Some of the suggestions for talking about drug abuse and physical abuse and mental illness may also be adapted to talk about neglect, whether the neglect is due to maternal depression, or to birthparents’ seeming lack of knowledge of children’s needs, or their seeming inability to care for another.
In early childhood: “Your mother took a kind of medicine that wasn’t given her by a doctor. She thought it would make her feel good, but it was bad medicine. It made her sleepy so she couldn’t take good care of you.”
In elementary school: Your mother took bad drugs that weren’t given her by a doctor. She probably thought they’d make her feel good, but when she tried to stop taking them she felt very sick until she took some more. She kept trying to feel better by getting some more, and soon she was so busy trying to not feel bad that she couldn’t take good care of you.”
In later childhood: “When people start using drugs, they do it to feel good. They don’t mean to hurt people they love. But drugs make people not think well. They also make it so that once people start taking them, it’s very, very hard to stop. People start to feel sick if they stop, so they might do wrong things to try to get more drugs so they don’t feel sick. Then their thinking gets worse and worse. Probably your birthparents loved you, but once they got so they couldn’t stop using drugs, they couldn’t keep you safe.”
Note: It is true that chemical dependency is a disease. But often adoptive parents, trying to spare their children’s feelings, explain that the birthparents couldn’t care for the child because they were “sick”. While true, this may lead to children panicking if the adoptive parent becomes ill. Stress that the issue was the birthparent’s inability to care for a child. This also applies to talking about poverty–you don’t want the child to worry that you will abandon him if you lose your job. Stress that the issue was the ability to keep a child safe and do all the things parents do—provide love and security, see that basic needs are taken care of and that a child is learning, etc.
Please see these related blogs:
Book Review: Making Sense of Adoption by Lois Ruskai Melina
Babies Produced by the Drug Culture