Telling

I totally agree with flutterby. In the past I have read that we are supposed to talk about adoption every day. I do not agree. The child knows they are adopted so it will not be a shock to come back and bite them when they are older. To be constantly reminding them must surely make them feel insecure? They deserve to be allowed to get on with life. Our daughter knows who she is and knows why she and her siblings have been separated and are being brought up by different parents. In the early days we talked about it as a matter of fact, she has grown up with it and knows no difference.

I definitely don't think you are doing anything wrong Donatella, and agree about following kids' natural curiosity. Your children will surely ask more when they want to know, whatever the prompt might be.....?

I remember at a talk when in prep group, an adoptee said that her mum told her about her BM, but forgot to mention that BM couldn't come back and 'reclaim' the child...so as a child, the adoptee often felt worried when playing in the garden as she was concerned her BM might pop up over the fence and take her back. She obviously felt she couldn't ask about this possibility with her adoptive mum. That really stuck with me - how we get that basic balance right between information and reassurance.

I hope I'm creating an environment where AD is free to ask me anything, but where the fact of her BF is not always hovering over her. I'm with flutterby.... as long as my AD knows her basic story and knows she is safe, I will be led by her questions and meet her curiosity about further detail when it arises.

It is really hard to know what's best longer term. We are different, our children are different in what they want to know - and when. But I do feel the pressure can be on to over-inform them at a young age.

We talk about being adopted a lot, but more in terms of what it means for us. We have fairly regular 'sad' episodes when he talks about missing birth mum and that he wants to see her, I can say truthfully that I don't know where she is, then he blows her a magic kiss and he seems happy to move on, for the moment. Dad is harder because we have the contact. At the moment we are back to him wishing I would marry daddy and then life would be perfect. He does have some very confused ideas about them, he's convinced they were married
when they in fact barely lived together for any time. I correct any obvious matters of fact but have only in the last week or so starting planting the idea in his head that they were responsible for what happened rather than it just being a sad thing. But I only talk to him in response to his questions, never bring it up, just go with him .

Hi -

I've heard from a couple of adoptees that they think about their adoption WAY more than we parents do - and certainly way more than we mention. They've said that they wanted their parents to talk about it to reflect that and also to give them permission to talk about it themselves.

I've also heard from another adoptee that they really didn't want to think about it, discuss it, etc. They just wanted to get on with the life they were living now.

So my best guess is that every child is different; insisting that you talk about it every day isn't going to work for every child; and it's another of those pesty things where we have to be sensitive and all that sort of stuff.

Sometimes I wish there were a definitive manual that would tell you exactly what to say and do...

Love,

Corkwing

This is an interesing thread as the advice we received was to start introducing life story book early, however, AS who is just 3 is not in the slightest bit interested and it feels very unnatural to push the information. We talk about his foster family who he lived with from birth and we still see them fairly regularly - and we have some Todd Parr books and other adoption books, which he likes. However, he much prefers Topsy and Tim - although I still have the 70s Topsy and Tim where the family adopt baby Theodore, which he does like.

However, I'll often realise we've gone days without mentioning anything adoption related as he just wants to pretend there are dinosaurs chasing us or that Daddy is a troll and we have to hide .

My gut feeling is that if he's not particularly interested or asking questions, I'm probably best not pushing the life story book. I don't think it is currently necessary to start pointing at the picture of his birth parents, who have not seen him since a few weeks old - and explaining that he grew in this ladies tummy. Of course I'll be open with this information and hopefully create an environment where he can ask questions, however, it also seems wrong to force this information on a currently happy child with no particular interest.

Fascinating thread and very refreshing, as I remember when I joined the AUK boards about 2 years ago, there were several discussion in which many people felt it was imperative to be clear with your child as early as possible.

In some ways it might be harder if the child came to the adopters as babies as they have no conscious memories of being anywhere else. I have found it terribly difficult to handle with K. Kipper came to us at 10 months - so non-verbal

don't remember what we were advised by SS, I'm fact I have no recollection of it being discussed at all and am pretty sure we were given the impression we should be as open as possible as early as possible , but we're give no specific advice on how to handle that. It felt like a terribly scary thing as kipper came to us at 10 months and we were struggling a lot with attachment. He was of course non-verbal and I felt clueless about how to handle it as his life story book was way too advanced for him, and he probably would have just eaten it!!!

At 2 years I became aware that he was taking it for granted that he'd always been here....I had already been saying things like 'I'm glad we adopted you etc' but felt I had to be more specific and started telling him a little story about how he came to us, which he seemed to like but I could sense he wasn't really understanding that it was real.

So I used a natural opportunity to gently explain about FCs looking after him before he came to live mummy and daddy.....I will never forget the stricken look on his face and still feel dreadful about it now. It was clearly a bombshell even at that young age. It has remained a highly sensitive subject ever since and he is so sensitive to it that it is very hard to refer to the subject naturally.

I felt like I had told him too much too young and dumped a massive burden on him. I am undecided whether I should have been telling him more when he was younger and pre-verbal so that he just sort of assimilated it, , or whether I should have told him less and taken his lead more. I have every sympathy wit those who believe it can be detrimental to attachment and think it has made attachment wobbles worse here...of course I would never have kept it a secret, but maybe I should have carried on using the word 'adopted' and then waited for the questions.


Donatella, my first thought was that maybe it's no big deal to your children BECAUSE you. Have handled it the way you have. If you had been less forthcoming about it maybe it would be more worrying to them, or more 'interesting'.

Corkwing.....me too!!!!

The longer I've been doing this the more shades of grey I see.  My views on lots of things have changed over the years.  I care much less about other peoples opinions of my parenting.  Our children are all so different and I don't think one size fits all.

My almost 13 year old has the same freedoms as his peers.  No special parenting - just your bog standard stuff.  We argue, we disagree, I tell him off, he gets grounded.  No big deal.

Even my two with an asd dx are poles apart.  One needs a softer, gentler approach.  My daughter needs very firm, strict, boundaried parenting.  Not terribly therapeutic particularly  - more direct! Am dreading her teenage years as I foresee her being a complete nightmare because of her poor social awareness.

Maybe we all need to learn to trust our instinct more??

Very interesting reading this thread. Like a lot of things, I think "telling" and how to do it has changed a lot over the years.

When I adopted 12 years ago it was all you must be as truthful as possible, you must be honest with your children and tell them everything etc etc, but now with internet and social media sites even SW's are now realising that what they advised 10 years ago, might have to change now, due to the immediacy of contact and BP's coming into our children's lives at such a young age. For those of you on the ASB you will already be familiar with my story of what has happened to myself and my DD's.

I am a prime example of someone who tried to do the right thing. I was 100% honest with my children telling them (age appropriately) everything I knew about their background, their family, their birth surname etc. Our story is very straightforward and is easier than most to explain, but now after recent events, I regret that I was so honest and have posted our story to forewarn others that sometimes honesty is not the best policy, and due to the internet I would now not do the same things again if I were adopting today.

Our children DO need to know they are adopted, that is very important, but they should also be allowed to have a childhood free of unwanted/unrequested contact from their BF's until they are of an age where THEY decide they want to know more and SW and well meaning profs should respect this - their rights to privacy, to be left alone to get on with their lives without interference from others telling them you need to know everything and now.

I grew up always knowing I was adopted, I don't remember ever not knowing about it, but it wasn't in my face everyday. I didn't have constant reminders that I wasn't born into my family. I was just a normal kid who sometimes wondered about my birth family, but most of the time I just got on with my life like a normal child and wasn't bothered about it one way or the other. I didn't feel any great desire to search for my other family and never really felt any great need to know. I was happy with my family and my other non related adopted siblings and I was content.

Ironically the only time I had to lie, was when I was going through the approval process, where well meaning, non adopted SW's pressurized me into lying and pretending that I was considering searching for my BP's. They, the "non adopted" professionals, simply could not accept that some adopted kids/adults are not bothered about searching, are happy with their adopted families and cannot be bothered looking for their other families, so I lied to get them off my back. I pretended I was going to look into it and I never did, still haven't to this day, because do you know what, I'm not bothered. That doesn't mean I wouldn't understand my adopted DD's wanting to know of course it doesn't, everyone is different as my own family shows. There were 4 of us, two of us found their BP's and two of us didn't bother to search - everyone is different and that's what bugged me about the SW's telling me I was abnormal because I wasn't bothering to look.

Sorry I've gone off on a tangent yet again.

As long as your child knows they are adopted, knows you are happy to answer their questions at any time, knows you are open to helping them search when they are old/mature enough to do so, then that is enough. They do not need SW telling them when the time is right, they do not need letters on their 18 birthday telling them Happy Birthday you are now 18 and legally entitled to see you file and contact your "other" family - Leave the adoptees alone, let them decide when the time is right for them be that 18, 25, 40 or never. They didn't chose to be adopted, they didn't chose to have do -gooders interfering in their lives telling them you need to know/do this by such and such an age. Give your adopted children the choice to chose for themselves when they feel old enough or ready for it. That's the least you can do as it's their life and their family.

Sorry if this offends anyone, but really adopted children spend their lives with everyone else making decisions for them, at least let them make the decision to search or not. It should be their choice and their choice alone and we adopters should support that choice and not allow anyone else to put pressure on our children to agree to anything before they are ready for it. I am fighting this very battle at the moment and it is causing so much hurt and angst to my family that I'm not sure if we are going to survive it intact.

By all means tell your children they are adopted, but don't turn it into being the most important thing about them and don't let any SW pressurize you into  telling them too much too soon. You are your children's parents, you know them best and you should help them decide what's best for them until they are old enough to make their own decisions for themselves.