How to Talk with Young Kids about Adoption - Weekend Wisdom

Question: My wife and I adopted a newborn baby almost 3 years ago and we could not be happier. Now that he is getting a little older, he is talking and starting to understand things. My question is how can we best normalize his adoption with him? I know it is better for kids to grow up with everyone being open with him and his adoption so it feels like now is a good time to start.  But I am not sure how to that with an almost 3-year-old.  For context, we do not have any contact with the birth family. We send updates and pictures to the agency, but they have not expressed interest in having contact with us. This always seemed like an avenue to start that conversation (you have a birth family and an adoptive family). Without that, I’m not sure how to start talking to him about adoption.  Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Resources:

• Talking about Adoption, Part 1: Talking with 0-5 Year Olds (Article)
• Talking with Kids about Adoption (Resource page)
• Talking with Kids about Birth Parents (Suggested Books for Young Kids)

Transcript

Please pardon any errors this is an automated transcript.

Welcome to this week's Weekend Wisdom. I'm Dawn Davenport. I am the host of all the
Creating a Family podcast, and today I'm the one who will be answering your Weekend
Wisdom question. You can send us your questions to info @creatingafamily .org,
and we will choose a question each week to answer. Just a reminder that We are now
on YouTube in video format. So check us out over there at the,
just look for creating a family and you will find us there on YouTube as well. All
right, let's jump right in. Today's question is on how to talk with young kids
about adoption. It's from John. He says, "My wife and I adopted a newborn baby
almost three years ago and we could not be happier. Now that he is getting a
little older, he is talking and starting to understand things. My question is, how
can we best normalize his adoption with him? I know it is better for kids to grow
up with everyone being open with him and his adoption so that it feels like now is
a good time to start, but I'm not sure how to do that with an almost three -year
-old. For context, we do not have any contact with his birth family. We send dates
and pictures to the agency, but they have not expressed interest in having contact
with us. This always seems like an avenue to start that conversation, i .e.,
you have a birth family and an adoptive family. Without that, I'm not sure how to
start talking with them about this. Any help would be greatly appreciated. Thank you
sincerely, John. All right, well, John, you were correct. There is no time like the
present to begin. In fact, we recommend the beginning in infancy. Infancy and early
tolerhood are, in my view, a gift to adoptive parents because there's there's no
question that at first this is it feels awkward. It's a new conversation. They're
new words that we have to kind of make fit together. We have to start feeling
comfortable with birth parents. They may have siblings. It feels awkward to us at
the beginning. And it really helps to start practicing with an infant or a very
young child and have a clue what you're saying. Now, your son is a little bit
older, but he's still likely to accept whatever you're saying without many questions
there. Keep in mind, his attention span is short. This is not something that is the
talk. Discussing adoption is something that happens over thousands of small
conversations throughout your child's life, thousands upon thousands, hopefully. So
you're just going to start by talking small and not trying to give him all the
information at once. You have to be open to the seemingly inconsequential things that
are happening in your life that are opportunities for you then to weave in the
conversation, looking for opportunities to bring in the conversation about adopting. If
you are fortunate and your child does ask questions and that is a fortunate thing
then answer just the question that he asked without trying to give a whole lot
more. If you are in the position where a child doesn't ask a lot of questions,
it's harder quite frankly you're having to look for ways to bring it up without the
child bringing it up. So first of all, children's books are your best friend.
There are so many great children's books and quite frankly, Creating a Family has a
list of some of the best and you can find it on our website, creatingafamily .org.
We break it out by age of the child and type of adoption. So if you're an infant
adoption and your child is a toddler, we've got books specifically for that age
group and then you should continue to move up. I And buying some, you want to have
them in your library, in your personal home library, but you can also go to the
library and check out some if your library has them, and have them out and rotate
them frequently into the reading. And then, not just reading, but then talk about
it, carry it further. If you're reading about a bear who was adopted, you could
say, "Well, that bear was adopted just like you." And if he's talking about the
bear's birth mom or the bunny's birth mom or whatever, you could say you have a
birth mom too. Talking about adoption means talking about his first parents. I
couldn't tell from your question, it seemed like you thought because you don't have
contact with the first parents, that means that you don't bring them up. I doubt
that's what you were meaning in the conversation. Of course, he has two sets of
parents, And that's part of what the talk about when you're discussing adoption,
which you're really talking about, is the fact that he has two families. He has a
family he was born to and he has a family he was adopted into. And both are
important in his life. So one of the things you have to figure out is, how do you
want to refer to his birth mom and his birth dad? Are you going to refer to her
or him by their first name? Are you going to call them Mama Susie and Daddy Paul,
whatever, you've got to come up with how you're going to refer to them. You may
have been content not to have contact, or to be, you feel like you're being
respectful to their request not to have contact. But for your son, you need to get
as much information as you can about his birth family. You need to be contacting
the agency. You may have already done this in the matching process, you need to get
as much information as you can to start weaving it into his story. He will be
asking questions most likely later in life, and even if he doesn't ask questions,
that does not mean he is not curious. So you need as much information as possible.
Go to the agency, ask for pictures, ask for background information. Another thing
that a lot of families do is go to Facebook and search and try to find pictures
of them. If you could find pregnancy pictures of when his birth mom was pregnant
with him, that would be helpful. You're having to go back now, I realize, but
hopefully you can do that and get some pictures. You may want to reach out to the
birth parent yourself. You say they haven't expressed an interest, but you could
express an interest in establishing a relationship or establishing contact. You will
want to book for your son. And a life book is basically a story of his life prior
to coming to you. It needs to include information about his birth family, his birth
grandparents, if you can, the time before he came to you, and then also include
your path to him. Mommy and daddy wanted a baby so bad, we wanted a child, we
wanted this, and this is, this is if you faced infertility, you could say we had
trouble, we weren't able to get pregnant. pregnant. So we weren't able to grow a
baby in mommy's tummy, but we wanted a baby so much, and this is what we did to
get to you. So a lifebook, it does not have their guides out there. We have guides
on creating a family .org. It can be as fancy as you want or as plain and simple
as you want. The lifebooks for my kids was pretty darn simple because I'm not a
crafty person in that sense. Your son will soon Everybody probably is now, and it's
certainly when he reaches three and four. We call it the adoption is cool stage,
and also everybody is adopted stage. He's going to want to, he may, depending on
his personality, but a lot of kids make the assumption that all kids are adopted,
or that being adopted makes me special, and they want to talk about it frequently,
talk about it to the world. All of that is okay, that is just part of the, and a
lot of us times we as adopted parents think Pat ourselves in the back and say,
"Boy, we've done a good job. This kid is, you know, we've done a good job of
explaining it. There are zero issues." And in fact, it's really honestly probably
just a stage he is going through. I will reiterate that a big mistake parents make,
in my opinion, is that they wait for the child to ask questions. And that is a
mistake across the board. Number one, some kids just aren't question askers. Number
two, we know from adult adoptees that often they feel confused. Are they sense our
discomfort and don't bring up questions because of that? Or they feel it's disloyal
to bring up questions about their birth family or about their adoption. The lack of
questions does not in any way indicate a lack of interest. It is up to us as
parents to bring up the conversation about adoption. It is not up to our kids to
bring it up to us first. All right, we have lots of resources at creatingafamily
.org about talking with your kids about adoption. One such resource is talking about
adoption part one, which is the zero to five year old age. And you can find that
just by going to our website, creatingafamily .org, or just by Googling. I hope this
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