Birth is More Than Once: The Inner World of Adopted Korean Children was written by Hei Sook Park Wilkinson, Ph.D.
Wilkinson is a clinical psychologist. She has been in private practice and also consulted with hospitals and human development centers. Besides her psychology background, she has another source of insight into the inner worlds of children adopted from Korea. Wilkinson herself is Korean. While she was not adopted, she shares the experience of moving to a new country with a new language in which she is a racial minority. In addition, while she was a student in Korea she volunteered at a Korean orphanage. (This began after her high school choir visited the orphanage. Sook Wilkinson’s statement that prior to the age of fifteen, she had had no contact with orphans was in itself interesting to me—so different from the American foster care system where the kids usually attend public schools.)
The book was published in 1985. The third edition published last year includes a new preface by Dr. Wilkinson and an informative essay about her life, written as an oral history project by a student in an Asian-American Women’s Studies class at the University of Michigan.
The crux of the book is about a research project Wilkinson conducted in 1976 and 1977 with eight children between the ages of four and seven years old (average age, just under six years), who had been adopted from South Korea at ages ranging from five months to six years (average age at which they joined their new families, just over three years). The children had been in the U.S. an average of two and a half years when Wilkinson began studying them. One boy had been in the U.S. and in his new family for less than a year. All of these children were full-blooded Korean and had been adopted by Caucasian parents in Michigan. A couple of the children had a sibling who was also adopted from either Korea or Vietnam. All of them were at that time the only Koreans in their families and immediate communities. Four of the study children were boys and four were girls.
The project involved the children meeting with Wilkinson weekly for eight months in a play therapy room. Wilkinson observed the children’s varied reactions to meeting an adult Korean and the themes which emerged from their play and from the questions and comments they made to her. These themes included fear of separation from their parents, obsessions with food, security, and approval; teasing from classmates, and initial downplaying and later reclaiming of their Korean identity.
As an adoptive parent, some of this slender volume was hard to read. The children confided in Wilkinson teasing that most of the parents didn’t know about. Even the children adopted at five months and at eighteen months seemed to have fears of doing the wrong thing, thereby upsetting their parents and perhaps losing them; and a desire to regress and be bottlefed. A six-year-old who had been adopted at age three played “store” and tried to sell Wilkinson various “babies” who had been “lost and found by the police”.
It must be remembered that this is a study of only eight children in Michigan over twenty years ago. Our society has become more diverse. Children adopted from Korea now are most often infants or young toddlers and are not usually suffering from malnutrition.
Nevertheless the book is unique in exploring in depth the children’s feelings expressed through play over time. It is a thought-provoking window into their feelings which led me to think about how ceratin behaviors of my own kids might be interpreted.
The book is definitely not intended for children. Like the birthmothers’ letters in I Wish for You a Beautiful Life, this book can provide insights for adoptive parents and professionals.
Please see these related blogs:
Books for Adults on Adoption from China and Korea
Pretend with Your Child and Improve his Future