I believe some types of adoption that would have been fine for us if we’d been adopting our first child are not fine for us now that we have other children. My last blogs have talked about birth order and spacing and safety issues. Here I will speak about emotional issues. Adoption can be a roller coaster of emotions, for your children as well as for you. The issues I will address here are: permanence issues and fears, and medical issues.
I personally would not accept a legal-risk foster-adopt placement now that I have children. In a domestic infant adoption where the birth mother had a few weeks or less to change her mind, my kids are old enough that I could tell them we are babysitting while the birth mother decides if she can be the forever mother or if It will be our family. This route is suggested by adoption counselors. Parents naturally want to celebrate with friends and extended family when a baby arrives in the home, but saving the party until the placement is final signifies to your children that the pre-finalization situation is different. This may help save them from being devastated if a birth parent does change his or her mind. In a legal-risk placement where the birth parent or family member is being given a year to become a safe parent through drug treatment, parenting classes, finding safe housing, or whatever, it would not be possible for our family to stay detached in that way.
I believe this is especially important if you have adopted children. These children know that sometimes a parent-child bond can be dissolved and may have extra abandonment fears. Our family used to participate in a transitional host home program for homeless families. We continued that after our birth son was born, but will not do it now that we have the girls. I believe that whatever they may be able to comprehend intellectually, they need to know in their gut that children who come to live in this house do not leave.
Many siblings of children with special needs receive significant intangible benefits from this experience. But some medical issues also carry risk. Many parents think about whether a severely disabled child will continue to be a heavy responsibility for their siblings once the parents are gone. We do not always think about the time that medical procedures will require us to be at the hospital and away from our other children. We also do not think about the grief our other children will feel if the sibling they have become attached to dies. When our family adopted our daughter knowing she had a 50-50 chance of needing open heart surgery, we felt comfortable enough with what doctors described as a “routine open-heart surgery” (surely an oxymoron if ever there was one) that we could take the risk. But later I panicked, thinking how devastated our son would be if something should go wrong during the surgery and he lost his sister. (The surgery was to take place, if needed, when she was a certain age and/or weight. This meant she would have been living with us for at least a year before surgery.) Fortunately, our daughter didn’t need surgery. But it’s something I should have considered.