Disastrous Advice on Preventing Adoptee Estrangement
Severance magazine offers 8 Ways to Guarantee Eternal Love and Devotion from Your Adoptee, Luella Dalpymple’s misguided advice for adoptive parents. (It’s satire, in case you didn’t catch that!).
Go read Luella and then come back here.
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Great! Glad you’re back, now with context. And if you read to the end, you know that Luella is a figment of my imagination. Here continues my dialog with her.
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Whereas you, Luella, learned from adoption agencies and social media influencers, let me counter each of your 8 Tips with what I have learned from adoptees and adoptee-oriented therapists.
1. Be very careful when deciding what to share about your story of adopting.
Sara Easterly, an adoptee, an educator on attachment, and an author, has 8 tips to avoid oversharenting that you might have missed if you are not seeking out adoptee viewpoints. About consent, Sara says:
Young children are unable to provide consent around whether their pictures and stories are shown on the Internet or in other public spaces. But for adoptees, consent is even more complicated than age…I write from experience. Sadly, I was unable to speak my truth to my adoptive family until I was in my 40s and my adoptive mother had died. Until then, I spent years politely nodding along as she used my story to sing the praises of adoption.
—Sara Easterly, author of Searching for Mom and Adoption Unfiltered
For the well-being of your adoptees, and for your relationship with them, I suggest you avidly study all of Sara’s tips.
2. An adoptee is not a blank slate, so don’t expect to be able to mold them.
Modern adoption practices were developed during the 20th century on the premise that a baby is a blank slate. Emerging neuroscience in the 21st century tells us differently.
Therapist and adoptee Lesli Johnson reveals that parenting as though your adoptee is a blank state is actually very harmful. When we have this belief,
…we have to pretend adoption didn’t happen. We’re going to pretend that this baby began when they came to our family rather than when this baby was born, or even earlier. We’re gonna pretend this baby looks like us. We’re gonna pretend this baby has the same genetic makeup, the same medical history right? It really erases the identity in some respects of the child. We’re going to put all of our hopes and dreams and wishes for what we wanted in a child onto this blank slate.
—Lesli Johnson, adoptee and therapist, in ep111 of Adoption: The Long View
All that pretending over the long arc of parenting makes adoptive parents fragile, puts distance between people, carrying a cost to all involved and to the relationship.
3. Do you require your adoptee to make you feel validated?
If you’re needing validation from a baby or a child, you are putting them in service of you rather than you being in service of them. Please see a therapist to work out this dysfunctional dynamic with another adult, rather than inadvertently making your adoptee feel responsible for anything missing or wrong in your life.
When you have that kind of loss or grief in your body, it’s a physical block that keeps the pure energy of you from flowing. Your child is going to sense that, and they are going to take it personally, and think it’s something they did wrong. They will then have this body confusion in relation to your body.
—Anne Heffron, adoptee and author of You Don’t Look Adopted, in ep206 of Adoption: The Long View.
4. Notice differences. See the whole person.
Take it from adoptee and facilitator Greg Gentry. Not seeing differences brings distance between you and your adoptee—not closeness.
It was comforting to my parents to tell me they didn’t see our differences. But they never asked me if I noticed differences myself.
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—Greg Gentry, ep407 of Adoption: The Long View
As with so many things in adoption, aim for BothAnd. See and honor the similarities and the differences.
5. Supporting your adoptee includes humanizing their birth parents.
When you set up a competition, even in your own head, and even one in which you seem to be the clear winner, you have already lost. Your need to be the “winner” by casting your child’s birth parent as a “loser” necessitates that your adoptee split their loyalties. That hurts them, and no adoptive parent wants to hurt their child, right Luella?
“What you think about my birth parents is what you think about me,” says Rebecca Ricardo, adoptee, birth mom, and adoption agency executive, whom I interviewed in ep401 of Adoption: The Long View. “We are of our birth parents, so if you think less of them, adoptees know that at some level you think less of us.”
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You simply cannot be everything to your child—no one can. If that is difficult for you to accept, please see a therapist.
6. If Grandpa disses your adoptee, call it out.
Lanise Antoine Shelley, interracial adoptee and actor, shares this story of being left to fend for herself when she found herself on the receiving end of a microaggression and stereotype about adoption:
I got an email from my grandmother saying, Your mom brought you into her family and you are ungrateful. You’re undeserving, and I am thoroughly disappointed in your behavior. Can you imagine what that did to me? There are a few times in my life that I had, like, blood rage, and that was one of them. My mother’s response was, She loves you. She admonishes all of your cousins as well.
Colossal missteps like these lead a lot of adoptees to saying to their adoptive parents, Forget it. I’m out of here.
—Lanise Antoine Shelley, interracial adoptee and activator, in ep508 of Adoption: The Long View
7. When it’s necessary to apologize, there is a healthy way to do so.
You say “right” way; I say “healthy” way, Luella. There are ways to apologize that bring connection our of separations, and ways to apologize that bring more separation.
If you want your adoptee to know how to take responsibility for their actions, even ones that cause hurt, you need to model doing so.
It starts with compassion toward yourself. If you have self-compassion, then when you make a mistake. You can say “sorry” even to a child, which is a really important thing. You can own up to things. You can be accountable because you don’t have the defense up, protecting that idea that you need to be good all the time.
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—Dr Brad Reedy, ep404 of Adoption: The Long View
Even if you didn’t intend to cause hurt (we seldom do), when your adoptee comes to you with their hurt or anger, you can still say: “Thank you for telling me about this. I am so sorry I hurt you. I am curious…would you tell me more?”
8. As the parent, you are and will be accountable.
You may think that the balance of power will always favor you, but your adoptees will eventually grow up and into their own power. They will eventually be the ones deciding if it feels good to be with you over the holidays—or not. If they choose to remain connected to you, will it be from obligation, guilt, or financial reasons? Or from a true desire to be in your presence?
Look inward first. Don’t think you are above accountability.
—Patrick Armstrong, adoptee, ep509 of Adoption: The Long View
Act as though you will be called to account for all the decisions you make around birth parent contact, for everything you say—and even think—about birth parents, and your willingness and ability to enter into conversations about your adoptee’s adoptedness. Instead of fearing that happening one day, why not make all of this as adoptee-centered—and thus defensible—as you can?
This does not mean you need to be perfect. It simply means we parents strive to be intentional.
Side note: those who are still actively parenting, unlike Luella, might want to try this exercise.
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I’ll close, Luella, with this quote from Dr JaeRan Kim, co-developer of the Adoptee Consciousness Model:
Estrangement is really a sad outcome because the whole idea of adoption is to provide permanency and forever families.
Adoptees sometimes say, “I don’t talk to my adoptive parents anymore because they were unhealthy to be in relationship with.” It’s not just about that relationship in the first few decades. Ideally, even after that you stay in relationship. You don’t want to be estranged from your adult adopted child.
—JaeRan Kim, PhD, scholar and adoptee, ep509 of Adoption: The Long View
Stick these on your fridge, Luella
So these are my 8 thoughts about your original tips, Luella. Put them on your fridge, tend to your own hurt parts, and maybe with time and attention your adoptees won’t always be quite so busy on weekends and holidays.
4 Responses
Great Post Lori. Sometimes it is good to laugh – even at these very serious things! Great creativity 🙂
Thanks for reading both posts, Linda. I had lots of laughs with Luella, for sure!
I think Luella “got it.” Her tips were intended to present, with humour, the “what not to do’s” if your intention is to support your child’s sense of safety and healthy development. But I very much appreciated the responses above that further explained what Luella was actually saying. Thanks for this.
You are so correct, Wendy! I’m so glad you saw the satire in it all.