IV: Is Adoption Right for You?, Page 4

As a Pension Plan

A child is not a meal ticket. If you want financial security in your old age, buy a personal pension, invest in government bonds. Buy lottery tickets, even. But don’t adopt a child. Talk about high-risk investments! If you invested wisely all the money you would spend on raising a child (£90,000 according to a July 2000 estimate), you’d be much better provided for in your dotage.

To Replace a Child Who Has Died

If you have been unlucky enough to lose a child, you deserve every sympathy. You will probably have had some well-meaning fool say to you, “Well, you can always have another”. But you know that no child can substitute for another. Every child is unique. By all means, have another child of your own or adopt a child, but after you have been able to come to terms with your loss and are able to see a new child as himself, not as the reincarnation or continuation of your dead child. I would recommend if adopting that you take a child of the opposite sex and one that would not be near in age to the age your dead child would have been had he lived. I would also not adopt a baby, but one who already unambiguously has his own personality, interests and talents, a different hair type, colouration, etc. This will help you resist the temptation to mould the adopted child into the image of the dead one. Under no circumstances should you try to match the new one physically with your dead child or name the new one something similar.

As a Companion for an Only Child

This is a tricky one. You may have already had a child born to you and be unable to have any more, (or have adopted one child) but don’t want little Miriam or Choong Nam to be an only child. This in itself is fine, especially if your child wants a sibling. But that can only be a starting point; you cannot adopt simply in order to provide a companion to another child, any more than you can adopt to get a companion to an adult. You still have to want another child for his own sake, essentially independent of any additional, ulterior reason. Otherwise you are using the new child, as surely as if you had adopted him to try to save a shaky marriage.

If adopting as a companion to another child is your sole or real, underlying reason, what will you do if they wind up not hitting it off? There is no way of telling before placement, or even for some time afterwards, how a new child is going to fit in or how the family’s dynamics are going to change. Little Connor and his new brother may get along like a house on fire during the introductions and early weeks, only to become sworn enemies after the honeymoon period is over and the new child’s true personality begins to take over, his disabilities cease to be a novelty, and Connor realises just how much attention and other resources the new child is going to divert away from himself. It’s sad enough when siblings don’t get along, as I know from personal experience, but if the new child has no other reason for being in your family, what happens then? You can’t take him back to the shop for a refund. While you need the co-operation and enthusiasm of your existing children to adopt, the new child must be wanted for himself, and any special friendship with existing children is just an added plus.

We adopted our second child with the enthusiastic consent of our first child, although he had wanted another a boy rather than the girl who arrived. Our third turned out to be yet another girl, much to the disgust of our son, who by this time had become something of a bully towards his first sister. Our fourth we swore would be another son, and so he was, but after a smooth introduction and honeymoon period, the other three children became fully conscious of their new brother’s developmental and emotional problems, and two of them rejected him, including his older brother, who now bullied him. It took another five difficult years before they all began to act like the sibling group we had hoped for, with the bullying being replaced by good-natured teasing and co-operative play.

© Roger Ridley Fenton