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We all want our children to grow up caring about others and to interact with others in a loving and appropriate way. Children who have been through great trauma in their own lives sometimes have a deeper understanding of the challenges others face and can demonstrate that with an unusually sensitive way of interacting.
Other children become so wounded by their own pain that they try to wall themselves off from their own feelings. This disconnect from their own sadness can leave children less sensitive to the feelings of others. Our challenge as adoptive parents is to help our children connect to their own feelings. This will help our children work through their own feelings, as well as making it easier for children relate to the feelings that others have.
One of the best ways to start with this is to simply help a child name his feelings. Some children will respond to direct talk about the loss in their past, and how they feel about it. Other children find that to be too scary, and they’ll refuse to talk about the past. It can be challenging to hit just the right note of interest in the child’s past while not delving too deeply with a resistant child who is perhaps not quite ready to face things.
The good news, though, is that even children who are not ready to talk about big pains can benefit from talk about their emotions over small disappointments in life. Some parents find that looking at pictures of faces in books to be helpful in giving children practice at recognizing and naming feelings. The better we can help our children understand their emotions, the better they will become at working through the big issues when they come along.
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