ADOPTION: YOU CAN DO IT! Blog Post #16, Chapter 11 – Real Relationships Face-to-Face
Today’s excerpt from ADOPTION: YOU CAN DO IT! A Husband-Wife Date-Study for Successfully Raising Adopted Children in the Christian Home applies to all families, particularly adoptive families. I hope you’ll read it and glean some parenting wisdom. This week I received some very positive endorsements from my Beta readers. My book should be in print and e-book mid to late December. I’m getting so excited!
Pleasant words are like a honeycomb, sweetness to the soul and health to the bones. Proverbs 16:24
Sadly, we live in an age where zombies really do exist in everyday life—they are walking around in our cities, and even our homes. The ‘touchy-feely’ machine of George Orwell’s 1984 is alive and well in our personal screens that we refer to as cell phones and other hand-held computer technology personal devices. I am using one right now! I have to vigilantly guard myself from not becoming addicted to them, especially late at night when I am still awake, alone, or even in the midst of my busy homeschool days surrounded by my houseful of children when I need an escape from reality by using social media.
Our technology-based culture has overtaken conversations during mealtime as the main method of communication with family members. No longer do American families eat three meals a day together. Lost in our technology-dependent world is a family’s waking up at the breakfast table discussing the events of the day, checking in at lunch to solve problems that erupted during the morning, and family members ‘debriefing’ the day at supper time. Since most Americans no longer attend church, no special Sunday meal is enjoyed after weekly morning worship. No discussion of the sermon, no relaxed fellowship around the pot roast and clothed table, and definitely not a weekly or monthly formal dining room meal with grandparents, aunts, or uncles attending. Our media devices can be set to ‘share’ calendars so family members know when to show up for the next get together, and we can text instead of talking face-to-face. The technology is amazing and great, but it gets in the way of our personal relationships, and definitely displaces several generations sitting around at the table together, talking over made-from-scratch cooking.
Car rides are now screen focused with the driver and GPS interacting for directions, instead of dad and mom talking through the paper map navigation. Meanwhile, kids ride in the backseat, zoned out except to the built-in screen, playing Disney or Marvel. My parents purchased a new minivan not too long ago. When they selected the model that best suited their needs, they had no choice but to buy one which included a media screen for the backseat—it came standard, not even as an optional upgrade. Gone forever are the long talks with my friends and their parents that I so enjoyed as a child during my daily school carpool route. I miss my siblings and I listening attentively to our Mom’s narration of the roadside attractions we passed during our two-week driving vacations every summer. Screens have replaced relationships everywhere.
Since the typical modern American family now rarely shares a home-cooked meal around the kitchen table, lost is the meaningful repartee between parents and children recapping the day. “What did you do at school today?” “What happened at the office that was new and different?,” and especially “What does the Bible say in Proverbs about the righteous versus the unrighteous?” The art of conversation, particularly between family members, is dying out. Unless we act quickly, it will be dead, right along with the biblical definitions of marriage and family.
Not only is this a tragedy for parents and their biological children, but for the family who chooses to adopt, it means fewer chances for positive, meaningful conversation, which means fewer opportunities for getting to know one another as a bonding mechanism. Of paramount importance to adopted children, and the families who choose to love them, is the time it takes to converse face-to-face, on a daily basis, about the mundane as well as the major things in life. If these all-important conversations don’t happen at the meal table or during car rides, when and where will they happen? Certainly not at the ‘staged’ weekly meetings called family therapy!
The adoptive family, before a placement ever occurs, or certainly by the time it finally happens, needs to learn to slow down. In the slower pace of life, time will allow for meaningful conversation to take place around the table, in the car, during evening walks around the block, barbequing out on the backyard patio, or while picnicking at a local park. All of these activities are the perfect setting to get to know each other, build trust, and bond in relationship because of the conversation that can and should happen while engaging in this type of slower paced lifestyle.
Kids know when adults are too busy to pay attention to them. Kids know when they are not on top of the priority list. Kids know when they can get away with misbehaving. What kids who are in adoptive placement probably don’t know—particularly during the elementary, tween, and teen years—is how to talk to adults appropriately. They lack the foundational teaching of how to start a conversation, how to respectfully listen and respond, and how to engage in building personal relationships through free discussion on any topic of interest to either the child or the adult involved. It takes months, if not years, of adults modeling and encouraging this all-important social skill before adopted children are comfortable with it as a part of their daily life….
