Attachment & Adoption - From an Adoptive Parent's Point of View

Adoption Friends,

I wanted to share with you some thoughts and information on forming a strong attachment with your adopted child – from an adoptive parent’s point of view – and let you know where you can learn more about attachment.

If you’re adopting, you may be wondering how you and your new child will “bond” or “attach”. If so, you are not alone. I know that my husband and I certainly did. We wondered how our new son would react when he first saw us. How we could help make his transition to our home as warm and loving as possible. And, what we should – and shouldn’t – do to help him form a strong bond with us as quickly as possible. And, most of all, we wondered if he would love us.

Unfortunately, with all the paperwork and tasks during our adoption process, I’m a bit embarrassed to admit that we did little more than wonder and worry. We didn’t take the time to learn about attachment in adoption.

However, we now know how important attachment in adoption is for adoptive parents. In fact, it’s so important that when the United States signs The Hague Convention on Intercountry Adoption (which is expected to take place in late 2007), prospective adoptive parents who will be adopting from China, Guatemala and other countries covered by the convention will be required to take training on attachment.

Why is attachment important? Unfortunately, for all adopted children, their very first attachment – the bond with their birth mother – was broken. And, as Dr. Lark Eshleman, author of Becoming a Family: Promoting Healthy Attachment with Your Adopted Child has told me, this break is traumatic for the child no matter when or how it occurred.

If that wasn’t enough, while your new child is waiting to be adopted and is not yet part of his or her forever family, he or she is not in an ideal situation to recover from this initial trauma and form strong attachments despite the best intentions of the caregivers. In the worse case, the child can suffer additional trauma if bonds with caregivers are broken or his or her needs are not being met. As a result, some children can develop attachment challenges that will have to be addressed. Since adopted children come from all types of backgrounds, you really won’t know about your child’s situation until you get your referral and possibly until you bring your child home.

So, if you are in the process of adopting, now is the time to learn so you can help make the transition easier for your child and yourself, recognize the signs of attachment challenges if they were to occur, and be prepared to help your child if they need it. As they say, “An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.”

Dawn Choate, a mother of four including two daughters adopted from China, recently shared the story of the attachment challenges she faced with her daughter, Hannah, on ThinkingOfAdopting.com. Dawn talked about how difficult it was for her to realize that Hannah was having attachment challenges and her struggle to find the resources needed to overcome them in order to “Heal Hannah”. It's a very heartfelt and emoitional story, told from an adoptive parent's point of view. If you haven't yet heard Dawn's story, Healing Hannah, I urge you to do so.

If you would like to learn more about attachment as you prepare for your adoption, you may wish to consider taking our new webinar, “An Introduction to Attachment in Adoption: What it is and why it is Important” given by Dr. Lark Eshleman. The webinar also covers what healthy attachment looks like, describes attachment styles and why the attachment styles of the parents are important, as well as discusses the signs of attachment problems. Plus, Dr. Eshleman will be appearing live on ThinkingOfAdopting.com for a 60 minute Q&A session on January 14th at 9 PM Eastern Time. For more information or to register go to the Adoption Telecourses page on ThinkingOfAdopting.com.

If you have any questions on how to learn more about attachment, please don’t hesitate to contact me via email at Robin@ThinkingOfAdopting.com

If you’re wondering how our son reacted the first (and second) time he saw us, he cried his eyes out. That’s right! You’d have thought that we were the scariest people around and that he would never want to leave the orphanage. And – despite how we felt at the time – what we learned later was that was a good sign. A sign that he had formed an attachment with his caregivers, and that once he got to know us he could form a forever bond with us as his mother and father. And while it didn't happen overnight, it did ... and it sure feels wonderful!

Robin Bartko