ADOPTION: YOU CAN DO IT! Blog Post #11 – Chapter 6: Separation, Attachment, and Bonding
Today I am pleased to announce that I met with my publisher yesterday and my book should be in print by Christmas. Typesetting and cover design work will soon begin. How exciting! For, now, please enjoy this excerpt from (working title) ADOPTION: YOU CAN DO IT! A Husband-Wife Date-Study for Successfully Raising Adopted Children in the Christian Home.
…Much research in the past decade has helped uncover the mysteries of attachment between child and birth parents. The broken attachment and subsequent separation creates a life-long challenge for the child to bond with anyone else in her life.
If you are middle aged or older, you might remember the heart-wrenching stories of the Romanian babies languishing in orphanages in the late 1900s because of that nation’s cruel dictator. Unwanted and disabled children were stockpiled in cribs with little to no care. These babies were rarely held, let alone diapered or fed. The rooms of full of children in cribs were hauntingly silent because the children had given up crying, since crying did not get their basic needs met. Many of the children would simply bang their heads against the sides of their cribs to feel pain, at least, instead of nothing at all. When western nations learned of this atrocity wreaked by failed communist policies, many families in the United Kingdom and the United States reached out to adopt these children. The children were so badly affected by neglect, that they were mostly unable to bond with their adoptive families. These children carried the burden and pain of attachment disorder.
So, how do we help traumatized kids, many with the ‘reactive attachment disorder’ label, learn to bond in our adoptive homes? First, we have to understand separation, attachment, and bonding. Learn the terms, and read up on them. It is worth your time to do an Internet search for articles about these three powerful words, but it also might be devastating for you to read. If you can, read about it before you encounter this in your own adoption experience. I always think it is easier to proactively move forward with a project if I know all the details beforehand. Your adopted child is not a project, but what you are undertaking is equivalent to launching the first man to the moon, so you had best be informed, instead of going about it blindly.
Second, put good parenting into practice. Safely hold and show nurturing affection to your adopted child. Even teens need to learn to respond to ‘good touch’ and ‘safe hugs.’ A 20-second hug releases endorphins that soothe the soul of a child of any age (and adults too!). Speaking in a kind and gentle voice turns away wrath, and a child whose named is called in love will learn to respond positively over time. Unconditional love of patience, kindness, and perseverance are important for parents to gain as character traits. I often tell God I have learned enough of each of them… but apparently I have more lessons to learn.
Around the age of six months, a child naturally begins to crawl. As stated before, babies need to be on the floor rolling around, playing, and then be given room to explore by crawling. Studies have shown that around seven months, a baby will begin to crawl toward a trusted caregiver. If there is not a trusted caregiver, or the baby does not have the space to crawl, then bonding processes in the brain are delayed. This is just one significant part of that all-important frontal lobe brain growth which happens from 0-3 years in children. Even if a child is in foster care, or an orphanage where the child knows her loving caregivers, and the child can crawl towards the trusted caregiver with positive affirmation, then attachment responses will be enabled in that child. Once a child attaches to a trusted caregiver, that child can then more easily attach and bond to others.
I have seen this play out in the lives of my five adopted children. The three older ones spent the first two to three years of their life with untrustworthy caregivers—their biological parents and their untrustworthy friends or relatives. All three of these children were labeled with reactive attachment disorder when they came to us. It took all three of them nearly ten years to bond with my husband and me. Our two younger adopted children, who were raised from near infancy by a very experienced, capable, loving, Christian foster mom, have never had bonding issues. They bonded with her at the crawling stage, and they easily bonded with us when they came home….
