The truth about adoption

A question that worries all adoptive parents without exception: whether, how and when to tell the child the truth. Parents need to recognize and understand that their child has a history of his own, that his life did not begin at the moment of adoption, that he has a human right to know his origins, his history, which is the foundation of his lasting sense of identity and self-respect. Parents fear that the truth might worsen the relationship with the child, that the bond, not strong enough because it is unbloody, might easily break. These are vain fears. Only a relationship built on the truth can be strong. There is no point in hiding your head in the sand, playing the role of a “regular” family, denying the real trauma experienced by the child. An adoptive family is a special family, but it too can be happy.
Keeping the fact of adoption a secret can be justified by the best of intentions, primarily the unwillingness to traumatize the child. The child himself, feeling that the topic is sensitive and unpleasant for the parents, will not ask questions, to preserve their peace of mind, to be good for them. But there was a trauma, this is a fact, to deny it is to deny reality, and therefore to get stuck in this trauma and then reap its rewards. On the contrary, talking about it contributes to overcoming the grief, experiencing it, which opens up a new avenue of development. The easiest thing would be to try to comfort the child with some superficial words, to distract him, but that’s not what he needs. Much more important is to experience with him his pain, sadness and suffering.
Experiencing grief is one of the key experiences a foster family must go through in order to be able to build a good, trusting, loving relationship. There are several stages in this experience, stages. At first the grief is denied, pretending that nothing happened, neither her own disappointment and pain nor the grief of the abandoned child. Then denial is replaced by anger, despair, followed by understanding and reassurance.
Telling your child the truth is always necessary, even if the child was adopted as an infant. Telling the truth as early as possible, without dramatizing the situation. For example, dressing, washing the child, say: “What a wonderful son we have, how glad we are that you live with us, that we adopted you!
I find the following example from life demonstrative. An adopted girl of 4, who knew she was adopted, cried one night before going to bed and told her mother that she missed her birth mother. Her mother told her that it was impossible because she could not remember her birth mother, she was adopted at 2 months old. The girl stops crying, but over the next few days her behavior changes, she becomes cranky, disobedient. The mother thinks about it and realizes that she was wrong and decides to talk to her daughter. She tells the baby that she actually cheated her, was wrong, because the girl lived in her birth mother’s belly for 9 months and then another 2 months together with her, so of course she can remember and miss her. Both cried, but in the morning the girl’s behavior was normal. A few days later she told her mother, “You know, I don’t miss my birth mother at all now when I think of her. And I realized that it was you I missed when I was in her belly!”
Our memories retain all of our experiences, even if we don’t consciously remember them. Experience of the first weeks and months of life also remains in the memory, and this memory is not verbal, but bodily, memory at the level of feelings. The infant’s mentality is built starting from these bodily sensations, which the immediate environment gradually teaches the child to give verbal form, meaning. If any part of experience, especially traumatic, turned out to be outside of this work of giving meaning and symbolization, it remains in the psyche as a certain foreign body and later on is the cause of incomprehensible, inexplicable suffering.
It is very important to talk to the child about his or her feelings, the events he or she has experienced in order to minimize their traumatic effect. Otherwise, the trauma will remain unprocessed and pathogenic; it can have a very dramatic effect on the entire mental life and development. Everything that is incomprehensible requires an explanation. If there are no explanations at all, the child will invent them, but usually these fantasies turn out to be much more terrible than any truth, especially since it is typical for a child to look for the cause of all these events in himself or herself, in his or her bad behavior and badness.

The post Secrecy and truth of adoption appeared first on Adoptinfo.net.

Adoption by an Infertile Couple

Such a couple by the time they decide to adopt is usually already undergoing a long and traumatic experience of many years of treatment, hopes and disappointments. She has to go through a lot of grief: the inability to be “like everyone else”, to conceive, bear, give birth, breastfeed their own child. Often this grief remains unresolved, in which case it will inevitably interfere in the relationship with the adopted child. It is very important that the child is not the last chance to be “like everyone else,” a cure for depression, but that the leading is the desire to give, not to take, to use.
It is a fact that sometimes, some time after adoption, a previously infertile woman becomes pregnant. This proves the great influence of the psychogenic factor in infertility. Perhaps the cause of such infertility was an unconscious fear of parenthood, a ban on having their own child, and then, after a successful experience of communication and raising someone else’s child, these bans and fears weaken. Here already there is a question of the relationship to both children, the issue is often difficult.

The substitute child.

Especially dramatic is the case when the decision to adopt a child arises as a result of the loss of a native child. The adopted child must then replace the place of the deceased. Parents do not burn out their loss, they try to drown it out by taking care of another child, who becomes a substitute, he could literally be assigned the role of a double. The problem is that such a solution does not diminish the grief that was simply in a state of denial, the substitute child will never replace the lost child, who, in addition, will be increasingly idealized. This is a very traumatic situation for the foster child, since he does not exist in and of himself and is not interested in his foster parents, he is called to play a role, to conform to expectations, in which he will never succeed by definition. The result is inevitable disappointment, bad relationships up to and including rejection of the adopted child, parental guilt, and powerful trauma for the child.

Single-Parent Adoption

If a child is adopted by a single woman, it is most often a mature woman, with an established career, a sufficient level of prosperity. The desires that she carries out, adopting a child – this is to be needed, loved, important, and often to fill the inner emptiness. Usually in her environment there are men who can play an important role in the formation of the child’s personality, but still, this influence is not so great, she remains a full-fledged “mistress” of the situation. In addition, the woman may overestimate her physical and emotional capacities, and she often has no one to share her difficulties with. The child becomes a very important object for her, who plays multiple roles: child, friend, confidant, and this is too much of a burden for her. The child may be called upon to alleviate her depression, which will inevitably intensify when he grows older and wants to separate. For a child to have only one parent is an additional fear of losing him, because he has no one else, no one to lean on.
Men’s adoption of children tends to increase around the world as a reflection of their struggle for their rights in matters of child rearing, from which they have been somewhat removed. It is more often about divorced men, and they are adopting older children.

Adoption by a homosexual couple

The law does not allow homosexual couples to adopt children, so if this happens, bypassing the law, the child is taken as if by a single parent. Thus, the situation is complicated from the very beginning for both the family in general and the child in particular. Despite public fears, according to statistical studies conducted in the United States, the likelihood of a child developing a homosexual orientation in this case does not exceed that of heterosexual couples. Nevertheless, the formation of a pattern of relationships undoubtedly occurs with some deformities. Besides, an adopted child’s sense of his or her own marginality will be much stronger, and there is less chance of receiving psychological help, as his or her parents will not be too inclined to address psychologists, both out of reluctance to declare their relationship and out of fear of a negative attitude and misunderstanding on the part of specialists. Such a family always lives quite isolated.
In any case, it should be absolutely clear that adoption is not a right, but a privilege given to people by society, based on the laws established in that society.

The post Who wants to adopt and Why? appeared first on Adoptinfo.net.