For children who have faced abuse or neglect in their birth families, adoption and foster care can bring a range of long-term benefits that continue to have an effect well into adulthood – the most important arguably being an enduring sense of safety. But this journey can vary greatly depending on individual circumstances, notably the child’s age at adoption. One study has shown that adopted children at a very young age were as securely attached to their permanent families as non-adopted children, while children adopted later tended to struggle more with attachment.
The question then, for an adoptive parent like me, is how best to help your child address these challenges. This seems basic enough. Something that science must have long since come up with some solid answers for. But when I talk to researchers about what has surprised them most about their work on parenting adopted children, their response is unanimous.
“We have almost no research on adoption post childhood,” says JaeRan Kim, an associate professor in the School of Social Work and Criminal Justice at the University of Washington at Tacoma, whose research focuses on the wellbeing and experiences of adoptees. “But if you’re adopted, you don’t stop having to deal with issues related to your adoption once you grow up,” she says. “How do adopted people parent? What kind of adoptive parents do they make? How do they deal with the loss of their biological parents? And their adoptive parents? We need to better understand these questions so that we can offer them the right kind of support.”
Because adoption is often framed as the final stop in a neglected or parentless child’s journey to safety and stability, even the most basic information about the issues that children face after their adoption is frequently missing. This can include further trauma and disruption, such as abuse or abandonment by adoptive parents. It may even involve a return to foster care if the adoptive family lacks support and cannot cope with the consequences of early trauma, such as violent behaviour. “We know that not all adoptive parents raise their adopted children to adulthood,” says Kim. “We call this adoption breakdown. But, here in the States, the figure could be anywhere between 5 and 25%. We just don’t know for sure because the stats aren’t there.”
So with huge holes in the research literature, how can we, as adoptive parents, use science to become better at addressing our children’s unique needs?
One key approach for adoptive parents is what Pedro Alexandre Costa, a clinical psychologist and researcher from the University Institute of Psychological, Social and Life Sciences (Ispa) in Lisbon, Portugal, calls “responsiveness”. This requires adoptive parents to engage with their children in a more receptive way, and focus on warmth, bonding and closeness rather than rules and discipline. “Adoptive parents do just have to make an extra effort,” Costa says. “They need to be responsive to their child when they might want to be strict. For instance, if their child is having a tantrum. For an adoptive child, you need to understand that they are trying to communicate something that they cannot express.”
This responsiveness and openness also needs to be applied to issues of attachment and security. “Adoptive parents need to be much more explicit with their child, for instance, that they are going to be around for the long haul,” Costa adds.
For this to be a success, it often involves parents having to rethink their approach to parenting, and engage more deeply in how they are responding to their child. But this can also be a source of pride, and result in a closer parent–child relationship. And there is no question that this relationship is central to dealing positively with the issues faced by kids who have gone through the care system. When I ask Costa what has most surprised him about his research into adoption, he points to the positive statistics on adoption improving a wide range of developmental outcomes, saying that he had not expected that “despite the difficulties, most children and parents are doing really well”.
For me, the key phrase here is “despite the difficulties…” Despite the difficulties of adoption, my life with my husband and my son is still defined by the everyday travails and very deep joys of family life. Sharing a cheeky doughnut on the way back from nursery, holding hands as we watch a red squirrel traverse the willow by the supermarket, trying not to laugh as our son pulls faces at the dinner table. These moments transcend the necessary legal convolutions of adoption that marked our first years as parents.
The adoptive parents and grown-up adoptees I know have experienced a very broad range of challenges, many of which are unique to adoption. But the truth is that, despite the difficulties, they have each, in their own way, created families as complex and full of joy as anyone else’s. Not without setbacks. Never without loss. But joyful, nonetheless.
