Transition from Orphanage to Home

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What You Need to Know

^{Transcript of our chat with Guest Expert Rita Taddonio on this topic}

If you are preparing to bring your child home, or have recently arrived home with your child, there are a number of things that are important to understand:

First and foremost, keep in mind that while you have spent months, perhaps years, preparing your minds and hearts to welcome this child into your lives and become a family, your child has had little, if any, preparation for this incredibly huge and significant change in his or her life.

Your child was going along with the daily routine when one day, there was an introduction to this person who is to be their new Mom or Dad. Certainly nothing told to them in the way of preparation makes sense to them. Cognitively, most of them are too young to understand that they are getting a new family, and most of them have no reference point for "family." If you have lived all but the first month or two of your life in an orphanage, you have no real understanding of what family means. If your child is older and has memories of a dysfunctional or unstable family life, those memories won't be an accurate reflection of the new relationship ahead with your family.

Don't be too upset or surprised if your child doesn't react to you the way you expected or hoped. Don't take it personally. It takes time to fall in love. It takes time to become a family - to learn how to interact with each other's personalities, temperaments, etc.

In addition, orphanage life requires different skills than family life. In fact, survival skills for life in an orphanage may be "dysfunctional" in a family or American school system.

Consider these points:

Life in institutions is often based on submissive/dominance models; therefore, your child at home may seem too aggressive or too passive.
If a child had to be very self-sufficient for survival, or was older and became a caretaker for younger children in the institution, it will be hard for the child to let you be the parent.
The extremely routinized life in institutions does not equip children with skills to handle transitions.
In an institution, everything is outer regulated: when you sleep, when you eat, when you go to the bathroom - so a child doesn't have any opportunities to learn self regulation or deal with choices.
In an institution, there are many changes over which a child has no control - staff, changes in what room he/she lives in because of age. This can create control issues and/or a lag in developing trust.
Living with multiple caregivers may result in indiscriminate friendliness. This is not the same as attachment disorder.
There are times when attachment disorder is an issue – but it can be dealt with successfully with appropriate intervention.
The children will not be used to having things of their own. It will take time to learn the concept of personal property.

There are positives and negatives to each of the above points. The important thing is that understanding where a behavior may be coming from helps you deal with it appropriately.

Your child may be coming home at 8 months, 18 months, or 28 months, but you will have to teach her/him how to be in a family, how to have social relationships.

Lastly, remember that this is a huge transition for your child. Everything – smells, foods, sounds, textures, language, faces - is going to be radically different from what they are used to and recognize. Respect that by going slowly in introducing them to new things (people, places, toys, foods, etc.).