My friend Kari over at Coffee Catharsis saved me a huge pile of typing by writing this post on Attachment Disorder today. I think that every potential adoptive family should be reading things like this before they adopt and trying the reality on for size.
Though it's human nature to think that 'our experience will be different' really looking at own reality and that of others we trust can teach us alot about pre and post natal childhood trauma. So if you are thinking about adopting, link over, read it to the end and see if that is a part of the adoption experience you are envisioning........because this is a very real possibility.
3 comments:
Aspergers children can display some of these symptoms, without having AD. Would you handle them any differntly than AD? One thing I have learnt this year is that even if an Apsie teen appears to not want certian attentions they still need them e.g.they may react to a hug by pulling away, but they still need hugs, hair ruffled etc. Which has lead me to realise again they still crave the same things as Neurotypicals, only because of sensory issues, they find them harder to handle, a diemah in itself....I would be interested to know what you think on these matters and how you handle them - same as AD or not?
I've really appreciated your links to Coffee Catharsis and I SO agree with you about the need for better education for adoptive families. I think one of the big changes needed is posts exactly like yours, sharing the reality of what adoption can mean. It's hard to strike a balance of showing respect for the privacy of your child while also letting others know the reality you live in. I also think when prospective adoptive parents hear about these types of behaviors, they don't think it will be their experience and it's hard for people to understand what it will FEEL like to live like this 24/7. I think there needs to be much more discussion and support developed within the adoption community for families living with these realities. We spend so much time and money advocating for adoption, but there's not much there for when you're parenting a severely attachment-impaired child, with significant trauma.....
You can tell this strikes a nerve with me....I'll get off the soap box now.... :o)
Lisa H.
This issue is SO complicated. I agree very strongly with the need for prospective parents to be made aware of the potential realities, to the degree that that's even possible, as Lisa pointed out.
On the other hand, if we'd known in the abstract - outside of the context of relationship with our own real, specific child - what we were going to have to contend with, even with relatively mild fetal alcohol effects, I think we'd have shied away, not believing we'd be able to handle it.
It makes me shudder even to say that - to think of not having this treasure in our family. It's more than I can even bear to imagine.
It's more than clear to me, though, that it could be so, so much harder than it's been for us. And maybe, in that case, we wouldn't be able to handle it. But that leaves me with the inevitable question - should we not have proceeded, because the reality might have turned out to be harder than it has turned out to be?
I really, truly do agree that prospective adopters need to be given a strong dose of potential realities. And we certainly weren't. But the questions of what a child will turn out to be and what the parents will actually be able to handle are both, to some degree, unanswerable at the time when the decision to adopt needs to be made.
And I will say with no caveat that I've been extremely frustrated with what seemed to be a thorough conspiracy to convince us that there wasn't anything special going on with our girl - how it took 10 years to finally get a confirmation that we were, in fact, dealing with alcohol-induced prenatal brain damage. We hadn't even been trying to learn how to parent a child with FASD through most of those early years, because everybody kept insisting she didn't have it.
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