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This week, I’ve posted a 5-part series that explores some commonly-asked questions about open and closed adoption. To follow up, I’d like to recommend a superb book that addresses the subject, called Telling the Truth to Your Adopted or Foster Child: Making Sense of the Past, by Betsy Keefer and Jayne Schooler.
The authors explain how adoption “loomed under the cloak of secrecy for decades,” citing that those who advised secrecy did so for the following well-intended reasons:
1) Birthmother could more easily resolve her feelings about the placement.
2) Birthmother would be protected from the “fallen woman” label.
3) Child would be protected from the “illegitimate” label.
5) Family could portray their structure as that of a biological family.
6) No one would have to look back.
The book explains how we deliberately conceal potentially shameful, embarrassing or painful events in order to exert power over those secrets. But secrets damage a family, assert the authors. “They have power over family members because nobody talks about them and yet a few influential ones know about them.”
They write:
Most adoptive and foster parents are loving and concerned. They want to protect their children from pain and unhappiness. When parents consider the impact of separation from the birth family on their child, or less-than-ideal circumstances surrounding that separation, they sometimes imagine that they will “protect” the child from pain or difficulty in adjustment by not telling the child at all about the adoption, not telling the “whole” truth by telling a “hole” (partial) truth; or avoiding conversation that might upset the child.
When parents attempt to “protect” their child, they unintentionally create in their child a lack of trust in and attachment to the family. When the child (no matter what age) discovers the withheld information, “the adoptee wonders what other lies or half-truths have been perpetrated by the adoptive family.”
So, when should you tell your child the circumstances behind his or her adoption?
Share it in layers, in age-appropriate ways, recommend Schooler and Keefer. At age 3, for example, you might tell your child a simplified, bare-bones version. As she grows and matures, more layers of information are unveiled.
For example, a preschooler who was adopted because her alcoholic parents were unable to care for her might be told that her birth parents were unhealthy and unable to meet the responsibilities of parenthood.
A grade-school child can be told that child protective services removed her from her parents’ care because they didn’t care for her properly. A middle schooler is able to understand about alcoholism as a disease, about her parents’ struggle with alcohol and about her own genetic predisposition to alcohol addiction.
The most important thing to remember when relating information about birth parents is to do so in a nonjudgmental manner. Adopted children need to have positive feelings for their birth parents, write the authors. When parents present the facts in a negative, judgmental fashion, “the child interprets this judgment as rejection of his birth family, his origins, and ultimately, himself.”
