e-mail
Awhile back I found an excellent article talking about the issues adopted kids face in classroom settings, and the difficulty they sometimes have completing projects about their families.
Creating a Classroom for Adopted and Non-Adopted Children is from the September 2006issue of RainbowKids magazine and was written by Elizabeth Hunt.
“I hear this story all the time,” says Adam Pertman of the Evan B. Donaldson Adoption Institute in New York. “A teacher gives a family tree assignment, and she tries to be sensitive telling Johnny, who was adopted, ‘You can choose who you want to put in your family tree.’
“But guess what? Johnny feels faced with divided loyalties , he has to say who his ‘real’ family is. And his little brain is bursting. He just can’t do it.”
Also in the article, a 19 year old adoptee named Josh Barrett talks about the difficulty he had during his elementary and middles school years. He remembers lots of assignments he couldn’t do — things like bringing a baby picture in, or asking his grandparents about their family heritage. He couldn’t even explain to the teachers why he couldn’t do them, without going into a lot of history that he didn’t want to talk about.
One option listed in this very helpful article is to ask children to create a ‘circle of caring’– a project where children can list the people in their lives who love them, without getting bogged down in the genetic relationship of everyone to everyone else in the project.
A flexible approach like this makes a lot of sense to me. So many children these days have non-traditional families, either due to divorce or other non-traditional ways of forming families. It just makes sense for teachers to come up with projects flexible enough to accommodate all the variety that is in our world today.
Teachers need to understand that the traditional family tree/newborn photo assignments may cause stress to adoptees. They should also be aware that there are other types of projects out there that are more inclusive. You may wish to think about making a copy of the above article to encourage your child’s teacher to be a little more creative in assigning projects.
Other resources:
Adopted children and genealogies
Scrapbooking for adoptees
I am a substitute teacher, so I have a real appreciation of all the different factions that feel the teacher ought to adjust their assignments just for their area of intrest. Each group has a strong case taken individually, together, it is frustrating for the teacher, kind of wrong no matter what you do. Circle of intrest is not going to offend adoptive families, but some traditional families may be put off by the failure to recognize the organization of a more standard family. I think this is an area where the adoptive parents need to do the work with the child. How does he want to do the assignment? Why not include his birth family? (What a neat chance to make it OK to talk about his birth family.) Be the facilitator, not the fixer.
My youngest, a senior in HS, just did an assignment involving the education background of every adult in his family. He was stumped about his mom’s HS graduation and going to leave her out of his project. I pointed out that his last foster family’s daughter went to school with his mom, call her and he would know. A great big no. He did call her the next day, and did not ask. I don’t think the mental termoil these kids go through is going to be avoided by some cleverly designed project. Either they are going to be comfortable dealing with their birthfamily’s info, or they aren’t. John