ChildDrenched: Should Your Child’s Reaction to Being Adopted Worry You?

Deciding when and how to tell your child about being adopted can be a source of great anxiety for adoptive and potential adoptive parents.  In addition to worrying about the optimal age a child should be told this fact, parents often worry about how to tell their child and what the reaction might be.  Will their child be upset, confused, or (Heaven forbid!) resentful when they find out the parents they’ve known all their life aren’t their biological family?  These highly volatile issues may intimidate some parents from considering adoption at all, but parents who educate themselves about taking the right steps, at the right time, for their particular child can insure a positive and healthy outcome.

I am certainly not a doctor or a psychologist, but I hope that my experience can ease some of the apprehension of the potential issues down the road.  My daughter was adopted at birth, seven and a half years after our second son was born.  Before she was born, we didn’t consider when we would tell her about being adopted.  Our two biological sons reacted very positively to their new baby sister and life moved on, the same as if she had also been brought home from the local hospital.  It was only after our friends started asking us when we would tell her that we began thinking about it.  We agreed to wait to worry about it until we felt she was mature enough to understand the concept of adoption.

As it turned out, it was a long time before she was ready to hear anything.  We read some books to her that were written specifically for children about adoption just to see if there was any reaction and to see if she understood the difference between adopted and biological children.  She was just happy the babies in the book found happy homes.  I also read some articles, books and searched online for information on the subject.  Most of them gave the same advice: understanding your child is the best indicator of how and when to talk to your child.

Our daughter learned she was adopted on her fifth birthday.  Wanting a baby sister, just like her good friend whose mother was pregnant, she asked if I could make her one in my belly too.  It caught me by surprise but I felt she was ready to understand how much she was loved by her adopted family, regardless of why her biological family was no longer a part of her life.  I explained it simply to her by saying “Your brothers grew in my tummy, but you grew in my heart.”  She asked whose tummy she grew in and after getting the honest answer from me, she said “Well, I would still like a baby sister so can you grow another baby in your heart?”  I was relieved she had no hurt or rejected feelings whatsoever.  A few days later (read more)