptee hates them for placing them into their adoptive home. They may worry/wish that the adoptee will search for them. When relationships exist only within a person’s imagination, they have the potential to be far more powerful and disruptive than when they are based in the reality of relating.
People are affected by the important experiences in their lives. Who they are is, in part, shaped by what has happened. This holds true for families touched by adoption. Families formed through adoption face developmental stages that are different than and often add to the stages experienced by families formed biologically. Families formed through adoption have their own unique developmental rhythms which are dictated by the impact that adoption has on each family member throughout their lifespans. How does one begin to make sense of having been born into one family, often an unknown family, and then moved into another - one with whom they have no biological connection? And for the adoptive parent - what does it mean to parent a child born to another? These events are understood differently at each stage of development. As each developmental challenge presents itself and is negotiated, the potential exists for it to take precedence over the developmental challenges that are present for all families whether formed through adoption or not. For example, entering primary school is a big transition for any family. Most parents put a lot of effort into making their child as comfortable as possible as they adjust to this new adventure. For families formed through adoption, this transition often coincides with a child beginning to understand that if they were available to be adopted, they had to have been “given away”. This realization is often pretty painful for both adoptive parents and adoptees and can take a lot of energy away from the energy that would normally have been used to acclimate to school. The need to deal with feelings of having been “given away” may result in the young adoptee taking a longer time to adjust to being in school than his/her classmates. If parents and teachers do not understand why it may take longer for the young adoptee to adjust to growth and change, the child can be perceived as having some type of problem and treated accordingly. Adopted children are over-represented in the population of children diagnosed as having learning disabilities. No one is sure why this is the case, but many adoption professionals believe that some of these “problems” are, in reality, the normal developmental lags that can be expected when a child is asked to deal with difficult emotional realities at the same time that they are being asked to make other adjustments. ADOPTION IS A LIFELONG PROCESS Families formed through adoption need to appreciate the lifetime nature of adoption. Each developmental stage brings with it the opportunity to learn about and appreciate the different heritages that are present – those of each of the parents and those of the children. Appreciation of these differences can enrich families’ lives and help children learn about difference in a way that makes it a source of pride rather than a source of confusion or shame. Adoption complicates the child’s understanding of who he is and how he came to be. When adoption is treated as an event in time, those touched by adoption often fall into a trap and are placed at a serious disadvantage. When prospective adoptive parents fail to pay attention to the long-term nature of adoption they fail to think about what their family’s needs will be in the years ahead and they fail to prepare themselves and their children to meet them. Prospective adoptive parents lose the chance to pay attention to the fit between what will be expected of them and what they have to give. They run the risk of assuming that once a family has been formed through adoption they and everyone else will expect the newly formed adoptive family to respond “as if” it was formed biologically. Families created through adoption have to make sense of their history. They need to understand that their family has had experiences that are different than those had by families formed through biology. These experiences impact upon the family and need to be addressed as the family develops. Children who have been adopted need to be supported as they wrestle with making sense of who they are and learn to value those pieces of themselves that come from biology and those that come through adoption. The movement of a child out of his or her biological family and into their adoptive family is an event with ongoing repercussions for the adoptee, the adoptive parents, the birthparents and their extended family systems. Society currently treats all families, regardless of how they came together, as if they have the same needs. As a result, we are sorely lacking in the kind of post adoption services that are needed in order to help adoptive families acknowledge their experiences by learning what they can expect to face as their children grow up. GENETICS PLAY A ROLE IN FAMILIES FORMED THROUGH ADOPTION Adoption does not erase infertility. As mentioned above, most pre-adoptive parents come to the world of adoption having failed in their goal of becoming a family biologically. They often feel beaten down by their failed attempts to become pregnant and feel that bringing a child into their lives through adoption will erase the pain of infertility. It is crucial for the well being of an adoptive family that the adoptive parents realize that the child that they are parenting is a different child than the one who would have come to them biologically. It is important to take the time to grieve the inability to conceive so that by the time adoption is considered as a family building technique, it is considered on its own terms. Although both genetics and environment play significant roles in our lives, this reality often is overlooked in relation to adoption. Adoptive parents often view their newborn as “tabula raisa” and are upset and baffled as the child matures into a person who is, in many ways, foreign to them. The child may look very different from anyone else in the family, a fairly obvious distinction. What is more subtle are the other differences - in temperament, talents and interests. It is not uncommon to read about the adoptee who has never felt as though he or she fits in until the adoptee searches and finds members of his or her biological family who share many of the same characteristics. If not prepared for and understood as normal, these differences can leave the adoptive parents and adoptee with feelings of sorrow and alienation. When these differences are understood and expected, these differences can enrich family life and become a source of joy rather than pain. A child who comes into a family by adoption is the product of another family or families and he or she shares a genetic heritage with that family or those families. This heritage affects the way that the child looks, it affects the child’s temperament and talents, it controls the child’s medical background and, to a large extent, his biological future. The child you parent through adoption, is a different child than the one you would have parented had you become a parent biologically. This has both positive and negative aspects. It is important to understand that the medical information that adoptive parents receive about their child and the child’s biological family prior to or at the time of placement is very incomplete. It doesn’t give adoptive parents information about what has happened since the placement – information that it might be important to have. Many adoptive parents do not have information about their children’s medical background. They cannot give their pediatrician accurate background information. On the positive side, adopted children are free of the genetic dangers that flow through their adoptive families. They will probably not take after your dreaded Aunt Matilda or your partner’s Uncle Fred. It is easier to allow a child to grow up free of expectations when his parents understand that his talents and interests may well emerge as surprises that come from his genetic heritage rather than his adoptive heritage. On the other hand, when you have full information, it is easier to place behavior in context and not worry unnecessarily when you understand that everyone in the last three generations has tended to behave in exactly the same way when exposed to similar circumstances. ADOPTIVE PARENTS SHOULD FEEL THAT THEY HAVE THE RIGHT TO PARENT By nature, there are issues of loss for adoptees, birthparents and adoptive parents. Loss is mitigated by feeling entitled to be where you are. There can be considerable pain in situations where adoptive parents are not sure that they have received permission to parent from their child’s birthparents. Adoptive parents should be prepared for the possibility that they may experience feelings of not having permission to parent and should seek help in assessing what the meaning of those feelings might be for them. Is it important to know that your child’s birthparent has selected you to be the adoptive parents? If the answer is yes, care should be taken to create an adoption where this desire is respected and honored. For example, I needed to know that I had permission to be my daughter’s parent. I did not want to go through my parenting experience worrying that my daughter’s birthmother regretted her decision and so I needed to have her permission to parent. In order to do this, I selected a form of adoption that allowed me to have an ongoing relationship with our daughter’s birthfamily. As our family develops we continue to have an open relationship with our daughter’s birthfamily. This has given my daughter the opportunity to understand which of her interests, talents and personal idiosyncrasies come from our family, which come from her birthfamily and which are uniquely hers. While having an ongoing relationship is not pain free, it gives all of us a chance to understand that we are where we need to be. My daughter’s birthmother is living her life with the knowledge that our daughter is loved as she hoped she would be and is growing up to be a young woman about whom she can feel proud. She also knows that she has a very special role to play as it is only she who can help my daughter to know that she is loved by her birthfamily although she is not being raised by them. We, as adoptive parents have been given the right to parent over and over. I fully know that my daughter’s well being is my responsibility. I, not her birthmother, am the parent and it is my responsibility to make the hard decisions that come with being a parent. Our daughter is growing up understanding that all of her pieces of heritage, those from her birth and adoptive families are of value. All of her feels fully accepted in our house. For some adoptive parents, not being sure that they have permission to parent translates into feeling unable to set limits for the child and feeling as though they have no right to set boundaries and discipline their child. This can lead to resentment and feelings of unsafety for both parent and child. THERE IS SUPPORT AVAILABLE – USE IT Support is available. Many times the responsibility for gaining awareness falls upon the adoptive parents. There are conferences and organizations whose missions are to educate families about the nature of adoption and about what is normal for their families. A key resources is Tapestry Books (1-800-765-2367) an adoption book catalogue which provides easy access to many adoption related books. We have to behave as advocates for our families. Many adoptive parents fail to realize that they have become quite knowledgeable about adoption and that they are in a position to contribute to the ways in which we all think about adoption. Share information with extended family members and the schools. Let the media know when their depiction of adoption is sensationalized. We learn about adoption as we go and it is important to get the word out. Parents feel that something needs to be wrong before we seek outside support for our parenting. It is especially important for adoptive parents to understand this. Parenting a child born to you is no mean feat. Yet, it in many ways it is easier than parenting a child whose heritage lies somewhere else. Parenting a child who is, in many ways, foreign to either parent is, at times, quite challenging. You can’t evaluate an adoptee’s behavior against that of extended family members - there’s no saying, “Oh Aunt Suzie was like that too!” Having the support of a well trained adoption professional can help adoptive parents to relax and appreciate the differences rather than have them cause discomfort and anxiety. There are adoption professionals who are trained in family systems. They help parents identify the challenges that they are facing and help them look at how to best make use of the family’s strengths in order to address these challenges. These clinically trained professionals can help families to recognize and face each level of development with understanding. There needs to be more awareness of the need for this type of adoption competent professional. Adoptive parents need to demand access to professionals who have the kind of long-term awareness that will help them support families and encourage their taking the time to look at both today’s concerns and tomorrow’s. It is ironic that far more of us studied trigonometry than use it and yet we expect to be able to parent without any training whatsoever!
In conclusion, adoptive parents can be supported as they maximize
their potential for success as they build their family through adoption.
Key to this process is a recognition that: • Placement is an event. Adoption is complex and ongoing. |