Welcoming a New Brother or Sister Through Adoption. Arleta James
of scenarios that lead to sibling separation in countries across the continents. Kids separated from brothers and sisters aren’t always easily able to accept their new siblings. For example, Pam resides in an adoptive family in which she has two brothers and three sisters. She has been reluctant to form any type of relationship with any of these children. In fact, she regularly plays by herself. She resents the fact that these children have had the opportunity to grow up together. She wants to know, “Why didn’t I get to grow up with my brothers and sisters? They get to.”
Further, Pam and the other children above—international and domestic—are frequently convinced that as they mature, they will be reunited with the brothers and sisters from whom they were split. Kids with this type of reunification fantasy see no reason to make connections with the resident children in their adoptive homes. “I don’t want ‘new’ brothers and sisters. I want my ‘old’ family back.”
Luis’s and Sergei’s cases alert us to an issue that plagues international adoptees. Children who reside together develop ties to each other. They think about the children left behind at the orphanage. They have difficulty comprehending that they can be happy while these children—birth or perceived brothers and sisters—reside in conditions far less plentiful than what their adoptive family has to offer. Such survivor guilt is difficult for these adoptees to overcome. It impedes integration into the new family system.
Emotional development
This realm of development includes the ability to identify, express, and regulate feelings. These skills create the capacity to enter into reciprocal emotional relationships. There is currently much information available regarding traumatized children and emotional development. The emphasis is on emotional dysregulation—dissociation and hyperarousal, more commonly known as flight or fight.
Each time a healthy parent picks up a baby who is wet, hungry, or craving attention, the youngster calms. Repetition of this dance (cycle of needs) helps the brain, as it matures, to learn the skill of self-calming. As kids move through pre-school and into grade school, they can express and manage their own feelings. The skill of emotional regulation has transferred from parent to child. Brain growth is “user-dependent.” It needs repetition of experiences to develop the skills necessary for the individual to function (Perry and Szalavitz 2006).
Children with histories of trauma lacked a nurturing adult to lead the dance. The orphanage setting or chaotic birth home isn’t able to soothe the crying infant with the consistency needed to develop regulatory capacities. In fact, the stress of living in a chaotic and/or neglectful environment creates a brain—a human being—more vulnerable to stress (real or perceived). The infant or toddler traumatized prior to adoption arrives in the family with an overactive stress response system. So she will enter the states of flight (dissociation) or fight (hyperarousal) easily and long after placement in a healthy family system. Again, brain growth is user-dependent. Early developed patterns will continue to have disproportionate importance to how the brain functions (Perry and Szalavitz 2006). Repetitive experiences during infancy and the toddler period will continue to influence the way the brain causes the person to respond long into adolescence and perhaps adulthood.
Thus, traumatized children are analogous to deer. Deer flee in an instant when frightened. Deer are hypervigilant—always wary of their environment. Traumatized children operate in a similar fashion. They are physiologically in a state of alarm, of “flight” or “fight,” even when there is no visible threat or demand. So a stressor arises. Perhaps there is an argument with a sibling or a firm parental request to sit down and complete homework. This over-reactive child feels stressed. He quickly moves to fight—yelling, stomping, slamming doors, etc.—or flight—staring off into space, withdrawal to a bedroom, biting his lip, playing with his fingers, or providing no response as to whether his mom’s request was even heard. We have all experienced dissociation while driving the car. We arrive at our destination with no memory of steering the car! We were immersed in a deep, internal thought process which typically defies memory as well.
I have worked with many children with histories of complex trauma who spend a majority of their day moving in and out of dissociative states. These kids miss large chunks of information. They aren’t hearing their parents, brothers, sisters, peers, or teachers. This phenomenon affects every aspect of their interaction with people inside and outside of the family. Dissociation and hyperarousal are excellent methods for surviving harsh and overwhelming experiences. They are poor coping skills when utilized in a fun, loving family or in the classroom.
In describing Gina, their now 13-year-old daughter whom they adopted, John and Nancy stated:
“We never know what is going to set her off. Everything can be calm and off she goes—shouting, swearing, running up and down the stairs. This can go on for several hours. Just the other night, we decided to play board games. We popped popcorn and made hot chocolate. The whole family sat down and she started screaming. We tried to ignore it. However, it was hard to ignore someone screaming while we were trying to have fun.”
Nancy went on to say that incidents like this are particularly disruptive to the whole family, which also includes their two birth children, Joshua, age nine, and Carol, age 11. She continued by discussing that she expected that their lives would be more hectic with three children. She expected there would be more transportation issues, more homework to help with, more laundry, and so on. To Nancy, what the adoption of Gina brought to the family was chaos. Plans often had to change based on her hyperarousal. Promises of activities or one-on-one time to Joshua and Carol were broken.
It is also important to point out that neglect causes other problems. As pointed out previously, children need nurture and acknowledgment in order for cognitive, social, physical, neurological, and emotional development to proceed along a healthy path. If this psychological stimulation is not provided, the brain’s pathways that were ready to grow through experiences with caregivers wither and die.
• If babies are ignored, if their caregivers do not provide verbal interaction, language is delayed. It is difficult to express feelings with this deficit.
• If a child does not receive kindness, he may not know how to show kindness.
• If a child’s cries go unheard, he may not know how to interact positively with others.
(Child Welfare Information Gateway 2001)
This additional information related to neglect is especially important for the family adopting internationally. Again, the ratio of caregivers to babies and toddlers in institutional settings is often poor. Review of countless hours of orphanage video clearly demonstrates five or more infants with one caregiver. This would be the same as a family having quintuplets—except that, in an institutionalized setting, a mother, mother-in-law, sisters, church members, and neighbors aren’t available to help out.
Cognitive development
A part of intellectual or mental development, cognitive activities include thinking, perception, memory, reasoning, concept development, problem-solving ability, and abstract thinking. Language, with its requirements of symbolism and memory, is one of the most important and complicated cognitive activities.
In her book Toddler Adoption: The Weaver’s Craft (2012), Mary Hopkins-Best describes rudimentary cause-and-effect thinking and problem-solving skills as developing between 12 and 18 months of age.
It is quite common when a family enters our agency for services that they proclaim, “He is so smart!” And indeed it is usually true. Intelligence tests confirm that many traumatized children have a good level of overall intelligence, which is often translated into being bright. However, without the capacity to reason or generate solutions to problems, the smart child is impaired.
Alice is age nine. She was adopted when age four. Her adoptive family includes a 12-year-old birth son. One evening, at age one and a half, social workers had arrived at her birth home and removed her. Her birth mother did not participate in reunification efforts and so Alice never saw her again. Her perception of her removal is that she was “stolen.” This is certainly understandable. What else would a toddler think when women come into your home, take you, and then give you to another family? Alice