Talking with Young Children about Adoption Book

This book cleared my head and reminded me that adoption is not just about the pain of loss (and having to tell someone of their loss), but it is the beginning of a new life and healing for both parents and children.

"Adoption is a repair of trauma, not a trauma in itself (except for unsuitable placements); it is not a losing or a taking away of what never was, but a mutual giving and gaining of affirmative family relationship". (Viola Bernard)


"Every parent has the wish not to give the child pain. Lancing an abscess is the pediatrician's problem. In that situation the parent merely holds the child - and that is difficult enough. But we ourselves, we alone, must inflict whatever pain or distress the knowledge of being adopted will entail. When we first talk about it, we are presenting information that will eventually introduce difference and disappointment into our child's life - and extra burden that other parents do not have to deal with in this particular form. And knowing that how we deal with it will affect how the child will deal with it does not make the burden any lighter."
"When a child of this age announces her wish not to have been adopted, this is no different from the announcement that she wants to live in a blue house like Amy's, not a brown house; that she wants straight hair like her sister's, not curly hair. At the heart of wanting to be the same is the desire to belong, to be loved, to be safe, accepted, and not separated off. But to adoptive parents a child's announcement that she does not want to be adopted sounds infinitely more serious because adoption cannot be changed or made better, because of the parent's lingering feeling that for the child adoption is less desirable than being reared by birthparents, and because the parents anticipate her fuller understanding of adoption later on."


"It is possible to convey to a child that being placed for adoption is not incompatible with being wanted and loved by one's birthparents. Indeed, it is most often out of a sense of caring that a birthmother acknowledges that for a variety of reasons it might be better for her child to be adopted."


"This is one of the deep paradoxes of adoptive family life: that by acknowledging the losses and sharing in the pain, the family deepens the attachment in the present."


"Adoption means a confrontation - sometimes painfully early - with the difficulties of life. As parents we need to remain clear and unromantic, remembering that no life situation or story can be kept pristine, seamless. There will be deaths and losses, disillusionments, regrets, times of pain and sorrow - with or without the facts of adoption. As our children encounter some of the loss implicit in adoption, it is easy for the parents to lose sight of the fact that adoption is as much a positive recovery from loss as it is loss itself (Bernard 1974). We need to hold onto these dual realities of adoption, while our children grow into an appreciation of them after dealing with some of the loss."


"The theme of the orphan, severed from her roots, lost and then found, is archetypal and symbolic, appearing in the myths and religions of many countries. It speaks to all of us, not just to those who have literally been orphaned, of a state of being vulnerable and lost, longing for roots that cannot be found, dependent on the kindness of strangers. At some psychic level we are all orphans. Is it not likely that adoptees who pursue their own fate, searching for their origins, are involved in a metaphorical as well as a literal search? Is this searcher so different from those of us who seek the wellsprings of our being in meditation, who visit the hometowns of our grandparents for clues about ourselves, or who yearn to go to the places from which our families emigrated in the expectation that we will experience some solemn, joyful resonance with these places? On this level, our children's searching - for understanding, information, homecoming - is something to be respected. It goes far beyond us, and we are fortunate if we can witness some of it."