Center For Family Connections

Dr. Joyce Maguire Pavao answers five common questions from adoptive parents.

1. If my young adopted child isn't asking about adoption, is s/he still thinking about it?

We must remember that these children are concrete thinkers. Assuming they are with loving and good families, they, in fact, don't have a problem with adoption. But the question is all wrong. These children may nor worry about adoption, but rather what came before it. Why was I not kept? Where are my birth parents? Do they think of me? Will they take me back? Parents need to work to feel comfortable themselves dealing with their own confused feelings about the birth parents, or birth family, or foster family, or birth race. Both partners need to be prepared to talk about these things and need to have a common understanding about how they will do this.

2. There's never a good time to tell adopted children about heir birth parents, but isn't it better to do it when they're older, say eighteen or twenty-one?

Eighteen is actually a hard time for young adults to take on new information about their identity, especially if it has been kept from them until then. They are ready to leave home to go to college, and there is the threat of losing an even greater connection to their parents for not having entrusted this information to them earlier. At age eighteen or twenty-one, most young people are not in the supportive environment of home, but rather at college or on their own. Earlier is better. As early as possible with ongoing open communication.

3. My child was doing really well in school, and then suddenly stopped doing homework. What's going on?

Frequently, school assignments can trigger emotional trauma. History assignments can painfully underscore the adoptive child's lack of personal history. Geography can spotlight for the first time an adopted child's country to origin. Math, with its emphasis on subtraction, can signal loss of family members. School and parents need to be sensitive to the impact of certain assignments on some children, and to act creatively for a more inclusive curriculum. For the almost universal project-the family tree-suggest a family orchard instead. This allows the child to show the numerous trees that have contributed to his or her being. Even if a child does not know his or her birth parents, Pavao's Family Orchard helps to acknowledge what the child essentially knows: there is another mother and father even if they are not the parents.

4. I'm so hurt that my adopted child has tried to run away. Is s/he trying to tell me something?

This is not like any other running away. These are children who are trying to search for other families--trying to see what it is like to be a different family. They are dealing with their divided loyalty towards their birth and adoptive parents. They are trying to figure out where they belong. They are trying to figure out where they come from. They are trying to be active; not passive; in choosing a family to identify with at the difficult age and stage of development. They are often running towards, not running away.

5. Now that my child is eighteen, he's/she's having difficulty leaving home. Why?

An idea that many adopted people carry around is that at age eighteen they will no longer be adopted, that they will no longer belong to their adoptive families. Many of them are told as children that they could search for their birth family at age eighteen or twenty-one, and they formed the idea then that this meant there'd be no 'going home' afterwards. They, in reaction, often decided to stay home-often with a vengeance. Because where will they go? Leaving home to these young adults means that they won't have an identity, they won't belong.