I love when I open the door for questions. It always ends up making me think of topics I probably wouldn’t have thought to write about otherwise. Here is the first:
Hermia asks:
I’m studying to be a school counselor. Today in my class we discussed a journal article studying delays in children adopted in the late 80s and early 90s from Romania. We talked about some of the ways children may be affected by early life in an institution and supports that might be helpful. It made me wonder — what would you want a school counselor to do to support L and your family during L’s elementary school years? Do you forsee anything coming up for L or your family?
Given our recent experience with ignorance coming fromthe OT at L’s school, my first impluse would be to say I don’t want ANY help from L’s school. I suspect there is no one at school who knowledgeable enough about adoption issues (e.g. health/mental health related to post-institutionalization and trauma, attachment or issues relating to transracial/transcultural adoption) to be meddling in our business or who could be of much help to us at all.
When I can dial back the know-it-allness and defensiveness, though, there are some little things that could make a big difference for adopted kids. It would be awesome if someone did some adoption sensitivity training with teachers. Maybe they would stop doing the stupid ubiquitous family tree project that our school and many others still do, if someone pointed 0ut how distressing it can be for some adopted kids or kids with non-typical family backgrounds.
I also would like to make sure that people at school don’t perpetuate the dumb adoption fairy tale that is so prevalent in our culture. L probably wasn’t abandoned because her parents “loved her so much” they were sending her off to safety like baby Moses. She wasn’t saved from a terrible orphanage by rich and benevolent adoptive parents like Little Orphan Annie. Like most adopted kids (as well as many kids in non-nuclear families) L’s story is complicated and there is no happy ending. If her teachers don’t understand and respect this, I would rather they not talk about adoption at all.
From our very little bit of experience, I also think that school professionals (like most of the general public) can be woefully uninformed about issues related to post-institutionalization. Learning disabilities, sensory issues, attachment issues, and trauma histories that are common in adopted kids and can obviously impact a child’s experience in the classroom.
In our attempts to figure out what kind of school services would benefit L, I have been forced to repeatedly point out that her issues are likely the result of spending a year in an orphanage and the lack of one-on-one care she probably received. Over and over, these supposedly well-educated professionals seem surprised that I would think there would be any long-term effects because L was still little when she was adopted.
(I mean, seriously? Didn’t these people have to study child development to get an education degree?)
The trick, though, is helping people understand those issues without invoking the “oh, the poor neglected baby!” reflex. I have heard this from medical and educational professionals when I have shared information about the delays L had when she first joined our family. L isn’t a poor baby, she is a survivor. I am not sharing her history with them for sympathy, I am giving them pieces of L’s puzzle. They need to know these things so they can understand she missed out on some early experiences and needs our help filling in the gaps in her development.
It isn’t really fair for me to expect the people at school to be adoption experts, but I wish they were. I don’t really know how you could fix those things as a school counselor. It seems like a pretty tall order.