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After writing the above post, I was thinking more about the topic of emotional resilience and how it affects our adopted children. Also rolling around in my head were some of the comments people sharing on the grocery store gauntlet. The two topics combined got me thinking what the most emotionally healthy response to adoption issues might be.
Certainly keeping our own good humor when dealing with others is crucial. Modeling nastiness and hostility to strangers can only hurt our kids and their reactions to life in the long run.
But just as telling, perhaps, is how we speak about those people to our children after the people have walked away. DO we roll our eyes and mutter about ‘idiots’? Do we chuckle and say, ‘people sure are nosy?’ Or ‘people sure do like to talk to us about adoption.’
I personally try to occasionally mention that there are lots of people who don’t know much about adoption and therefore are curious about it. The way we ‘frame’ the interference of people will affect how they feel about it, especially now as kids, but potentially into adulthood as well.
Another issue related to adoption and resilience is a more challenging. How do we frame the loss of birth family? Whether we want to face it or not, all our adopted kids have a major loss in their past. It is right sometimes to cry. They should be allowed that. We as adoptive parents need to be accepting of that and give them openings to talk about feelings of loss.
But — here’s where it gets tricky, and here’s where I need some input from other people. I think we might theoretically also encourage our kids to dwell on the loss in an unhealthy fashion if we frame every conversation about adoption in lanaguage laden with sadness over the terrible loss in their lives.
I don’t ever want to say adoption is all sunshine or deny kids the right to feel sad over that loss. But there has to be balance. Along with acknowledging the sadness, we need to model healthy ways of getting our thoughts past the sadness and moving on.
When my kids are sad (for whatever reason), I try hard to acknowledge that sadness. Sometimes I talk a little about a sad time in my own life to let them know they are not alone in their sadness. But then I try to encourage them to think about some good things in their lives, and to cheer themselves up by getting involved in a project or reaching out to others.
I hope that by modeling these types of coping skills, they will have tools they can use into adulthood to become emotionally resilient adults.
How are you helping your kids become resilient?
The main we we try to teach out kids resilience is to point out the many ways in which our families’ values differ from many other people’s. That might sound odd or like not a great idea, but when you are a vegetarian, homeschooling, Buddhist, transracial adoptive family with an HIV+ member, well, your kids have to learn that other people might not agree with our values and choices, but that’s their problem, not ours. How does this relate to resiliency? We hope that, when our kids are in situations where they are made uncomfortable by others, our kids’ first reaction will be to recognize how their behavior and circumstances are a reflection of our family’s values. We feel that with a strong foundation in that, our kids will be less likely to feel helpless in the face of criticism or hostility.