The Children Money Can Buy

by Anne Moody

  Adoptive parents need to take extra care in educating extended family and friends about adoption since these people play an important role in their lives. With infant adoption, this can be done fairly easily. By the time the child is old enough to understand language, the various people who formerly said things like, “If her real mom could see how cute she is, she’d want her back” (with the implication that a birth mother could only relinquish an unattractive baby?) will have learned that this is not the way to give your child a compliment. This training can start even before you bring the baby home, with the simple use of a few key words. There’s no need to introduce a lot of adoption jargon (which people, your child included, would no doubt find annoying), but you do need to advise people early and often to use “birth mother” (or whatever the favored terminology is at the time) instead of “real mother” or “natural mother” and to use “adopted” instead of “given up” or “given away.”

  It is usually sufficient simply to model the use of the words you want people to use, but if they don’t seem to be catching on, you’ll need to tell them directly what you want them to say. If they object or are forgetful, you can offer to lend them a good article or book on the subject. Remember that it takes time for people to learn new things, and others haven’t been educating themselves about adoption the way prospective parents have been. But also remember that it is your job as a parent to do what you can to ensure that the people who are going to be part of your child’s life will not say ignorant or hurtful things about adoption or race.

  8. Honesty or protection?

  Part of an adoption counselor’s responsibility to the child being adopted is to elicit a promise of honesty from the adoptive parents, who are often asked to state in the home study that they agree to disclose the fact of adoption to the child and to give him or her accurate information about the birth parents and the circumstances of the adoption. Accepted policy is that all available information should be shared with the person who has been adopted at an age-appropriate time. Although families generally agree with this policy, there is no way to enforce their promise in later years or monitor the quality of the information the child is given. Like all other parents, adoptive parents are free to make decisions about how and when to tell their child whatever they want him or her to know, and I respect their parental authority, even though we may not always be in agreement about what is in the best interests of their child. The issue of full disclosure can be enormously complicated, and there are times when I have felt it did not necessarily coincide with the idea that “honesty is always the best policy.” Honesty, and truth, can be elusive.

  I had always assumed I was a proponent of full disclosure until the day I received a referral for one of my families, for a baby girl from Korea. A referral is the initial packet of information about a child that I would take to the prospective adoptive parents for review; it was thrilling, to say the least, to share their elation when they saw their child’s picture for the first time. Normally, there is nothing worrisome in this information and everything in the referral packet can be happily shared with the child when she is older. Typical information in a referral would be about how the birth parents had not been in a good situation to raise a child and consequently had chosen adoption for a better future for their baby. But this referral said, “The young birth mother died in child birth while screaming in agony.”

  It was painful to read and hard to imagine any possible benefit in having this image forever embedded in the child’s mind. It is enough simply to know that the birth mother died. I also came to realize that I didn’t completely trust the information in those referrals. After all, most of them sounded practically identical; initially written in Korean and translated into awkward English, they sometimes contained judgmental descriptions such as “bar girl.” The people who wrote them could make mistakes and misinterpretations just like anyone else. I rejected the idea that the few words that someone had written down about this birth mother should be seen as the absolute and overriding truth of her life, eclipsing all else in the child’s mind. The person who wrote that statement hadn’t been present at the birth, or the death, so what did he or she really know about the quality of the screaming? And why was it important to describe a birth mother as a “bar girl” rather than as a loving daughter, great cook, good storyteller, wonderful sister, beautiful singer, or any of the other qualities she might have had that would be far more important in letting the child know what she was actually like?

  Another situation giving me pause about full disclosure involved a birth mother who said that she had been raped. She was Caucasian, married to a Caucasian man, living in a southern state, and expecting a biracial baby. I remember a discussion with the prospective adoptive parents about how one talks with a child about rape. And in that conversation, it occurred to me that we actually knew nothing at all about the father, not even his name. All we really knew was that the woman told us she was expecting a child that wasn’t going to be her husband’s biological child, and she wanted to plan an adoption and hopefully preserve her marriage. Given that set of facts, it seemed at least possible that the pregnancy resulted from indiscretion rather than rape. Of course, it is true that women who are raped sometimes do become pregnant. It is also true that women who want to plan an adoption and fear that the birth father will prevent them from doing so can avoid his legal involvement in the matter by saying that they were raped and do not know the identity of the father. Although it is illegal, and grounds for overturning the adoption if the father finds out what she has done, women who fear the father will cause them or the child harm or difficulty sometimes do take this approach. These two examples in which “full” disclosure was possibly less than the full truth are mercifully rare, and in most cases, honesty really is the best policy.

  Adoptive parents of infants these days go through a home study process in which the importance of early and open communication is emphasized, and they are usually pretty well prepared to talk with their children about adoption when the time comes. This understanding and preparation is less common when a child is being adopted by a stepparent, primarily because the counselor’s involvement comes after family relationships have been established—as has the story about how they came to be a family.

  A too-frequent scenario when I’m doing a home study for a stepparent adoption is to be sitting in a kitchen with a couple in their early thirties, their one-year-old on the mom’s lap and the seven-year-old boy—the one being adopted by the stepfather—coming in and out of the room. Three hours into the meeting, with the child now quietly playing nearby, we have gotten through the adopting dad’s biography, the history of the couple’s relationship, the circumstances of the seven-year-old’s birth, and the couple’s views on child-rearing. Now we start discussing one of the most important parts of this type of home study: whether, when, and how the family plans to structure the child’s relationship with the birth father and other paternal relatives in the future; how to handle questions the child has if the birth father is absent from his life; and how to explain the adoption process to him. Parents sometimes tell me at this point that the child does not know about the adoption, and if he finds out the stepfather isn’t his “real father,” he will be devastated, and it will irrevocably change their relationship.

  The parents seem oblivious to the fact that the child can’t possibly have avoided hearing much of our conversation, and that even in the unlikely event that someone else hadn’t already tipped him off, he now knows that the father he lives with is not his biological father.

  Parents can be enormously clueless about what their children know, but in these situations, the desire to hang onto ignorance about this particular subject is astonishing. Parents convince themselves that they are preserving the child’s innocence, even in situations in which everyone else in the family, including same-age cousins, knows that he has a different birth father. It is particularly odd when the stepdad didn’t meet
the child until he or she was about three or four years old. Yet I know many such families who cling to the belief that the child is unaware. It is delusional thinking on the part of the parents, and it can be extremely hard to convince people that they are not doing their child any good—rather, that they are doing a lot of harm by not talking honestly with their child.

  I fully understand why a woman who was, say, in an abusive relationship with the birth father of her child would want to distance herself and the child from that person. And I understand why a loving stepfather would want to keep his family safe from the abusive birth father. But creating a false story is more likely to create difficulties for the family than to protect it. The first message the child should be given is simply that his birth father wasn’t able to be a parent. As time goes on, and depending on what memories the child has and whether there is contact with the paternal birth family, the amount of information can be augmented. No matter how much or how little information about the birth father’s situation or behavior is shared with the child, he or she needs to hear something positive about this person as well. Even in situations where the birth father is actually dangerous (and there will be no contact), it is usually possible to find something positive. The child has undoubtedly inherited admirable qualities that can be attributed to the birth father, even if they were all from recessive genes.

  Parents can talk honestly with their child about a birth parent’s problems without seeming to condemn him or her as a person. If the parents seem too harsh or judgmental about birth parents, they run the risk of inadvertently encouraging the child to identify with them and/or to feel the need to defend them. This can be a huge issue during teenage years when it is important that parents not set the stage, in essence, for their child to assert his or her independence by reaching out to a birth parent who is not a good influence. A primarily negative message from the parents about the birth parents can have an effect on the child that is opposite the hoped-for one. This does not mean that parents shouldn’t be honest about problems. They do have to prepare their child for the reality of the birth parent’s situation, but they should try to do it with compassion rather than condemnation.

  Another area in which openness and honesty can get complicated for adoptive parents is when the child has memories of an abusive birth parent. I worked with one family who adopted a five-year-old and his two younger siblings, who had been voluntarily relinquished by their birth mother. She had been under scrutiny by Child Protective Services after several episodes in which one or another of the children suffered mysterious illnesses requiring hospitalization but defying diagnosis. The doctors suspected Munchausen’s Syndrome by Proxy—in which a parent either causes, exaggerates, or invents symptoms of illness in a young child in order to get attention or sympathy or to feel superior to medical professionals—but they had no proof. That was provided over time by the five-year-old, as he grew to trust his adoptive mother. In her effort to help him adjust to his adoption, she had talked a lot about how his birth mother must have loved him a great deal to have made the decision to allow him and his brothers to be adopted. This adoptive family enjoyed an open relationship with the birth mother of another one of their children—a young woman they admired and respected—and they were trying to present the new birth mother in the same favorable light. But gradually, the little boy began to voice objections to the idea that his birth mother had been so loving. Eventually, he revealed that she had forced him and a younger sibling to drink dishwashing soap (so she could take them to the hospital with symptoms). Although the birth mother had told the boy that drinking the dishwashing soap was a punishment, and apparently he felt that he sometimes deserved punishment, he knew that his baby brothers did not, and he had come to his own conclusion that their birth mother was not, in fact, a loving person. The adoptive mother was horrified by what her child had gone through, but she was heartened by the fact that he felt comfortable sharing his feelings with her. She decided that honesty was the only approach that made sense in this situation, but she still did not condemn the birth mother as evil; instead, she talked about how the birth mother’s behavior had been bad and how glad she was that the boy was now safe from that treatment.

  9. Document contacts with birth parents.

  In this era of open adoptions, a child is likely to have contact with the birth parents before he or she is an adult, and it is important that birth and adoptive parents who have an open relationship agree about which information is shared with the child, and at what age. Both the birth parents and the adoptive parents are entitled to privacy and autonomy in this matter. Just as biological parents don’t share all the details of their own relationship with their child, so birth parents should be able to use their own judgment about which personal information they want to share, and when they want to share it. And adoptive parents, who know their child best, should be able to make decisions about how and when information is shared with their child when he is young, although at some point it will be important for them to step out of the decision-making role with respect to information and contact with the birth parents. Adoptive parents will need to use their best judgment to determine at what age they feel their child should have full access to all available information, including upsetting and possibly inaccurate information. It is not easy to decide the right time and the right way to share this sort of information, nor is it easy to find the right balance between protecting your child from painful information and always being open and honest with him. There are no hard-and-fast rules about exactly when and how to have these conversations since each child and each situation is unique.

  In the past, it was usually fairly easy to establish a mutually comfortable level of communication between birth and adoptive families, and for both families to maintain control over their interactions. But the Internet has changed things dramatically. Now it is not unusual for adoptees and birth parents to contact one another via Facebook, and this can sometimes lead to difficulty. I was recently contacted by a girl whose birth mother I had worked with seventeen years earlier when the adoptee was a few months old. The birth mother had turned thirteen shortly before the baby was born, but she looked more like a frail ten-year-old. She and the baby were staying with an aunt and uncle and a number of cousins, all of whom were encouraging adoption, and the girl clearly had no ability to provide for herself or for a child. The baby seemed as delicate as a tiny bird, but she was alert and beautiful with enormous bright eyes. Because the birth mother was a minor, she was assigned a guardian ad litem and given legal representation, but even with that help, she was too young to fully comprehend the situation either legally or emotionally. Her aunt walked her through the steps of choosing a family, and she wisely selected an extremely kind and loving couple. After the placement, the birth mother returned to her family in another state and went back to middle school. She did not keep in touch with the adoptive family, although they would have welcomed an ongoing relationship with their daughter’s birth mother.

  Seventeen years later, when the birth mother was only thirty, she contacted the daughter through Facebook. At first, things went well, and the daughter enjoyed communicating with cousins and other family members as well as with the birth mother. But it wasn’t long before it became obvious to her parents that something was troubling their daughter. It turned out that the birth mother had told the girl that the adoption had never been legal because the birth father had not known anything about it and therefore could not have given his consent. The implication was that the adoptive parents had taken part in a semi-black-market adoption against the wishes of the birth parents. The girl was understandably upset about this possibility; when she confronted her parents, it became clear to them that, even with their reassurance, their daughter still felt confused and concerned about how everything had been handled.

  It was also clear that the adoptive parents had suddenly found themselves in an adversarial role with the birth parents, and that their daughter wa
s essentially being asked to choose sides. Fortunately, the lines of communication in this family were wide open and included lots of talk about adoption. Even so, the situation was difficult and upsetting enough to make them seek counseling.

  Happily, the situation was largely resolved when I shared my old case notes with the girl. They indicated that there had been phone conversations between me and the birth father, and also between the attorney and the birth father. It became clear that the man had known about the baby and had willingly relinquished his parental rights. The girl and I were also able to talk about the fact that her birth mother had been so young that she had probably not fully comprehended everything that had happened. Perhaps the birth father, who was in his early twenties at the time, had told the birth mother that he had had no involvement in the adoption in an effort to distance himself from any responsibility for his illegal relationship with a minor. The girl, her parents, her nice and reasonable boyfriend, and I talked for hours about various possibilities, none of which included either the idea that her birth mother might be trying to cause trouble or that her parents might have taken part in an illegal adoption.

  I encourage adoptive families to keep copies of all correspondence with birth parents. Generally, this consists of letters or email messages the parents have sent to birth parents about the child’s growth and milestones, what he likes to do, and how much he is loved, along with pictures of the child and of significant events in his life. These communications are full of the sort of detailed information (and bragging) that only people who love a child would be interested in. Put it all together and you have a thorough and thoughtful record of childhood that will be treasured by the child and adoptive parents as well as by the birth parents. It will also serve to let the child know that his parents were respectful and inclusive of the birth parents and will stand as a record if there is ever a dispute about this.