How To Help a Child If the Birth Mom Hated Being Pregnant With Them? - Weekend Wisdom

Question: I see that you have information regarding prenatal substance exposure. Is there information regarding biological mothers that hate their pregnancy or their baby, but carry it to full term and put it up for adoption? Are there resources that would address the emotional impact on the baby?

Resources:

• Understanding the Birth Mom/Parent's Experience
• Talking with Kids About Adoption
• Raising a Child with Prenatal Substance Exposure

Transcript

Please pardon any errors, this is an automated transcript.
Welcome everyone to Weekend Wisdom by Creating a Family. Creating a Family,
for those of you who don't know, is a national support and training non -profit for
foster, adoptive and kinship families. We have two podcasts. We have a long -form
podcast where we interview an expert or someone with lived experience that drops once
a week. It's usually around an hour and that's been going on for 17 years.
So we have a huge library of experts in this field. I truly think we've probably
covered every topic you could possibly ever want information on and I highly
recommend it. However, this podcast is not that. This podcast is where we answer
your questions once a week on the weekends. Hence the name. We take your questions
and we answer them one question per episode. We need your questions,
so send them to us at info @creatingafamily .org. Without further ado,
I'm going to jump into this week's question. It's from Peter. He says, "I see that
you have information regarding prenatal substance exposure. Is there information
regarding biological mothers that hate their pregnancy or their baby, but carry it to
full term and put it up for adoption. Are there resources that would address the
emotional impact on the baby? Peter, that's a hard question.
First, my gut feeling is that there really aren't too many moms who hate the baby.
I mean, sure, there are some people who are pregnant who wish they weren't for any
number of reasons. But from my experience, they separate the fact that they wish
they weren't pregnant from the baby itself. So I wouldn't go into adoption thinking
that this is common at all. And I wouldn't assume that a mom felt this way just
because she decided to place her baby for adoption or didn't bond with the baby
right after birth. Now it's true that it's highly stressful to be considering making
an adoption plan for a baby while pregnant. And most researchers I've talked to
acknowledge that a high stress pregnancy could impact the baby later in life both
emotionally and physically, but it's hard to tease this out from all the other
things in the mix when you're studying adoptive people compared to non -adoptive
people. I would also imagine that a woman who strongly doesn't want to be pregnant
would be less likely to focus on nutrition that would benefit the baby and on
prenatal care, and the absence of both of these could impact the child later in
life as well. And I would also think that a birth mom who has such strong feelings
towards her pregnancy and possibly even towards the baby would be less likely to
enter into a healthy open adoption relationship. And that too can impact a child
emotionally. But you ask for resources. I don't know of resources specifically to
helping a child whose birth mother hated the fetus for the baby. But I acknowledge
that this could affect the child. However, creating family has lots of resources to
help you raising a child with tough beginnings, including a number of resources,
including articles, tip sheets, podcasts, and things like that, for how to help your
child who is conceived by rape or incest, which could be close to what you are
asking. Also, we have lots of resources on helping kids whose birth parents struggle
with substance abuse disorder, and you can find all of those resources by searching
at creatingafamily .org. And before you go, I wanted to tell you about creating a
family's interactive training and support curriculum for foster, adoptive and kinship
parents. It is a curriculum, we currently have 25 curriculum on topics that are
directly relevant to parenting, foster, adoptive and kinship kids. You can get more
information at parentsupportgroups .org. The training could be used for support groups.
It could be also just used for small group trainings. Again, parentsupportgroups .org.
And thanks for listening to this week's Week in Wisdom. If you liked it, please
tell a friend to subscribe to the creatingafamily .org podcast. And I will see you
next week.