An Important Statement on Adoption, by Adoptees

At http://www.thelostdaughters.com/2014/05/adoptee-reactions-to-reactive.html?m=1, Karen Pickell has posted a powerful rejoinder to the recent Huffington Post claims about adoptees and Reactive Attachment Disorder. In addition, this post includes an essay by Matthew Salesses in which he rewrites part of Tina Traster’s book, from the point of view of her lonely and puzzled adopted child. Both these statements point to the failure of adoption education to provide real insight into the nature of the adoptive process to all adoption candidates.

Adoption education, as required by the Hague Convention, has a lot to do. There are legal and financial issues to be considered, as well as general advice about childrearing that may be needed by adoptive parents who have no other children. All these things have to be covered in a small number of hours, and they have to be taught to people who are excited and emotional and just want to get the lessons over so they can get their children. It’s a bit like having a lecture about estate planning a few hours before your wedding.

Adoption education, if done well, can cover many points that adoptive parents will eventually need to know. If they don’t learn every bit of the legal and financial information, at least they can take home the fact that this information exists, and some idea about how to find it when they want it.

However, it’s a lot harder to teach the realities of emotional connection with a frightened young stranger. It’s especially hard because many adoptive parents—like other members of the public—believe they already know all about early emotional life. As the Zero to Three Benchmark Study some years ago showed, many adults know a good deal about young children’s motor and cognitive development, but most, including parents, know very little about social and emotional development. What’s more, much of what they “know” is wrong, which makes it especially difficult to correct their thinking. When you add to these misunderstandings  the fact that a “faux theory” of attachment is being provided by individuals like Nancy Thomas and Tina Traster, so that people come to adoption education committed to bizarre beliefs, it is not surprising that adoption education does not do the job we want it to do.

Here are some points that I would like to add to what Karen Pickell and Matthew Salesses had to say:

1. When you adopt a child, you are not “bringing your son or daughter home”.  Only in a legal fiction or in evangelical religious belief is that child at that point your son or daughter. He or she may become your son or daughter, and you may become the child’s mother or father, but this will take time and effort. You will have to get to know each other, and that work will be mostly your responsibility--  just as getting to know a child you have just given birth to is your adult responsibility. Your home is not the child’s home until it has been made so by good experiences, which you must try to provide (and by the way, this does not mean going to Disney World).
2. Children don’t “love” their parents as their parents love them. (Even adult children don’t love their elderly parents in the same way the parents care for them!) Even under the best circumstances, with unbroken relationships and constant kindness, infants, children, and adolescents are not capable of adult love. How much less should we expect  adopted children, with their experiences of disruption and anxiety and possibly far worse things, to love in the adult sense? Adult love surely means understanding of and consideration of the needs of the loved person, even putting those needs ahead of our own at times. This kind of love is what children need from adults, but cannot give to adults. To be able to love in an adult way means to be able to recognize needs that are different from our own and to be able to delay our own gratification when a loved one’s needs are more serious than ours.

Expressing love symbolically, by gazing into someone’s eyes, snuggling up to them, or saying “I love you” is not real love, and is not of much use unless two people share a symbol system. Being asked to do these things may be very uncomfortable if they are unfamiliar, as they will be to most adopted children. Demanding that a child make “eye contact” with you as an expression of love is putting your own needs first, not the child’s.

When reading about the concerns of adoptive parents whose children do not “show affection on the parent’s terms”, I’m often reminded of a case of a mother who was very angry with her child who accidentally scratched her face with his fingernails. She said, “he does it on purpose. He knows it hurts,’cause I said ‘ow’.”  This child was two weeks old. It’s obvious that this mother was expecting far more than her baby could give her--  but isn’t it also obvious that adoptive parents who expect instant love, displayed as specific behaviors, are also expecting far more than the children could give, even if they had been together since birth?

Tina Traster, in her New York Times blog, recently told how her adopted daughter said “you’re not my real mother” and Traster replied, “Oh yeah, then who is?” The daughter cried and complained that this was “so mean”, and indeed it was. Traster apparently does not know that even the most “attached” child says things like this, including “you’re not the boss of me”. Rather than accepting this as typical of a developmental stage, and perhaps suggesting a different way for the girl to state what she was feeling, Traster responded with the most devastating possible comeback: You don’t have a mother. If I abandon you, there is no one to care for you. Having had her needs quite predictably ignored, Traster got out the heavy artillery—because she thinks a child can love her as she wants to be loved.

3. Hating your child is part of parental love. There, I’ve said what most experienced parents know, but some adoptive parents don’t seem to understand. The intensity of parental love derives in part from its profound ambivalence. Naturally, we feel angry at people who seem to demand our constant attention and delays of our own gratification, and who only rarely give us the smile or other response that rewards us and keeps us marching on. But we are also fascinated by them, engrossed in them, and adore them. No wonder we can’t stop thinking and talking about them, but also, no wonder we have moments when we feel like attacking them. (Most of the time, we don’t attack, because we realize that the consequences of doing so are far worse than whatever is annoying us now, and actually we don’t want to hurt them.)  

It’s extremely hard to explain this fact of parenting life to people who have not had children, so it’s not surprising that adoption education doesn’t succeed in getting it across. But to understand this reality might help adoptive parents feel relatively comfortable with their own complex emotions, and save them from having to blame the “problem” on something wrong with the adopted child.

These comments are obviously only a bare beginning of what we ought to be telling adoptive parents when we attempt to educate them, and of course what we can possibly tell them is severely limited by time constraints. But if we were to focus on information of this kind, and perhaps limit the legal information to handouts, we might have a chance at fighting the harm done by people like Traster and Thomas.