One of the key things a social worker considers when assessing an adoptive parent’s application to adopt an older child is the parents’ ability to give and receive love. Several behavioral and personality traits of the potential adoptive parents offer a social worker clues about their ability to give and receive love. Relationships with our siblings, parents and spouses as well as our support system of friends usually offer a good picture of adoptive parents’ ability to give and receive love. Assessing a parent’s ability to claim a child is more difficult.
Adopting and older child and having a relationship with the child is unlike any other interpersonal relationship. It is not same kind biophysical connection that drives the claiming of a newborn. It is not a mutual or reciprocal relationship like marriage. In simple terms, claiming a child who is already a person is not like any other relationship most people experience.
There are some questions parents might be asked in order to help a social worker asses their capacity to claim a child:
- What do you do when a friend disappoint you?
- How do you usually end a relationship?
- What does a child owe parents?
- What do parents owe a child?
- What would it take for you to say, ‘This is no longer my child?’
One major thing most perspective adoptive parents can’t imagine is a situation in which they would ever give up a child. Many parents adopting older children are shocked when training instructors or social workers talk about abused and neglected children and the resulting problems these children may carry the rest of their lives. Many parents feel they can turn a child around and often parents are upset when told they will never know until they actually have a child placed and try. It is often at this point in time when parents make statements such as, “Well, adoptions aren’t final until they are final are they?” Or, “Is it possible for us to meet several children and get to know them before we decide?”
Adoptive parents who are overly concerned with what other people think about “image” or with “fitting in” tend to have issues in claiming an older child. Parents with rigid lifestyles or households often have issues with control. People who express an inflexible attitude regarding typical child behavior often have difficulty claiming an older child as their own.
A positive indication of an adoptive parent’s ability to claim a child has to do with imagination. There is so little social framework within which to think about older-child adoption, and parents of an older child must be able to create a different kind of birth process in order to experience their children entering their lives. They need to be able to recreate imaginatively the definition of “family,” and what kind of family they are willing to become.
In the next blog I will talk about things adoptive parents can do to Claim their newly placed child.
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For more information about parenting special needs children you might want to visit the Families.com Special Needs Blog and the Mental Health Blog. Or visit my personal website.