9 Things I Wish I Knew Before Adopting - Weekend Wisdom

I spent some time this week thinking about what I’ve learned from my experiences as an adoptive parent and the wisdom of others in our community. In reflection, I've created a list of the things I wish I knew before adopting.

Resources:

• 8 Things I Wish I Had Known Before I Adopted
• Free courses to strengthen your family
• Therapeutic Parenting: Strategies & Solutions
• Beginner’s Guide to TBRI

Transcript

Please pardon any errors, this is an automated transcript.

- Hello, and welcome to Weekend Wisdom. I'm Tracy Whitney, content manager for
creatingafamily .org and your host for this episode. I wanted to welcome you and say
thank you for all the questions that you've sent in. We are still looking for more
questions and would love to receive your comments and questions at info
@creatingafamily .org. We use them to plan future weekend wisdom episodes.
We use them to keep educating ourselves. And it's a great way for you to reach out
and get some practical help for the issues that you face when raising your adoptive,
foster, or kinship care related family. Today's format is a little bit different.
I'm not answering one particular listener's question because I was searching through
our archives for something else and found an article that got me thinking about my
own adoption experiences with my two children and this particular article kind of
sparked some thoughts especially after I read my own comment on the original article
way back in 2015 when we were still brand new to parenting adopted children.
Mine were very little when they came home, and I was fresh into the learning curve
of parenting adopted children. And all I can say after reading that comment is, wow,
I didn't know what I didn't know. So that kind of started me down the path of
thinking about the things that I wish I had known before I adopted. And if you're
interested in the original article, you can go to our website, creating a website,
creatingafamily .org and search eight things I wish and it should pull up the
archived article for you. So I spent some time this week thinking about what I've
learned from my own experiences, what I learned from our online community, which if
you haven't joined yet is a fantastic place to hang out and learn from others, you
can find it at
slash creating a family. And I took what I have learned,
what I read in this article and kind of some of my gut reactions to my original
comment back in 2015 and created kind of a new updated list of nine things I wish
I knew before I adopted. So here we go, being a little vulnerable in this episode
more than maybe typical. Number one, I learned that adoption is not a fairytale,
and that's okay. And I wish I had known that going into adoption. Many parents,
including myself, go into their adoption experiences, expecting it to be a way to
complete their family, obviously starting a family if you're coming from infertility,
completing your family if you've already been raising children. And Many of us
expected it to be kind of this big, beautiful, redemptive story for everyone. But I
learned along the way that adoption is far more complicated than that. Love
absolutely is essential, but it is not enough. It does not erase grief,
it does not erase trauma, and it does not erase loss. So that was kind of a big
foundational starting point for me. The second thing I wish I knew before I adopted
is that kids grieve even if they've been adopted at birth. As I said before,
my children were young when we brought them home, but loss is a part of every
adoptive story. Even infants adopted at birth can feel and carry pre -verbal grief
and loss, and it might show up later in very unexpected ways. Knowing this can help
us adoptive parents, hold space for our children's feelings instead of taking their
feelings or the challenging behaviors that come out of those feelings helps us not
take it quite so personally. The third thing I wish that I had known before I
adopted is that attachment takes time and it's a two -way street. It's very common
to assume that bonding with your child will be instant, especially if you adopt a
baby or a very, very young child, and if you've done all the preparatory work, as
if somehow that will ensure a secure attachment. However, it's really important to
remember that building this relationship and the foundations for a secure attachment
is a very long process for the child and for the parent. Very often,
it also includes stops, starts, restarts, and detours. My favorite quote from that
original article that I referenced at the beginning of this episode is the statement
that attachment is not a straight line from the moment of meeting the child to the
magical moment when you are well and healthily attached. And I wish that I had had
access to that quote prior to bringing home my children. The fourth thing that I
wish I had known before I adopted is just how much trauma can change the brain and
affect behavior. Even if your child comes to you very young, the early neglect,
chaos, stress, prenatal, substance exposure, etc. that they experience before you
brought them home will impact their brain development. It often shows up in things
like big behaviors, big emotions, meltdowns, aggression, withdrawal, whatever,
and those things require some therapeutic parenting, not punishment. That leads me to
one of the other things that it took me probably the longest to learn, and that is
number five, traditional parenting techniques just don't usually work. It's hard to
admit, it's hard to swallow, it took me too long to learn this, but many of us in
the foster and relative caregiving community feel like we're failures because nothing
we do is working to change our child's behavior and they come to us at creating a
family for help what do I do my child's melting down etc they're frustrated that
sticker charts and timeouts that maybe worked with other children aren't working now
and they are baffled as I was about why small things turn into really big
reactions. What I had to learn is that our kids with trauma histories need
connection before correction. That's why we are such huge proponents of parenting
models like TBRI, the trust -based relational interventions, or therapeutic parenting.
These are things that can make a huge difference in how your child trusts you and
then allows you to correct them because they can trust you. Number six is that your
expectations will need to shift. Whether it's academic achievement, emotional
regulation, how quickly your child settles in, how you're settling in, how you feel
about the attachment process, it's really important to try and let go of any of
those unrealistic timelines or expectations that you may have. In the early days of
raising our girls, our former executive director Don Davenport used to say to me,
"lower your expectations and then lower them again." And it was such great advice
from somebody who'd been there done that. So I was very grateful to have that
guiding mantra to help me learn because it did take me a long time to learn it.
Number seven, I wish that I had known that I would need support and that it would
have to be adoption -sensitive support and adoption -sensitive or adoption -informed
training. Not all of the therapists, doctors, teachers, et cetera that we work with
as parents in the adoptive and foster and kinship circles really understand trauma.
Sometimes we feel like we're educating the educators. It's really important that you
seek out professionals to support your family that are trained in and experienced in,
and that's the key, not just trained but experienced also in things like attachment
and trauma and the adoption process and what adoption involves the multiple changing
of places to live and multiple caregivers and things like that. And it's also really
important to give yourself permission to switch providers if the one that you're
working with doesn't feel like a good fit for your family or for your child. So
the eighth thing, number eight that I wish I had known before I adopted,
and I will say the caveat to this is that I did know to some degree that this
was true. But I wish that I had known how deeply sibling dynamics will be affected.
Because we did parent children before we adopted, I had seen and experienced how
adding a child by birth changed the sibling dynamics. But I will say that adding
siblings by adoption kind of magnified the changes of sibling dynamics more than I
expected it to. If you already have children, that could be true for you as well.
Your birth orders may shift, jealousy and regression can happen. Plan ahead if you
can to support both your adopted child and the children already living in your home.
Planning ahead might look like getting someone to come and take your resident kids
or the kids already in your home out for a date at the park. Some special
attention with the resident children when maybe the adopted child is napping or when
the adopted child is at school, kind of get creative with how you do that, but
plan ahead any way you can to support both the adopted child in their transition to
your home and the resident children as they're facing the impacts of this new
sibling joining the family. And finally, the ninth thing that I wish I had known
before I adopted is how much growth and change I would see in myself as a parent,
as a woman, as just a regular human trying to navigate this planet.
It stretched me and continues to stretch me in ways that I never imagined. It
challenges my ideas about parenting, about identity, about justice, about mercy,
it deepens my compassion and my resilience has grown and it expanded my ability to
love. And I find that to be probably the biggest blessing of the changes that have
occurred in my life is I feel like it's expanded me not just as a mom,
not just as the one kind of running the household here, but As a human being,
I am thrilled and thankful for those changes. So there you have it,
nine things I wish I knew before I adopted, some good, some hard. Thank you to all
of the contributors to the original article that sparked this idea for me to get a
little vulnerable and share my thoughts on the matter. If you're listening and
nodding along or you're feeling overwhelmed by these nine things and what they're
doing to your life or what they might do to your life. Just know that you are not
alone. It happens to all of us who welcome children who've had difficult experiences
into our home. The adoption journey, the foster journey, full of surprises.
You don't have to navigate it alone. We don't want you to navigate it alone. And
in light of that, we want to extend an invitation to you to join our Facebook
community, facebook .com /groups /creatingafamily.
It's where I got my feet on the ground when we were getting ready to bring home
our adopted children. It's where so many of us learn and keep learning how to
listen to others that have lived experiences with these issues and it's where we
connect with each other so that the road does not feel lonely along the way. Of
course, our website, creatingafamily .org, has tons of resources to educate and support
you, including articles, podcasts, and free courses thanks to our partner at Jockey
Being Family. You can find those free courses on our site by searching bit .ly
/jbfsupport.
And you can also find the original link to the full article that kind of inspired
today's thoughts in our show notes. And thank you for joining me. I'm so grateful
that you spent some time with me today. I again would love it if you'd send your
questions about anything related to adoption, foster care or kinship care.
I'll dig through the archives of our expert -based resources and find an answer that
can strengthen your family. The questions should be sent to info @creatingthefamily .org
to join the queue of other questions that we have lined up for you. Thanks again
for listening. Leave a rating or review if you enjoyed today's episode. We always
love hearing from you and it boosts our algorithm to get this kind of information
into the hands of other listeners who are looking for the same kind of support and
strength for their family. Again, thanks for listening and have a great day.