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Question: I’m a foster-to-adopt mom. I have 3 children. Two have already been adopted, and we are in the process of adopting one. My oldest son, who is 5 years old and turning 6 in Aug, had parental visits, but they were terminated when the parental rights were terminated, and he no longer sees them. It's been a year since the last visit. My daughter never had visits and doesn’t see her bio family, but I send the family a twice-a-year email with photos and updates. My current foster child, who is 4 years old, has once-a-week phone calls with his mom, who is in prison. My 5-year-old son is really struggling with seeing his younger brother getting phone calls with his bio Mom since he no longer sees his bio parents, and it’s hard for him to understand why his brother talks to his mom, but he does not. Each one of my child's stories is very different, but my oldest one notices the differences and doesn't understand why they're in the same family but have different relationships with past foster families and biological parents. How do I navigate this as he gets older?
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- Welcome to Week in Wisdom by Creating a Family. This is our short podcast. We have a longer one where we interview an expert every week, but this is our shorter one where we answer your questions.
We try to spend five or so minutes, maybe a little longer answering your questions. So please send us your questions. You can send them to info @creatingathamily .org.
Today's question is as follows. I'm a foster to adopt mom. I have three children. Two have already been adopted, and one, we are in the process of adopting. My oldest son,
who is five years old and turning six in August, had his parental visits, but they were terminated when the parental rights were terminated, and he no longer sees them.
It's been a year since the last visit. My daughter never had visits and doesn't see her bio family, but I send twice a month emails to them with photos and updates.
And my current foster child, who is four years old, has a once a week phone call with his mom who is in prison. My five -year -old son is really struggling with seeing his younger brother getting phone calls with his bio mom,
since he no longer sees his bio parents, and it's hard for him to understand why his brother talks to his mom, but he does not. Each one of my child's stories are very different,
but my oldest one notices the differences and doesn't understand why they're in the same family but have different relationships with past foster families and bio -parents.
How do I navigate this as he gets older? Well, thank you so much for asking this question because this is such a common occurrence in adoptive families with more than one child.
I think I would view this on two levels. One, and this is certainly the more surface one, is that he sees his brother getting something that he isn't. And this sometimes comes up when one birth family or former foster family brings or sends gifts and the other birth family doesn't.
Or one birth or former foster family takes the child someplace fun and the other has no contact. However, I suspect that this is a deeper issue for your son. It's not just that my brother has something I don't.
It sounds the more like he is struggling with the loss of contact with his birth family. And this is hard. It's easy for us parents to think and to even know that our kids are better off in many ways not being raised by their birth family.
And on an objective level, that may be true. But many, actually perhaps most, of our kids want a connection with their birth family. And this is a case even if they never knew them.
But your son knew his birth family and he loved them, regardless of how flawed they may be or how much they struggled to parent him well. And now they're gone. And of course he's struggling.
So here are a couple of suggestions. One, talk with your son about his feelings about his birth family. So often our kids, even as young as five or six, are afraid to bring up their birth families because they sense that we parents are uncomfortable with these conversations.
Even at this young age, they may start feeling the divided loyalties between wanting contact with their birth family and not wanting to hurt our feelings. So I am so glad that you were open to discussing this with him and recognizing his struggles even at this young age.
So second suggestion, can you reestablish some type of contact with his birth parents? Now that he has adopted it to you, not the child welfare agency, they get to decide about contact and what degree of openness is in your son's best interest.
So you can start by sending letters, texts, or emails, but make sure your son is involved in these more remote contacts. So, you know, things like have him draw a picture that you can scan and send to his birth family or have him dictate a greeting for you to send.
And then you can gradually change the level of contact that works for your son and for his birth family. And this is now your decision and there are ways that you can go about doing this at this time if you think that's in his best interest.
Also, is there someone else in this biological family that you can connect with? Grandparents, aunts, uncles, somebody like that. Even if his birth parents themselves are not somebody either that you feel is in his best interest to connect with or you have no way to reach them,
there may be somebody else in his family that can provide that connection for him. And while it's not nearly as good, you may be able to collect pictures of his birth parents off of social media. You may be able to find even pictures from the past that include your son and ask him if he would like to keep one of these pictures in a frame in his room or something along those lines.
Bottom line, your son is telling you through his behaviors that he needs and wants a connection to his biological family. So see what you could do to find some type of connection.
And also, I just want to say I am so glad you're addressing it and not trying to diminish his pain. As parents, we want to do everything our kids need. We want to provide everything. We want to be everything that they need.
And it can sometimes feel like an insult that our kids want or need more, that they want or need their birth family. And I sense from your message that you realize this, but this doesn't in any way mean that your son doesn't need and want you to.
So thank you so much. And just note that we have addressed at creating a family. This is a topic that we have addressed and here are two articles that have been written.
One, open adoption and the holidays. This issue comes up not infrequently around the holidays and that article discusses handling different forms of connection and openness and presence and things like that that come with different birth families.
And the second one is Five tips for navigating sticky situations with birth parents, and we discussed that there, and I think that might also help give you some perspective. You can just search on our site,
creatingafamily .org, or you could just Google search, creating a family, and then those titles, and you should be able to get them. I hope this has helped. Before you leave, let me remind you that we have 12 free courses provided to us by the Jockey Being Family Foundation.
We truly appreciate Jockey's support. These courses are one hour. They're self -paced. They come with their certificate of completion. You can find them at bit .ly /jbfsupport.
That's B -I -T dot L -Y slash J -B -F support. Thank you for listening to this week's Weekend Wisdom. If you liked it, Please tell a friend to subscribe to TheCreatingAFamily .org podcast.
See you next week.
