With Eyes Wide Open is a workbook sometimes used in required pre-adoption preparation courses or given to pre-adoptive parents of international children. It is intended for parents adopting children who are several months old or older. These are children with life experiences, which the authors define as a child who has recognizes caregivers or caregiving patterns such as voices, words, gestures, who has attempted to attach to a caregiver, who is aware of smells, sounds, and sights in the environment.
This workbook intends to make you think about your child’s likely past experiences and what is likely to be most difficult for him/her in the new setting, and how you yourself may react to the culture shock of traveling to receive your child.
Typical exercises in the book include forming a picture of what you imagine your child will be like, what you imagine your family will look like in five or ten years, what medical conditions you might be open to. There are “visualization” scenarios in which you imagine that you are moving to a place with new sounds, smells, language, foods, beds, household appliances. Strange people keep hugging you and passing you around.
One exercise asks you to imagine that you are going to live in a rural Central American village. You travel for three days and feel sick. Then you meet the family, realize that their dialect sounds nothing like the formal Spanish you have studied, find yourself stared at and chattered about, and are then shown a mule to ride bareback to the family’s home. Your host family seems kind, but totally unprepared for the fact that you don’t know how to ride a mule. The book asks what other skills the family might expect you to have to cope with daily life. This can start you thinking about family life skills that your child may have no experience with.
Chapters in the book offer suggestions for anticipating and dealing with sensory deprivation and institutional living, attachment issues, abused and traumatized children, culture shock, separation from caregivers, food and sleep issues, prejudice, regressive behaviors, children who “act older” than their years, and telling your child his story. The book points out that most adoptive families do not experience all of these issues.
Topics discussed here that are not included in many other adoption books are siblings in adoption and the possible effects of adopting out of birth order (making your oldest child now a younger child, for example).
One exercise I found interesting tested your knowledge of your child’s birth culture and suggested trying to find the answers to the questions while you are on your trip. I thought I knew a lot about Korea (my daughters’ birth country), but many questions were ones I hadn’t thought of or realized I had only a vague idea about. Examples include: How do rich people treat poorer people? How do poor think about the rich? What do people think about the media? Where do they go for spiritual questions? Who gets vocational training? What do people learn from television? Who gets special education or therapy? Who gets psychiatric help and why? How are children of different ages disciplined? Who gets married or lives together and why? How is prostitution organized? What illegal drugs are used and how do people get them? How often do extended family and friends interact?
Many of these exercises are difficult, some even painful, as you imagine yourself or your child in various situations. But still it can, I think, be helpful in forcing ourselves to think some things through.
With Eyes Wide Open is published by Children’s Home Society and Family Services (formerly Children’s Home Society of Minnesota). Their website is www.chsfs.org. Used copies are sometimes available at Amazon.
Please see these related blogs:
Books for Adults on Adoption from China and Korea
Book Review: Real Parents, Real Children