Helping Adopted Children Adjust to Losses

by Child Welfare Information Gateway

(Page 3 of 3)

Adoption experts acknowledge the importance of helping children integrate their previous attachments to important people in their lives in order to be able to transition that emotional attachment to a new family. Integration is a way of helping children cope with the painful realities of the separation from their birth families that often impact their future behaviors and can create extraordinary stress between them and their foster/adoptive parents. The five-step integration process, first described by adoption pioneer K. Donley, is an effort to clarify the child's permission to be in foster care, to live with new parents, to be loved by them, and to love them back.

Steps in the Integration Process:

Create an accurate reconstruction of the child's entire placement history. Creating a lifebook, lifemap, or ecomap with a child helps a child to see and understand his or her own history.

Identify the important attachment figures in the child's life. Foster parents might be able to learn who these important people in a child's life are by listening to the child talk about people from previous placements. These attachment figures might be parents, but they could be siblings, former foster parents, or other family members.

Gain the cooperation of the most significant of the attachment figures available. If possible, parents should cooperate with the birth mother during a child's visits or gain the cooperation of a birth grandparent or relative to whom the child was attached. Even if the birth family is not happy about a child's permanency goal of adoption, there is likely to be one important person (a teacher, a former neighbor) who will be willing to work with foster/adoptive parents or the agency to make a child's transition to adoption easier.

Clarify the permission message. It is important for children to hear and feel from people who are important to them that it is all right to love another family. The important person in a child's life who is available to give the child that message should be sought out to do so.

Communicating it to the child. Whether the "permission to love your family" comes in the form of a letter or phone call from grandma or from the birth parent during family visits, it is important that children hear from that person that it is not their fault they are in foster care and that it is all right to love another family. This "permission" will go a long way to helping a child relax and transfer his/her attachment to the new family.

In working with children during this transition phase it will be important for parents and others working with the child to use the following skills.

• Engaging the child
• Listening to the child
• Telling the truth
• Validating the child's life story
• Creating a safe space for the child
• Realizing that it is never too late to go back in time
• Embracing pain as part of the process

Helping Children Transfer Attachments

Once it is clear that a child will be adopted by the foster family, there are many things parents can do to signal to a child that his or her status within the family has changed. Some of these include:

• Encouraging the child to start calling the adoptive parents "mom" and "dad"
• Adding a middle name to incorporate a name of family significance
• Hanging pictures of the child on the wall
• Involving the child in family reunions and similar extended family activities
• Including the child in family rituals
• Holding religious or other ceremonies to incorporate the child into the family
• Making statements such as, "In our family, we do it this way" in a supportive way
• Sending out announcements of the adoption

Conclusion

While on the surface it may seem easy for a child to stay in the family in which he or she was living as a foster child, in reality, the internal process for a child and family is much more complicated. Allowing children to just "drift" into adoption without acknowledging the very significant changes for the family may lead to later difficulties. Foster/adoptive parents need to help children consider and understand their own history and reasons why they cannot live with their birth family, help them adjust to this loss, and help them transfer their attachments to the foster/adoptive family. In helping children, families will need to consider each child's needs as they are related to the child's age, health, personality, temperament, and cultural and racial experiences.

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.