Ten Things Adoptive Parents Need to Know
by Sara Lively, M.S.Ed.
The following principles capture the most significant challenges and responsibilities of the adoption journey – whether you’re deciding to adopt, waiting for your child, or parenting your child. Once you come to understand and live by these principles, both you and your child will thrive.
- Accept the fact that parenting the adopted child is different from parenting the biological child. Learn how and why this is so.
- Especially if you have been through fertility treatment, shift from the patient- or parent-centered process to the child-centered process that characterizes adoption. This process is about finding a family for a child, not about finding a child for a family.
- Spend as much time and energy as you need to grieve the loss or dream of your biological child. When you can articulate clearly how you did so, you might be ready to move on.
- Embrace your child’s birth family, whether or not you and your child know them, as they are very important figures in the development of your child’s identity. Do not mistake your child’s normal interest in the birth family as a rejection of you.
- Acknowledge that loss is the most significant core issue for all three members of the adoption triad. Become willing and able to talk openly with your child about loss.
- Expect to adjust your expectations over and over again. You’ll have relatively little control over the adoption process, a sort of training ground that leaves you open to your child’s developing traits instead of making assumptions about them.
- Learn deeply and fully about the adoption process and adoptive parenting, and become an informed consumer of pre- and post-adoption services.
- Establish support systems and resources for yourself and your child early on. Expose your child not just to the adoption community, but to all kinds of diverse families such as same sex parents, single parents, bi- and multi-racial families.
- Work on your marriage or relationship (if you’re in one) before, during, and after the adoption. Expect that you and your partner will have different perspectives about adoption and parenting, and that the current issues between you will be exacerbated by the stresses of fertility treatment, adopting and parenting.
- Recognize that adoption requires the profound reshaping of roles and identity, requiring (among other things) that you accept the failure to reproduce biologically; realign your relationships with your partner and extended family to accept the non-biological child; deal with community attitudes; mourn the loss of the genetic link; and achieve the sense of entitlement to adoptive parenting.
Copyright by Sara Lively, 2007. All rights reserved.