Archive for June, 2009

According to Anna Glendenning of the Adoptive Parents Network, the stages of adoption have certain developmental milestones, however most people don’t understand what these milestones are and sometimes expectations are too high for an adopted child. Below is a list of some of the stages of adoption developmental milestones and how they relate to an adopted child’s unique concept of self:

Birth through the Toddler Years

• Normal Life Issues:  Basic trust, attachment to primary caretaker.
• Adoptee issues:  Basic trust, attachment despite primary losses.
• Positive Parenting Responses:  Provide high levels of nurturing, consistency and security.

Pre-School Years (Ages 2 ½ to 5)

• Normal Life Issues: Developing Independence, and competence in the family.
• Adoptee issues: Questioning age, “Why was I adopted?” and “Where did I come from?”
• Positive Parenting Responses:  Provide truthful answers and have an open attitude with your child about the truth.

Early Grade School Age (Ages 6-10)

• Normal Life Issues: Begin to see themselves as a part of a peer group. Mastering skills and feeling competent.
• Adoptee issues: Questioning of the primary loss, an overall sense of being different some child her have issues over the primary rejection.
• Positive Parenting Responses: Parents provide information and help children deal with feelings of rejections.
• Development of open lines of communication is vital at this age.

Pre-Adolescence (Ages 8-12)

• Normal Life Issues: Bodies chance and peer relationships become very important.
• Adoptee issues: Adopted children often have questions about their birth family at this age and wonder about how they may appear or have similar talents as their birth family.
• Positive Parenting Responses:  This is one of the most important times for parents to share any information or pictures of the birth family with their child.  Answer any questions with concrete information. This is the age where grieving and self-esteem issues are most difficult for adopted children.

Early Adolescence (Ages 12-15)

• Normal Life Issues: Children tend to focus on peer groups more then family. This is when children typically develop their sexual identity.
• Adoptee issues: Adopted children may want to learn as much as possible about their birth family during this period. Many adopted children engage in a great deal of abstract thinking during their early adolescence.
• Positive Parenting Responses: Parents can best support their children by giving expressed permission to the child to think about their birth family.

Later Adolescence: (Ages 16-21)

• Normal Life Issues: Children are developing their own identity and planning for their futures. During this age, peers are much more important then family.
• Adoptee issues: This is the age where critical thinking becomes more developed and adopted children may consider search and reunion with their birth family.
• Positive Parenting Responses: Even if it is difficult this is the time when adoptive parents need to be supportive and help the adopted child find information to assist in their search.

Developing healthy attachment behavior

• Parent must be attuned to their child’s needs in order to create and develop healthy attachment
• Create joy, elation, interest, and excitement together with your child
• Parents should maximize opportunity for positive emotions and minimize opportunity for negative emotions
• Reciprocal behaviors between child and adult
• Respectful eye contact, body language
• Respectful verbal language
• Calming, soothing, nurturing responses
• Physical proximity and touching while respecting boundaries
• Careful, deliberate listening
• Accepting limits – boundaries
• Interventions for consideration
• Attachment Parenting

Interventions

Attachment Parenting
Attachment Parenting International publishes educational and research articles related to attachment parenting. In their Eight principles of attachment parenting, they offer a guide for areas that are key to the optimal development of children.

Eight principles of attachment parenting

• Preparation for Pregnancy, Birth and Parenting
• Feed with Love and Respect
• Respond with Sensitivity
• Use Nurturing Touch
• Engage in Nighttime Parenting
• Provide Consistent Loving Care
• Practice Positive Discipline
• Strive for Balance in Personal and Family Life

Support Groups
Attachment Parenting International is a resource for parents wanting to connect with other parents around attachment parenting techniques and ideas and support during difficult times for parents and child(ren),

Family Therapy
Family therapists are able to explore the connections between what happened in past generations and what is happening now in the family. Family therapists can help to determine if what happened in the past is happening now and whether or not that is helpful in moving forward towards healthy family relationships.

Understanding how an adoptive child’s development differs from that of a biological child’s is key in understanding any cognitive and/or emotional issues that may arise.   Temper expectations while arming yourself with the information needed to help process difficult questions around identity that may come up.  Review the above-mentioned interventions and see which ones you you might pursue.  As always, we are here to help and answer any questions you may have about attachment parenting and adopted children.

Adopting a child or becoming a foster parent can be an emotionally rewarding experience for parents.  However this experience can be marred with failed expectations and a lack of historical and in depth information around the child and birth parents.  This information is critical to helping parents understand the cognitive, emotional and physical needs of their children. And, what was to be a rewarding experience is now wrought with a search for answers on how to close the gap between parent and child.

Slowly, as parents enter into the journey of bonding with their children, they may begin to see the signs of a child exhibiting the signs of insecure attachment.  This can often be a frustrating process as the expectations of a child who is to be happy and grateful for a clean home with loving parents, just didn’t quite materialize in the way it was suppose to in the minds of many parents.  So the question becomes, how do new foster and adoptive parents create secure attachments with their children?

Enter attachment parenting of foster and adopted children.

What Is Attachment And Why Is It Important?

Building a secure attachment between parent and child is key to the pair developing a healthy and emotionally secure relationship.  Early attachment styles determine how children will relate to the world around them. Foster/adopted children often struggle with this as they have been removed from their primary caregivers at an early age.  In some cases, the primary care givers may have been present but the emotional bond needed to build a secure attachment was not.  According to Attachment Parenting, this often times results in a child who may exhibit the following attachment styles:

1) Secure- these infants actively explore, they get upset when their mother leaves, are happy upon reunion and seek physical contact with their mother. Mothers of secure babies are typically loving and responsive to their infant, quick to pick them up when they cried, hold them longer and “with more apparent pleasure.”

2) Insecure-ambivalent (anxious/resistant): these infants stays close to their mothers, there is limited exploration, they become very distressed upon separation and ambivalent toward their mother upon reunion but remain near her. Mothers of anxious babies were observed to be “more mean-spirited to merely cool, from chaotic to pleasantly incompetent. Though well meaning, these mothers have difficulty responding to their babies “in a loving, attuned, consistent way.”

3) Insecure-avoidant: these infants show little distress when separated, ignore their mother’s attempts to interact, are often sociable with strangers or may ignore them as they ignore their mother. These mothers often have an aversion to physical contact themselves and speak sarcastically to their babies.

4) Insecure-disorganized/disoriented: these infants are the most distressed upon separation and are considered the most insecure. They seem confused upon reunion and exhibit behaviors that appear to be a combination of resistant and avoidant.

Debra Wesselmann gives us the following ingredients for a secure attachment:

Physical

• Consistent touch and eye contact
• Cradling and cuddling an infant before bedtime
• Hugging a teenager periodically to increase the sense of a physical connection

Emotional

• Build an emotional connection by becoming attuned with your child’s feelings.  Children can sense their parents’ level of emotional attunement based on how they respond in different situations
• Empathize with feelings of disappointment or insecurity in order to build a secure emotional connection.  This reassures the child that they are loved and accepted in good and bad times.
• Execute discipline in a manner that is consistent and empathetic as this can increase the emotional connection between parent and child.

Consistent Environment

• Provide a safe, consistent and predictable environment
• Even during times when behaviors are out of control, children need to know that parents and/or guardians will be steady and calm
• This may include: a consistent schedule, consistent limits and consistent parental responses.

Without these ingredients, children build emotional walls which may prevent secure emotional attachments to parents and/or primary caregivers.  It is also important to also assess your own attachment style as a parent which can often give some insight into the attachment issues with a foster/adopted child.  Often, parents don’t realize that their own attachment styles are indicative of whether or not their children will in turn attach in a healthy manner.

Individual and/or family therapy is also an option which gives parent and child a chance to come together and face the issues they are experiencing with each other head on.  An astute family therapist with experience in dealing with attachment issues can bridge the chasm and help put these issues in perspective.