Five Tips for Helping Your Adopted Children Field Questions About Themselves

As I’ve pondered this whole “discussing adoption at school” issue, I’ve continued reading articles about the topic in Adoptive Families magazine.

In one article, Carrie Krueger provides 10 “talking tips” for preparing your child to discuss adoption. Here’s a summary of her first five tips:

Kids need to know that they don’t have to answer questions. When people ask intrusive questions, kids can just answer, “That’s just the way our family is,” or “I don’t care to discuss it.” These responses are simple, truthful, and they keep your child feeling safe.

Rehearse responses ahead of time. “Don’t wait for the ugly or intrusive comment to discuss responses,” recommends Krueger. Rather, role-play the types of questions your children will likely be asked and practice your answers.

Discuss adoption issues with your children, even when it isn’t obvious they were adopted. I dealt with this in the last couple of posts. While most people assume my sons are my birth children, we know and they know that they were adopted. They need to learn to feel comfortable with their adoption story, just as any adopted child does.

Initiate discussions about adoption. If your children don’t bring up their adoption, that doesn’t mean they’re not thinking about it. Kids have a lot to process as they’re growing up, and adoption is one of those things. They may be getting teased on the school bus and are afraid to tell you for fear that your feelings will be hurt.

They may hear crass comments about adoption on TV (“you’re nothing like me; you must be adopted hahahahahaha”) and have no idea how to react to them. If you bring up some aspect of adoption as a normal part of the conversation once a month or so, it gives your kids an opportunity to ask questions or to work through their feelings about a particular issue.

School assignments may bring up sadness and grief. The “baby picture” assignment that we’ve been discussing for the past few days can devastate a child who doesn’t have any baby pictures and may trigger the need for a child to grieve some of his losses.

I’ve noticed that when my own children are processing sadness or grief, they sometimes act out. They aren’t able to verbally articulate what’s wrong, so their grief is expressed through poor behavior or crankiness. If your child is exhibiting atypical behavior, it might be a good idea to see what types of projects he’s working on at school.

Continued in next post…