Survival Strategies in Adoption

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Survival Strategies
for Dealing with Medical Conditions or Learning Disabilities Diagnosed in Your Adopted Child After Placement by Dee A. Paddock, M.A., NCC

Months or years after placement, we are sometimes faced with unexpected information about the physical, psychological or neurological health of our adopted child. Before placement, many adopted children are described to prospective adoptive parents as "normal, healthy and developmentally on-target," and they probably are - at that particular time in their development. However, we now know that many medical, psychological or learning problems only manifest in our adopted children as they mature physically and emotionally, and as the social and academic expectations become more demanding.

The first response of adoptive parents to unexpected and previously undiagnosed medical, psychological or learning problems is often grief. Parents may feel betrayed by an adoption agency, by a placing country or by a birth parent: "How could you not know that my child was going to have this problem? How could we just find this out now? Who has withheld this information?" Remember, Survival Step One in dealing with unexpected diagnoses is recognizing that our feelings are normal grief responses to the threat of loss. When our adopted children face new issues or difficulties, we grieve the loss of normalcy and safety that are threatened with these diagnoses. Adoptive families are created out of profound loss and our vulnerability and reactivity to more loss is normal.

Adoptive parents who receive support and acknowledgment from family, friends and professionals for their grief reactions - anger, fear, guilt and anxiety - will then be ready to take Survival Step Two: gathering information regarding the most appropriate professional help for their adopted child. However, adoptive parents who are judged negatively for reacting "inappropriately" to difficult and unexpected news may get stuck in their anger and their need to blame someone, anyone, for what is happening. Now is the time to search out other adoptive parents who have dealt with the issues your family is facing. Now is the time to join a support group of parents who have learned to strategize and cope successfully with their children who have medical, psychological or learning disabilities. Information is power! Adoptive parents can move from helplessness and powerlessness into empowerment and participation in their child's progress.

Survival Step Three kicks in when adoptive parents, armed with information and support, begin to contact professionals who can treat their child. This is not the time to let your fingers do the walking through the Yellow Pages and this is not the time to take the first provider recommended by your HMO. Adopted children with medical, psychological or learning disabilities need professionals who know adoption! It is very appropriate and important to ask for a professional's "adoption qualifications" as part of any professional interview. Too often, adoptive parents must deal with teachers, doctors, psychologists and social workers who have no 'lived experience" in adoption. We then must spend our precious time, energy and money trying to educate these professionals about the different, but normal, developmental realities that impact our adopted children and that affect their disabilities. Mary Pipher, author of The Shelter of Each Other, encourages parents, fighting for their children's health, to get the right professional help: "in a war zone, it's crazy to ask people if they were breast-fed as babies or to analyze their dreams."

By taking this careful and demanding approach to building a professional team, we move into Survival Step Four - changing our expectations for our adopted child according to their disability, and learning to manage, rather than fix, the issues our child now faces. Adoptive parents who have been "homestudy approved" often struggle with unrealistic expectations - of ourselves as parents and of our adopted children. We continually try to erase the cultural stigmas that surround adoption by showing the world that we are perfect parents raising perfect children. A medical, psychological or learning disability will challenge that image and we will waste important time trying to get back to "who we were" before the diagnosis. There is no 'going back' - disability changes us, our child and our family, and we must create a "new normal" that includes the reality we now must deal with.

Nietzsche wrote, 'That which does not kill me makes me stronger." Adoptive families can survive and thrive, even when our adopted children must deal with unexpected medical, psychological or learning issues. As we learn to adjust to new losses in adoption, we open ourselves to receive the gifts of growth and attachment that accompany difficult times. Take each Survival Step as a baby step and expect to re-trace those steps from time to time as your family successfully meets the developmental demands of the adoptive family.