Nurturing an adopted child
In Neil Simon's "The Goodbye Girl," Paula has been jilted so many times that when her true love finally appears on the scene, she can't trust that he's the real thing. Eliot, the man who wants to marry her, becomes so angry and frustrated that he shouts at her, "I hate all those men who came before. They've ruined it for me!"
The movie is a perfect metaphor for anyone who wants to understand the dynamics of adopting an older child. Just think of the child as the woman who's been jilted and the parents as the one true love. All the men who came before? They're the caregivers between the birth mother and the adoptive parents.
That some older adoptive children don't know how to trust can be the source of misunderstanding, frustration, anger, and pain for many of the parents who adopt them. The sooner parents understand and respond to the source of the distrust rather than take it personally, the sooner they will be a family in spirit as well as words, say post-adoption specialists.
"Babies who don't go from the arms of the birth mother to the waiting arms of the adoptive parents experience what we call a break in attachment," says trauma and attachment psychotherapist Lark Eshleman, author of "Becoming A Family, Promoting Healthy Attachments with your Adopted Child" (Taylor Publishing).
Whether that break lasts for months or years is not as crucial to a child's development as what happens during it.
"How well were her needs met? Did she learn to associate mother with love, safety, and nurturing, or with neglect and fear?" asks Eshleman. Internationally known for her work with orphans in Croatia, she is founder and director of the Institute for Children and Families (instituteforchildren.com) in West Chester, Pa.
Children whose intervening experiences are positive are able to transfer trust from one set of caregivers to another without much difficulty. Children who have had multiple caregivers or whose experiences are neglectful or abusive are at risk for a range of attachment issues, known at the extreme end of the spectrum as reactive attachment disorder.
"Is that risk a reason not to adopt internationally, or not to adopt an older child? I don't believe so," says Eshleman.
It does, however, behoove parents to know what to do should these issues crop up, says Cleveland psychologist Greg S. Keck. "The kind of parenting that helps this child is often counter-intuitive," he says.
With international adoptions on the rise (according to the US Department of Health and Human Services, 20,099 in 2002, a three-fold increase in a decade), and foster-child adoptions also climbing (51,000 in 2002, up 38 percent over 14 years), researchers and clinicians are working hard to understand how attachment plays out in adoption. The subject is not without controversy. In 2000, a 10-year-old girl suffocated while undergoing a radical therapy known as "rebirthing," a strategy Eshleman and Keck shun. The attachment therapy they practice recognizes that you can't be "reborn" to your new mom; rather, says Eshleman, adoptive parents "have to make up for the injury to the attachment that would have been had they been the birth parents."
Karen Gibedes of Yarmouth has learned that the hard way. Her son, Nicholas, now 11, came to her as a foster child when he was 18 months old. She adopted him when he was 5, but for years she didn't understand him.
"When you love a child, you assume he'll love you back," she says. He exhibited classic signs of attachment disorder, but she didn't know it. "Nick would turn his back on me and not accept affection," she says. "He would fall down and not cry. He never made eye contact. He broke things on purpose, toys and gifts."
What she learned is that the brains of babies neglected during infancy develop differently from those of other babies.
Barbara Braun-McDonald, an attachment therapist at Capeside Psychotherapy in Brewster, explains how it happens: "If a baby cries and he's ignored, and it happens over and over again, at some level he begins to tell himself, `I can't trust that the people who are in charge are going to meet my needs. I have to be in charge of myself. That means I have to be smarter and better than everyone else.' " Over time, she says, the distrust gets neurologically imprinted in the brain.
Not only that, but it takes so much emotional energy to take care of themselves that they have little left over to invest in the people around them. "That makes them apathetic to the reciprocal process of relationships," says Keck. He is past president of the Association for Treatment and Training in the Attachment of Children (attach.org) and author of "Parenting the Hurt Child."
He says this flawed beginning almost certainly is the basis for the confusing behavior adoptive parents may see years later, from the way a child has no regard for parental authority to how she'll pull you to her emotionally by doing something endearing, then push you away with dreadful, hurtful behavior.
The latter is particularly frustrating, "because it almost always happens just when you thought you've had a breakthrough. So then, of course, you blame yourself," says mental health counselor Ken Frohock. He says the behavior comes from a deep-seated fear of rejection and of loss of control. To a child, that translates to not being able to take care of himself, maybe even to not being able to survive. Frohock works with adoptive families at the Attachment Institute of New England in West Boylston (www.attachmentnewengland.com).
This need for control is typically huge for children coming out of orphanages or foster care. "They learned early that the people who control you don't protect you," Keck says. "They will do everything to take control away from you," including setting up tests designed for you to fail. When you do, it enables her to tell herself, "See! She can't take care of me. I don't have to love her. I don't have to trust her."
Parents who are unaware of the dynamic typically get into one power struggle after another.
Consider the 6-year-old who asks for candy even though he knows the rule is no candy before meals. Mom says a firm "No." Minutes later, she finds him eating candy he took from the drawer. Angry and frustrated, she scolds him or turns her back and pretends she didn't see, hoping to avoid another confrontation.
Either way, she fails the test.
By yelling, she's lost control, therefore yielding it, Frohock says. By turning her back, she confirms that she isn't capable of taking care of him. Logical consequences are recommended: "Calmly, without anger, take the candy away and say, `I see you've already had your sweets today. You won't need dessert.' "
That's a take-charge response that is not only a surprise but also loving, caring, and not punitive. With repetition, Frohock says a child internalizes it in a positive way: "Mom is strong enough and smart enough to take care of me."
"All your interactions need to be designed to prove that to your child," he says. Meanwhile, by having fewer struggles, you have more fun together. "Ultimately, that's what gets you to a more loving relationship," says Keck.
In most cases, this style will make a difference within four to six weeks; with extreme reactive attachment disorder, professional help is advised.
Karen Gibedes says that's what made the difference for her and Nick. When Nick was 3 or 4, she saw him put his Matchbox cars on the stairs and hide, watching to see if she would fall. She walked around the cars and said nothing. "I didn't know what to do," she says. Through attachment therapy, she learned a better response: Calmly picking them up and saying, to herself but loud enough for Nick to hear, "I'm such a good mom, I know how to keep myself safe so I can always keep my son safe, too."
Contact Barbara F. Meltz at meltz@globe.com.
