#76 Our attitude toward adoption

January 14, 2017 at 3:57 pm | Posted in Adoption differences, adoption issues, adoption loss, Adoptive parenting do's, Raising the adopted child | Leave a comment
Tags: adoption family life, adoptive parenting, awareness of being adopted, feeling of wholeness, parental attitude, understanding the adopted child

Once again I’d like to direct you to the papers that Robert Hafetz has written.  You can google –

Robert Hafetz – Academia.edu.

Or scroll down to the bottom of this page and click on the link under Favorite Links.

There you’ll see a list of his papers. They are all excellent, so you can click on any one to begin with and you won’t be able to stop reading them.  His approach to adoption has long been missing in adoption literature and his insight and approach should be examined by all in the adoption world.  It makes sense to those of us who have been struggling for years with virtually no support anywhere.  It’s like no one understands.  Well, Robert Hafetz understands and states “facts” clearly.

 

In his paper, “Changing the Way We Think about Adoption” he brings up the point that adoption is not normal.  It is not normal for a baby to be removed from its mother and raised by strangers.  Society has claimed that adopted children have more problems than biological problems and it’s the child’s fault or their adoptive parents’ fault.  Robert says that the so-called problems that an adopted child faces are deep, so deep that the child doesn’t understand that they started when he or she was removed from the safe environment of his birth mother’s womb.  While growing up, he or she is reacting normally to an abnormal situation.

 

Many adoptees are diagnosed with multiple disorders (and medicated) when in fact they are reacting normally to the abnormal situation that life has put them in.  There are bonding hormones between a birth mother and her unborn baby. Studies have shown that babies just a few hours old can distinguish their own birth mother’s scent and touch from other birth mothers in the study.

 

Because of preverbal memories such as the loss of its comforting pre-birth environment, many adoptees on a very deep level associate love and safety with a following  abandonment.  Many adoptive families have dealt with the child who appears to fail to bond, to feel a part of his adoptive family.  I urge you to read Mr. Hafetz’s papers to gain an understanding of the effect the infant’s primal loss has on him.  It will change your parenting style, very much for the better because you will finally understand what even your child cannot understand or describe to you.  He shows it in his behavior, often difficult to deal with.  It is crucial that adoptive parents respond correctly to their child’s anxiety and acting out even though it is not what the parenting books (that deal with biological children) advise.  Adopted children have different needs than biological children.