Creating a Family: Talk about Adoption, Foster & Kinship Care

How to Normalize Adoption for the Child? - Weekend Wisdom

Creating a Family Season 19 Episode 51

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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 start talking to him about this.  Any help would be greatly appreciated. 

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Welcome to this week's We Can Wisdom by Creating a Family. We Can Wisdom is when
we answer your questions. So please send us your questions because we want your
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us answer your questions...
analyze his adoption with him. I know it's 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 do that with an almost three -year -old. For
context, we do not have any contact with his 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 the conversation. You know, you have
a birth family and an adoptive family. But without that, I'm not sure how to start
talking with him about this. Any help would be greatly appreciated. Thank you. Well,
John, you're right. Now is the perfect time to start this conversation. In fact, for
other listeners, I would say we really recommend that you start from the moment you
bring the child home, not that the baby is going to be understanding anything you
say, but you're getting more comfortable with the conversation. You're getting more
comfortable with the words, you're getting more comfortable with the story and all.
So we really recommend starting the conversation even earlier. But nevertheless, this
is still a great time and I'm glad you're asking him. Needless to say, I have a
lot of suggestions. So to answer your questions, first about how to begin, creating
a family has a lot of resources on this exact topic, how to talk with your kids
at different ages about adoption. Two of my favorites are talking about adoption part
one, which is zero to age five, and then talking about adoption part two, which is
six to twelve -year -olds. One thing to note is that, of course, kids process
adoption different ways at different stages, if that makes sense. You are in the
adoption is cool or adoption is completely normal stage. Kids take everything for
granted. In fact, it wouldn't surprise me at all. Many kids just assume that
everybody has adopted. This is especially the case if he is your only child and you
don't have a child by birth. Then they just assume everybody is. That will not
last. You shouldn't expect it to, but that's the stage that your son is likely to
be in. Now, five tips. The first tip and probably the most important is that
children's books are your friend. Your son is at the Golden Age Forum because there
are so many options, so many picture books. You should have some of these in your
library. Creating a family has the best that I have seen. I know I'm bragging,
but it's just the truth. We have a list of books, adoption books broken out by
type of adoption and age of the child. You should go through and we've written
reviews for all of them. And you should go through and pick out some that you want
to, you should own them. They should be part, you know, sitting with the stack of
all the other books you have. They should be sitting right there and you should
pull them out to the top and continue to and read them. You can also go to the
library. Bigger libraries usually have a pretty good selection as well. Books make it
easy for you. They do all the work for you for the most part. They have a huge
range from books that talk about the specific types of adoption, books that talk
about birth parents, and you should also include books that talk about all the
different ways that families are made and that all families are good, regardless of
how they are made. We have a lot of books like that as well. Include those in
your rotation. Many of the books, or at least some of the books I should say, have
a section for parents, And that's always helpful to read that. They will give you
also suggestions for how to raise the conversation with your child. So books,
children's books, you couldn't do better. My second tip is to make sure you're
talking about birth parents. You were saying in your question that, well, since we
don't have contact, that's not an avenue in. We can't really say, well, you've got
two families, but in fact, he does have two families. He has a birth family, even
though he doesn't have contact, and he has his adoptive family, the family that is
raised.
The problem is when we don't talk about birth parents, kids pick up on that
hesitancy and they begin to feel that it's a topic that we are uncomfortable with
because quite frankly sometimes it is and they're picking up accurately our discomfort
or even if you're totally comfortable and you're not talking about it then they
don't know that it's okay to talk about and that leads to feelings of disloyalty
like I'm thinking about my birth parents and does that make me bad? So you got
guilt thrown in there or I really wonder about my birth parents but I don't wanna
hurt my parents' feelings so I'm not going to say anything. Those are not things
that any child should have to deal with and it's up to us as parents to broach
the subject because our kids are not going to and they're afraid of hurting or
potentially afraid of hurting our feelings. So you have to start talking about his
birth parents. And there are books that will help you do that. You'll see those at
our list of books. My third suggestion is make sure you continue to talk about
adoption as he ages. Honestly, in Mike's personal experience, it got harder because
when they're little, you're reading to them. And I love children's literature anyway.
So you're sitting there reading and the books are great. And they cover a whole
host of different topics. But at some point they outgrow us reading to them.
My first point is that don't let that happen sooner than it needs to. There are a
lot of good older kid books, chapter books and things that have adoption themes to
them. They're not usually specific that adoption is the primary thing, although there
are some. But there's lots of books, great books, that adoption is part of, it's
just a part of the book. I loved and continued to read to my children. We moved
into chapter books, and they were reading on their own easily, but we still had a
chapter book we were reading. And I would encourage you to try to, even if that
wasn't something you were thinking about doing, I number one, it's a great way to
bond and connect with your kids. But second, it's a way to continue to bring
adoption into a natural way into the conversation. There are other ways, TV shows,
something that's happening or whatever that you could continue, you have to look for
opportunities. In my experience, it became harder because I had to be more
intentional. But my tip to you is to make it intentional because it's easy to say
I've already had the conversation. But as with all big conversations with kids, it's
not one conversation. It's a series of many conversations. and with each conversation
as they grow their understanding changes and their processing of adoption changes.
At some point your son is not going to be adoptionist school stage. He's going to
be moving into the "I wonder why my birth parents didn't keep me" stage. You've got
to be talking with him at that stage so that you have input to help him
understand, even if you can't answer 100 % of his questions, you want to be able to
have input there. Also, I can't tell you the number of parents who say, "Well, I'm
here to answer his questions. If he has questions, he'll ask them." That is
absolutely not true. First of all, you may have a kid who isn't a question asker.
That I had one just didn't ask a lot of questions. That doesn't mean that they
aren't asking questions, they aren't thinking about it. In fact, I guarantee they're
thinking about it. And also, some kids don't ask questions because they're afraid
that it's going to hurt our feelings or it's going to upset us by asking questions.
And then also, oftentimes they don't know the questions to ask. You don't know what
you don't know and you don't know it. So they won't know the questions to ask. It
is our job as a parent to continue to bring this up. And sometimes the conversation
goes flat. You can say, "Do you ever think about your birth parents on your
birthday or something? Do you ever think about your birth It's I think about your
birth parents sometimes in your birthday and your kid may go. No, but they may it
can initiate a discussion It is not a failure if your kid It doesn't engage in the
discussion because you've sent the message that I'm open for this conversation And
when they are ready to talk they will have less hesitancy to come to you I think
in terms of it. I throw the ball they can choose to catch it or not So our third
tip continued to talk about adoption as the ages Fourth tip, be around other
families who are created by adoption. There are lots of opportunities. Maybe your
agency has, if it's a local agency, has gatherings. There may be a local adoption
support group. You may have to drive to a nearby larger town to find that. Or you
can just keep your eye out for other families who have children of similar ages.
They're everywhere and create your own gathering. We're going to have a cookout
because, and other parents will understand, I want my kid to see that there are
lots of families formed by adoption. So, invite them over and you will get to know
the parents. But more importantly, your children see that adoption is just one of
the many ways that families are formed. And our fifth tip, or my fifth tip, is to
create a lifebook for your child. Creating a Family has lots of resources on how to
do it. Just go to our website, creatingafamily .org, and in the search bar, type in
lifebooks. We've got very specific examples on how to do it. But one of the things
you need to include in a lifebook is information about their birth parents. And it's
harder if you don't have contact. And when you include information, it would be
really helpful if you can include pictures, which means that you may need to go
through the agency and ask and explain. I'm making a lifebook. We anticipate that
our son will have questions. It would like to see pictures. Can you send them? I
know plenty of parents who have had to go onto social media and find the birth
parents there and see if they can find pictures, but that's an important part of a
lifebook for your son. John, this is a great question. As you could tell, I really
enjoyed answering it. I went a little long this time, But it was an important
question. It's also a great question. And I'm so glad you and your wife are happy
as clams. I'm sure your son is as well. And I wish you the best of luck with
this. And before everybody leaves, let me remind you that we could really use a
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