Many people would be quick to agree that children who have been adopted experience grief. Older children are perhaps most conscious of what they have lost, since they have memories of living parents and the life they left. Preschoolers’ memories may be confused and chaotic-- snippets of a past that no longer makes sense because not enough of it is remembered. Emotions may be triggered at odd times and the triggers may be impossible to trace. Was it a smell, a sound, or something they saw?

Even infants have experienced loss. It doesn’t matter whether they lived with their birth mom for a day or a year. A baby becomes accustomed to his mother’s voice in utero, and the loss of that presence is felt. Loss also involves caregivers. Whether they were good or bad, chances are the child got used to the person who took care of him for months or years.

So the loss for an adopted child is very real. Many adoptive parents, however, expect the grief over that loss to be finite. Traditional wisdom expects that after three weeks or three months or in the case of older children maybe a year or so, the pain will have gone, and the child will be whole again.

The tough thing for us as adoptive parents to face is that our children may have grief issues for their whole lives. Chances are, the most intense pain will be in the first year or two after homecoming. And certainly most kids have times where the grief is only a tiny portion of their lives. But most adopted kids cycle through their loss, revisiting at each new developmental phase, asking more probing questions each time they revisit it, and hopefully gaining a deeper understanding and new coping skills at each age. But the loss is still there.

I’ll talk in another post about ways we can help our children deal with that loss, keep lines of communication open, and provide our kids with the coping skills they need.

Related links:

New arrivals and griefAdult adoptees and grief
Talking about birth family