Helping Your Adopted Child Understand His Own History

by Child Welfare Information Gateway

(Page 2 of 3)

Parents can help children review and understand their previous life experiences to clarify what happened to them in the past and help them integrate those experiences so they will have greater self-understanding. Foster/adoptive parents and children's therapists and social workers can help children in answering important questions about their lives - both to assess their readiness for and to prepare them for staying permanently in their family.

Questions for children to assess where they are on the permanency continuum

• Who am I? (question related to identity)
• What happened to me? (question related to loss)
• Where am I going? (question related to attachment)
• How will I get there? (question related to relationships)
• When will I know I belong? (question related to claiming and safety)

Children's answers to these questions will change, depending on their developmental stage. Their responses can guide parents and therapists in helping the children achieve feelings of permanency.

There are many ways families can help children in answering these important questions and in understanding their unique history. Life books, ecomaps, lifemaps, and lifepaths are all tools used by foster/adoptive parents and children's therapists to help children of various ages understand and find ways to visually represent the answers to questions of how they came to be separated from their birth family and where they will ultimately belong.

A lifebook, is essentially an account of the child's life in words, pictures, photographs, and documents. While lifebooks can take many forms, each child's lifebook will be unique to that child. Foster parents can assist in creating a lifebook for a child by gathering information about a child and taking pictures of people and places that are - or were - important to the child.

An ecomap is a visual representation of a person and the important people and activities in his or her life. A child's ecomap may have a circle in the middle of the page with a stick figure of a child, along with the question "Why am I here?" Lines are drawn out from the circle like spokes to other circles representing the court, other foster families, siblings, school, or to other topics such as "things I like to do" to visually represent what and who is important to a child and to help the child understand how he or she came to live with the adoptive family.

Lifemaps or lifepaths are visual representations to help children understand the paths their lives have taken and the decision points along the way. They may have stepping stones to represent a child's age and a statement about where and with whom they lived at that age. They may have lines that go to a drawing of a house representing any foster homes a child lived in, the years the child lived there, and a mention of who lived with the child at that house, if known.

Possible items to collect/include in a child's lifebook:

• Developmental milestones (when a child first smiled, crawled, walked, talked, etc.)
• Common childhood diseases and immunizations, injuries, illnesses, or hospitalizations
• Pictures of a child's birth parents and/or birth relatives and information about visits
• Members of the foster family's extended family who were/are important to the child
• Pictures of previous foster families, their homes, and their pets
• Names of teachers and schools attended, report cards, and school activities
• Any special activities such as scouting, clubs, or camping experiences
• Faith-based activities
• What a child did when he/she was happy or excited and ways a child showed affection
• Cute things the child did, nicknames, favorite friends, activities, and toys
• Birthdays or religious celebrations or any trips taken with the foster family

The most important information to include in any of these tools to help children understand their past history is information about the child's birth and an explanation of why and how the child entered foster care and how decisions about moves and new placements were made. A baby picture and pictures of birth parents should be included, if possible. If no information is available, children can draw a picture of what they might have looked like. Statements such as, "there is no information about Johnny's birth father in his file," at least acknowledge the father's existence. The importance of honesty, developmental appropriateness, and compassion in any explanation of difficult and painful circumstances that bring children into care is important for children.

Working with these tools provides an opportunity for the child to experience and work through the feelings of loss; therefore, they are beneficial therapeutic methods to help children with the grieving process.

About the Author

www.childwelfare.gov
Formerly the National Clearinghouse on Child Abuse and Neglect Information and the National Adoption Information Clearinghouse, Child Welfare Information Gateway provides access to information and resources to help protect children and strengthen families. A service of the Children's Bureau, Administration for Children and Families, U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.