Needing Attention

Though my children are not adopted, when the youngest son was born, at about 2 years old for him and 6 for the older boy, there developed a lot of problems. I would wake up every morning thinking I am not going to fight with him and within 20 minutes he would act up and I would react. My dad had quite a temper that terrified us when we were growing up even though he never laid a hand on us – just seeing his face turning red was enough to suppress us for fear of going too far.

Also, my mom and youngest sister had a terrible relationship and so I knew how important it was to turn the situation around as quickly as possible. My husband started taking the younger one and I started taking the older one when each parent needed to have direct responsibility for one kid. That took care of it in only a matter of months. Thankfully. All that was needed was the direct attention that had been in short supply as I cared for an infant.

Today, I was reading about a foster parent having trouble with older foster children (ages 9 and 12) who also has 4 younger biological girls (ages 2, 3, 4 & 6). It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to see that the acting out and behavior problems of the older foster children are cries for attention. It is tough enough to have been removed from one’s original parents . . . just that explains much. I do know how this situation came to pass as a kind of natural trajectory but it doesn’t appear to have a good prognosis though the foster parents are trying and do care. It may be that they simply cannot give enough with the other demands in their immediate family.

An Atlantic article in 2015 details some of the behavioral problems that adoptees exhibit. This is the happy story a lot of people believe –

There is something temptingly tidy about the idea of adoption: A family with extra love and resources meets a child in desperate need of both. The happy ending almost writes itself.

Only that is often not the story that actually exists. At the start of kindergarten, one study showed, about one in four adopted children has a diagnosed disability, twice the rate of children being raised by both biological parents. Adopted children were significantly likelier than birth children to have behavior and learning problems; teachers reported they were worse at paying attention in class, and less able to persevere on difficult tasks.

A follow-up study suggests the problems for adopted children not only fail to fade with time—they multiply. A growing chorus of voices are challenging the popular Pollyannaism around adoption including adoptees who are now speaking out. Add me to that chorus.

Adoptive parents tend to be especially sensitive about their children’s well-being, and aggressive in obtaining diagnoses and related treatment for them. In other words, the very qualities that make adoptive parents stand out—their resources, their proactivity—also prompt them to seek out expert care at the earliest sign of trouble.

With parents this dedicated, why do adopted children seem to struggle so much? One theory might be based in knowledge about attachment – a strong bond with at least one nurturing adult—usually the mother—is essential to a child thriving. Mother/child separations cannot help but be part of the problem.

Our First Union

We seek love, because of that very first union we had with another person – our mother. Of course, at birth, it was necessary for us to separate physically from her, in order to grow and develop further. Even after birth, and more importantly still, if we are totally separated from her – taken away from her and given to a complete stranger (as in adoption) to raise us – very deep within us, we know her still.

In the womb, we heard her voice, experienced her emotions, tasted the foods she preferred flavoring the amniotic fluid that cushioned us from the blows of a harsh world. We were ever intimately connected to all the interior sounds, her heartbeat and other organs functioning. They say a pregnant woman is a totally different gender from the typical male/female divide.

Though we celebrate our mother’s love in May, the month of February is full of constant reminders of the importance of love. We send Valentine’s to other people, even children do this as they celebrate the day in school and church. We remember to tell people we love them.

Yesterday was my own mother’s birthday. I lost her to death in 2015. The years fly by so quickly. Most years on her birthday, I called her up on the telephone and we would talk for a very long time. During a difficult time in my life, I remember going into the darkened kitchen to cry alone in my deep despair. Suddenly, she was there. Her maternal sense knew I needed comforting.

My mom was taken away from her mother after a brief visit. Her desperate mother was struggling to find a way to support the two of them. The father (she was married) inexplicably did not answer when her cry of distress through the Juvenile Court in Memphis was issued. I like to believe he didn’t get the message in time to prevent my mom from being taken from her own mother by exploitation and unbearable pressure (surrender your child or be declared unfit by my good friend the Juvenile Court judge said Georgia Tann, the master baby thief, to my grandmother).

Separating a child from their original mother causes deep wounds. I grieve that our country cruelly does this to migrant children. It is an abomination. Truly.

Separation Trauma

This subject comes up frequently in adoptee groups. Also mentioned is RAD – Radical Attachment Disability.

Children are seriously harmed when they are separated from their parents. There has been quite a bit of research that proves that harm. When a court becomes involved in a child welfare case, it is important to balance the harm of removing a child with the risk of abuse or neglect that the child faces by remaining in the home.

When that is apparently necessary, it is still important to preserve a child’s relationship with their family of birth. The effects of separation from their original parents on children is always devastating. Such children are at increased risk for
developing heart disease, diabetes, and even certain forms of cancer. Even when children are in the care of parents who may not be able to meet their needs, they still organize their behaviors and thinking around these relationships and go to great lengths to maintain them.

Other ways that separation from their original family can impact children includes developmental regression, difficulty sleeping, depression and generally acute stress.

The younger a child is when they’re exposed to the stress of separation, the more likely it is that they will have negative health outcomes caused by dysregulation of stress hormones and a response to that flood of them. That dysregulated stress response can lead to architectural changes in the brain.

Family separation may also lead to long-term chronic medical conditions like cardiovascular disease, hypertension, obesity and decreased longevity.

If It Was So Good . . .

why am I so unhappy ?

It is a paradox and difficult to explain beyond the fact that fear and trauma put the child into a survival mechanism. Yes, even with a loving and kind, caring adoptive family, an adoptee can feel messed up a lot of the time. The adoptee may rationally feel like they should be okay with having been adopted by such nice people. Yet, they are sad. There is a trauma that exists deep down in every adoptee whether they ever become aware of it or not. Adoption by strangers is never a normal experience in reality.

Adoptive parents may say, “My adopted child is so close to me. It is like they are attached at the hip.” While this may seem like a good thing, and the adoptive parent interprets this to mean that their child is well adjusted and/or bonded to them, it is actually a fear driven survival instinct in response to an abandonment, even if the child could never define it as such to their adoptive parent.

Sadly, the perspective of many adoptive parents is something akin to owning a possession. In some adoptees, the response to the adoptive parents is similar to repulsion. While an adoptee may attach, it is an attachment based on a longing for what is not there between the adopted child and the adoptive parents. It is inescapable that all adoptees are deprived of something fundamental that affects them developmentally.

The young adopted child will eventually stop crying for the need that can never be met. Unfortunately, in this surrender, the adoptee is seen as “such a good baby”. By the time this happens, the adoptee’s attachment style has already been deeply altered. They adapt.

Adoptees know how to use all of the different attachment coping styles, and switch between them based on the specific situation they find themselves in. Very little of what they are expressing outside reflects their true internal feelings. It is not how they are really feeling or what they are really needing. Mostly it is about appeasing the adult who is caring for them. It is a survival tactic. Always, what is seen, is even so, coming out of a deep and unaddressed trauma.

The Effect Is Catastrophic

This is what happens inside children when they are forcibly separated from their parents.

Their heart rate goes up. Their body releases a flood of stress hormones such as cortisol and adrenaline. Those stress hormones can start killing off dendrites — the little branches in brain cells that transmit messages. In time, the stress can start killing off neurons and — especially in young children — wreaking dramatic and long-term damage, both psychologically and to the physical structure of the brain.

“The effect is catastrophic,” said Charles Nelson, a pediatrics professor at Harvard Medical School. “There’s so much research on this that if people paid attention at all to the science, they would never do this. To pretend that separated children do not grow up with the shrapnel of this traumatic experience embedded in their minds is to disregard everything we know about child development, the brain, and trauma.”

Nelson has studied the neurological damage from child-parent separation — work that he said has often reduced him to tears. As the children grew older, Nelson and his colleagues began finding unsettling differences in their brains.

Those separated from their parents at a young age had much less white matter, which is largely made up of fibers that transmit information throughout the brain, as well as much less gray matter, which contains the brain-cell bodies that process information and solve problems.

The activity in the children’s brains was much lower than expected. “If you think of the brain as a lightbulb,” Nelson said, “it’s as though there was a dimmer that had reduced them from a 100-watt bulb to 30 watts.”

The children, who had been separated from their parents in their first two years of life, scored significantly lower on IQ tests later in life. Their fight-or-flight response system appeared permanently broken. Stressful situations that would usually prompt physiological responses in other people — increased heart rate, sweaty palms — would provoke nothing in the children.

What alarmed the researchers most was the duration of the damage. Unlike other parts of the body, most cells in the brain cannot renew or repair themselves. The reason child-parent separation has such devastating effects is because it attacks one of the most fundamental and critical bonds in human biology. From the time they are born, children emotionally attach to their mother. If separated from her, a caregiver can mitigate some of that damage but not all of it.

“Our bodies secrete hormones like oxytocin on contact that reinforces the bond, to help us attach and connect,” Lisa Fortuna, medical director for child and adolescent psychiatry at Boston Medical Center said. A child’s sense of what safety means depends on that relationship. And without it, the parts of the brain that deal with attachment and fear — the amygdala and hippocampus — develop differently.

The reason such children often develop PTSD later in life is that those neurons start firing irregularly, Fortuna said. “The part of their brain that sorts things into safe or dangerous does not work like it’s supposed to. Things that are not threatening seem threatening,” she said.

Telling The Story

If at any age your child asks you about their adoption and they want to know why –
they deserve the absolute truth. It should be age appropriate.

At a very young age, “Mommy couldn’t take care of you.”, may be enough.

Kids know when their parents don’t want them. They don’t need to be told; they’ve felt it from the beginning. Babies can feel rejection in the womb and it affects their attachments.

The majority of adoptees feel unwanted – whether it is a one time thing, or episodic, or lifelong – the question is how accurate is that perception ?

A parent should not evade an adoptee’s question but they should be sensitive and gentle in their response.

Not answering with the real reason when they ask, can lead them to feel like they aren’t good enough to be told the truth. Or that what they want doesn’t matter. Or that they aren’t smart enough to understand it. Or that they ought to just be happy with whatever answer they are given. And that they should stop bringing it up because the parent doesn’t want to talk about it.

A competent, caring, informed Adoptive Parent can manage to put the child’s feelings first and provide an answer that meets that child where they are developmentally, emotionally and intellectually.

But never lie. There are many subliminal messages that get sent to adoptees. Children often see themselves as the problem. The Adoptive Parent may not really know the whole truth. It may be very complex.

My dad’s original mother had a love affair with a married man. My dad was with his mother for some months after birth. Even so, she may have come to feel that adoption was her only solution to what may have been primarily a financial problem in the 1930s.

My mom’s story was complex. Her mother didn’t intend to lose her. She was exploited by a woman who was stealing and selling babies. My grandparents were married when my mom was conceived. It is not possible to know the whole story now about why they were separated. They are both dead and the descendants don’t seem to know the details accurately enough to convey them.

Parents should know that their children are incredibly resilient. Whatever the adoptees story is, they deserve to have their history told to them honestly.

Special ?

A child that has been told he is “special”
will feel that he has to be perfect
in order to retain the love and acceptance
of his adoptive parents.

Whether or not the adoptive parents exert any pressure,
the child may feel a need to live up to unattainable expectations.

Unable to do so, the child may feel inadequate and worthless.

~ The Primal Wound by Nancy Newton Verrier

Sadly, some of those children will end up in need of adoption a second time. It is easy to understand how deeply disrupted this will be for their lives. Such an experience could leave the child with lifelong doubts about their worth.

To be separated from one’s original mother is always traumatic. But an adoption dissolution carries a significant risk of additional trauma to the child.

Such a child is at high risk for forming insecure attachments and will have difficulty trusting adult caregivers. May have difficulty maintaining any caring relationship once they are mature.

Is it any wonder ?