XVI. After the Adoption Order, Page 2

Telling Your Child

Way back in the section Can You Be Honest with Your Child? I talked about telling your child about her adoption, and how it was an absolute necessity that you do it so that it was a natural and happy part of life.

Introducing the Subject to Your Child

Adoption has been a favourite theme in literature for centuries, and in the past few years there has been an explosion in good children’s books, including a considerable number which can be used to introduce the subject (especially if you have been putting it off) or to act as springboards for discussion. There are books suitable for all ages and many of them are based on particular features of family life and adoption which may be specially relevant to your child’s situation. Some of the books are direct in their approach, while others treat the subject as a side issue or obliquely. Adoption is such a basic feature of human society that it also crops up in the folk tales of most cultures. Your local library and bookstore should be able to help find appropriate books, and there are specialised suppliers, such as Letterbox Library and adoption-related sites on the Internet which can supply excellent books by mail order or on-line. Adoption Today carries reviews of current publications.

Older children will remember a previous family and quite possibly some of the former life, good and bad. They will have had structured conversations with social workers and foster carers. This does not mean that the job is done by the time you get them; there are years ahead when children, whenever they were adopted, will have questions and they will need answers.

Your child may not bring up adoption. If you yourselves are open and comfortable with it that will help her feel she can discuss it. But even then, some children are simply not very interested. If it doesn’t come up, you should take the opportunity occasionally to bring it up yourself. Don’t sit down and have a serious “Birds and Bees”-type session. Work it into the conversation occasionally, perhaps when adoption is in the news for some reason. The idea is to keep it natural and part of your life as a family, not in a separate department.

If you find you have left it too long and your child still doesn’t know she was adopted, you need to contact your social worker or a post-adoption counselling service right away and get help in putting this right. The longer you leave it the more difficult it will be for you, and the more traumatic it could be for your child. There are often day courses run by various post-adoption services on how to tell your child about her adoption.

Bullying

Knowing the facts about her adoption isn’t going to stop some children or even adults from asking insensitive or intentionally cruel questions like: “What does it feel like to know your real mother didn’t want you?” There is nothing we can do to prevent that kind of remark, only try to “vaccinate” our children beforehand with love and deal with the incidents as they crop up with more love and sympathetic explanations of the facts. We can also confront the culprit’s parents and the school with our anger and concern, just as we would with any other form of bullying.

Telling Your Child about a Difficult Past History

Eventually your child will want and need to know the full details of her adoption. Some of them may be very painful and difficult to tell. There is almost always a way to tell even the most tragic details in a way which makes them easier to bear, even regarding abuse, neglect, or other inadequate parenting. Remember that a large part of a child’s self-image is derived from her parents. A child who is told that her parents were no-goods or wicked will take that as part of her own identity. Much better to help the child understand the circumstances which made good parenting impossible, that people are not always in control of their actions and often regret them, and that some parents cannot cope with some situations (such as children born with handicaps), rather than say baldly — and probably without doing them real justice — that the birth parents were incompetent, violent, abusive or rejecting, even if that is how it seems from our perspective.

Older children may remember a great deal about their past, or in some cases they may repress bad memories or idealise the past, even viewing aspects of their parents’ behaviour which were dangerous or dysfunctional as fun and exciting, instead of boring, like their new life! They may long for the all-night parties, the non-stop violent or pornographic videos, the parental collusion at bunking off school or shoplifting. In these cases it can be even harder to help the child remember and understand the truth about the past without damaging his basic image of his birth family, but that’s part of the job of the adoptive parent. You may be able to get help from professionals or other, more experienced parents.

Life Story Work

Some of this telling work which older children will have done with professionals can be called life story work. It is usually based on the child’s Life Story Book, which will contain photos, drawings, stories, documents, etc., put together by the professional, the foster family and the child, working together. The book can be a help in discussing the past in a warm, secure setting, helping the child come to terms with the circumstances of his past and with the need for a new family. Life story work does not stop when a child is placed for adoption, but simply enters a new phase. For a baby placement, the adoptive family can begin to compile the book, with photos of the child and foster family and the introduction period. If available it can also include photos of previous homes, birth family members, other important people in the child’s life, school reports, birth and adoption certificates, letters, birthday cards, etc.

Your child will go back again and again to her Life Story Book. Each time she will have her relationship with you reinforced and each time she will gain a little more understanding about herself and her past. It is a gradual and long-term process. There are a number of specialised publications to help you if you need ideas, and your social worker or a post-adoption counsellor can also help if you are in difficulties or either you or your child find some aspects very painful.

Adoption Keepsakes

Some families have adoption boxes, with space for the Life Story Book and other mementoes: first shoes, hospital name tag, birth family photos, maybe a gift from the birth family. These things may not mean a lot to the child at certain stages, but there will come other times of curiosity or sadness, when the information and objects will be very important.

Other documentation, all documentation, must be kept: social work reports on the family, medical reports, minutes of meetings, court papers, notes you took during conversations with the social workers, newspaper reports, baby progress charts, everything. Even if you have returned the originals to their source, keep photocopies. This supplementary documentation is best kept with your other household papers, or even in a bank safe deposit box, and not in the Life Story Book. You never know what will come in handy later if the child wants to trace his birth family, or what will have emotional significance for him. Goodness knows, there is likely to be little enough. The entire official documentation and letters between foster and birth families and ourselves, on all our children takes up less than six inches of filing cabinet space.

In some cases you will need to keep papers and mementoes safe away from the child or at least keep the originals as a secure back-up. Some children go through destructive or rejecting phases and might destroy photos or papers in a fit of rage if they are available, and live to regret this. Better to keep them out of harm’s way, but not secret. Some documents (things like newspaper reports about a parent’s trial for abuse) will be biased, and I would not show them to a child, any more than I would expose Black children to racist literature. Such documents (although not the fact of abuse, carefully explained) should be held back until the child is grown up and emotionally and intellectually able to deal with that kind of document.

Our children each come from different ethnic backgrounds. For each one we have commissioned a furniture-maker to make a box from woods native to their countries of origin, which we use to store official documents, baby clothes, cards and other mementoes. They keep the items safe and are beautiful objects in themselves.

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