Post Adoption
Telling the child the facts of his/her/their adoption:
The why’s and how’s of addressing adoption along with specific personal facts with our children at various stages in their lives. There are several books that could help here, one could make their own ‘book’ with pictures from stages of the child’s life that we have had access to, including the day of placement at the adoption agency. Parents have a lot of fears on telling the child and this needs to be addressed. Sheela Ramakrishnan, an adoptive parent with an adult adoptee and teacher, addresses several of these fears and reasons out what telling the child does for all parties concerned.
School and the adopted child
Starting schooling is a variable process for children who join their family at the age of 2.5 or older. Does one tell the school or not? What are some overlapping issues between adoption and schooling? SuDatta Bangalore has published a booklet with case studies and links to research proven articles for educators. This is a great resource, set in the Indian context, with material from Indian school curricula and lots of practical suggestions.
You can get a copy of the booklet here: Adoption and Education
Adolescence and Adoption
Adolescence and its growth away from parents is well documented in parenting literature. The adopted teen deals with an additional facet that comes from wanting to firm up their identity and addressing issues that they have questions on like who do I look like? Where am I from? Why was I placed in adoption?, etc. These are hard questions that sometimes have no answers. Addressing these questions openly, honestly and sensitively is very important to both the child’s state of mind as well as the relationship between the adoptive parent and child at this critical life stage. Reading more into the Core Issues in Adoption is a good idea here.
Search for Biological Roots
The adoptee in India gets access to their records at the age of 18 or older. Children in India are placed in adoption in two main ways: found in public spaces without parents or relinquished to an authority by the birth family. In the first case, there is little information available in the records. In the second case, there is likely to be more non-identifying information available to the adoptee.
Some adoptees initiate a search and try to see if they can locate their birth family. It is important for adoptive parents to know that the search is not one for new parents but a search for roots, to understand more about themselves. There are movies that address this and some stories from real life as well. For many adoptees, searching has not resulted in finding their roots and that comes with ups and downs.
There are also those adoptees who do not initiate a search for several reasons – they don’t feel the need right then, they feel rejected by the birth family and don’t want to risk another rejection, and other such sessions.
As the adoptive parents who have been there and raised these children, it is important for us to acknowledge their feelings, detach from being emotional about this and making it about us and support them in their search (or not), giving them the control that they have rarely had thus far in their lives.
SuDatta is here to help
We organize several sessions online and offline for our members and often throw them open to adoptive parents who are not members:
- Interactive learning sessions for adoptive parents with in-house / external resource persons
- Residential workshop every November, by inviting an adoption-expert of national / international repute
- Sharing-sessions where members just share their experiences in the absence of experts
- Provide opportunities to adopted children to form their network
