Building Connections with Your Adopted Child
Adoption expert and co-editor of Adoption Parenting: Creating a Toolbox, Building Connections, Jean MacLeod, explains how parental awareness can help parents better understand their adopted children.
Commitment: Adoption Parenting: Creating a Toolbox, Building Connections is an informative and thorough book which offers a practical, hands-on approach to parenting an adopted child. What does “creating a toolbox” entail?
Jean MacLeod: The Toolbox: Parental Awareness. This involves education and preparation - understanding what an adopted child has lost or experienced, in order to proactively parent to fill the gaps. A child may be physically, mentally or emotionally affected by trauma, neglect or abuse, and parents must to be able to recognize when their child needs extra parenting, or professional expertise.
Useful tools: Knowledge of the Seven Core Issues in Adoption (Loss, Rejection, Shame, Grief, Identity, Intimacy, Control - Silverstein & Kaplan, 1982) - AND the practical, everyday application of these tools! See AdoptionToolbox.com for user details.
Commitment: Adoption Parenting covers so many areas that, reading it, one realizes that there are different issues associated with each situation. For example, the issues facing parents who adopt an infant are not necessarily the same issues facing parents who adopt a preschooler, yet there may be some overlap. Where should an adoptive parent start?
Jean: I really think there are ‘universals’ in parenting an adopted child, whether he or she is a baby, toddler or an older adoptee. For instance, loss issues can crop up at any age. The Seven Core Issues are really an adoptive parent’s best-friend…understanding what lies beneath our children’s behavior(s) allows us to address adoption-related issues in ways that promote parent-child attachment.
Commitment: In past generations, the trend was to not discuss a child's adoption, even in the case of trans-racial adoptions. How was the detrimental to families?
Jean: When a sensitive topic is avoided or not talked about it is often perceived as ‘secret’ or ‘shameful’. Secrets make it impossible to have honest family relationships, and shame attacks an adoptee’s self-worth (and true parent-child intimacy). Openly and empathically acknowledging tough subjects actually helps to bring a family closer together.
Commitment: In Adoption Parenting, it is noted that adoptive parents are parenting from loss. What does that mean and how can parents best deal with that loss?
Jean: Parenting from loss means we work to understand and address the losses our children may have experienced through abandonment and adoption. Our adopted children lost their birthparents and biological siblings, and their extended family of aunts, uncles and grandparents. Our internationally adopted children lost their birth country, birth culture, racial identity and language. Some of our daughters and sons lost orphanage caretakers that they cared about; others lost foster families that they had loved and lived with since birth.
Many of our children were simply never loved. A huge childhood loss!
How can parents deal with loss? We need to be brave and teach ourselves and our children to openly recognize our feelings related to loss. Kids need to be taught to examine their feelings and to be able to decide if loss is unfairly over-influencing an emotional reaction. Adoption loss can’t be eradicated, but both parents and kids can learn to recognize it, own it, channel it and decide on how to react to it! And importantly: focusing on adoption-related loss does not equate with fixating on unhappiness; loss doesn't go away, but it can become a dimension of joyful living, rather than a sad view of life.
Commitment: Do adoptive parents also experience loss?
Jean: In “parenting from loss”, we also acknowledge our own losses, because what we have dealt with (or NOT dealt with) will affect our ability to meet our child’s emotional neediness. Some of us have come to adoption via miscarriage or infertility. A large number of us lost out on parenting our adopted children in their infancies or early childhoods. Processing our own ‘sad’ feelings will allow us to better support our kids who may be displaying grief / loss / fear.
Commitment: How does adoption affect a child's identity?
Jean: “Who Am I?” is a very big question! An identity is built on a foundation of love, trust, previous knowledge, memories, tradition, shared ethnicity and family connection. If the entire foundation is missing for an adopted child, there is nothing to build on…it is tough to grow up and go forward without a strong base of self-knowledge. Parents can help provide a foundation by consciously employing stories, rituals and new family traditions. An adoptee’s birth culture can be explored, and biological relatives openly discussed.
Commitment: What are some of the tools that can help foster the bond between and adopted child and his parents?
Jean: My two favorite tools to foster bonding both help promote discussion and parent-child attunement, and are easy and fun:
Play - Child’s play may be simple, but playing for a child’s love, playing for keeps, is both imperative and purposeful. Nothing should be as satisfying to your son or daughter as your touch, your eyes, and your smile. One-on-one play between a parent and child reinforces the normal, healthy pattern of playful attachment that occurs naturally between a parent and a biological baby or toddler, and it re-teaches an adopted child the magical give-and-take of a reciprocal relationship. Playful intimacy teaches basic trust with disarming silliness, and promotes re-parenting of a young child through a nurturing “babyhood” he or she may never have had. Gymboree, swimming, make-believe - anything interactive and engaging!
Children’s Literature - books can provide the tools to facilitate stories that promote parent-child attunement. Tools are not always easy to use… reading a story to a child is fun; reading a story that evokes emotion, shared conversation and empathy, is a little harder. The beauty of using narratives to adoption-parent is that it is already part of what most of us normally do with our children. It is just done consciously with an extra level of awareness, and with an end result in mind. Storybooks can assist children who are navigating a new environment. They can be used to begin a conversation or open a topic, and can be personalized to a child’s circumstances. Books are user-friendly and non-threatening, and can help a parent find the words that unlock shared feelings.
Commitment: How can siblings help build family attachment?
Jean: Children who are adopted from an institution may have no concept of family, of what parents are supposed to do, or what exactly siblings are for. Children adopted from a foster home may enter a new family while grieving their foster family terribly, and rejecting everyone else in sight. Helping older siblings view your family (and themselves) from the position of the transplanted adoptee will give them a base for patience and compassion when dealing with their new sister or brother.
If your older children were also adopted, watching a parent teach the new child to love and trust may create a better understanding of their own babyhood. Be prepared to talk about what all babies need and why adoption happens. Listen to what isn’t being said when your older child asks you questions, and be sure to address underlying feelings.
Teaching your older children that helping the new baby or toddler to fall in love with you is your parent-job, and that they can promote this happening with helper-jobs of their own, is one way to pull them into the new child’s bonding process. The Team Family approach can work very well; it is extraordinary what big sisters and brothers can do to help once they are informed about the issues, understand what you are trying to accomplish, and are given an action blueprint.
Commitment: Where can adoptive parents, or those thinking of becoming adoptive parents, get more information on adoptive parenting?
Jean: Adoption Toolbox www.adoptiontoolbox.com
A 4ever Family www.a4everfamily.org
The Center for Adoption Support & Education (C.A.S.E) www.adoptionsupport.org
Adoption Learning Partners www.adoptionlearningpartners.org (fee-based courses)
Jean MacLeod, author of "At Home in This World" and contributing co-editor of "Adoption Parenting: Creating a Toolbox, Building Connections", is a free-lance writer who has been published in Adoptive Families Magazine, Adoption TODAY Magazine and in the adoption essay books "Passage to the Heart" and "Finding Happiness".
Jean has presented her workshops at the Colorado Heritage Camps, the Midwest Adoption Conference, the KAAN Conference, and for adoption support groups across the USA, Canada and England. She is the mother of three daughters, two of whom were adopted from China.
To purchase Adoption Parenting: Creating a Toolbox, Building Connections, click here.
