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Losing a Sibling: Helping Your Child Cope with an Adoption ReversalAdults hoping to become adoptive parents can experience with similar degrees of intensity three distinctly different losses related to an anticipated adoption that isn’t completed …
Each of these three differing kinds of adoption loss produces a similar process of grief for the adults in a family. Parents feel shock and denial, isolation, bargaining, anger, sadness and depression, and, finally, after much work, resolution. In an earlier article, “Losing an Adoption,” (on this web site and in Adoptive Families’ January/February 1997 issue) we offered advice to help adopting parents deal with their own grief and begin the process of moving forward after an uncompleted adoption. For many families in such a situation, however, helping other children in the family understand and cope with the loss of a new baby may present more complex issues. Children in the adopting family most often experience these losses very differently than do their parents. The fact that children under ten are unable to think as abstractly as do adults most often means that, unless their parents went further in preparing them for a coming sibling than is recommended by most adoption educators, children will have invested little emotional energy in the “unknown quantity” of a “maybe” placement that never happened. That being the case, children are not likely to feel the same sense of personal intensity about non-placements as will their parents, even though they will nearly always be troubled by the grief they see their parents experiencing and will need support to understand that they are in no way responsible for their parents’ sadness about a hoped-for placement that did not happen. While non-placements may be primarily parental losses, adoption reversals are definitely a whole family loss, and helping parents deal with children’s grief and loss about reversed placement is this article’s focus. Occurring in what is anecdotally reported to be far less than 10% of placements in North America, post-placement reversals happen more often in the non-baby-centered-adoption states and provinces which have multi-week changes-of-heart statutes and/or among the clients of facilitators who are least conscientious and adept about providing pre and post adoption grief and loss counseling for clients dealing with an untimely pregnancy. But no matter how rare, reversals are the stuff of horror stories commonly shared with pre-adoptive couples. What’s more, those who are among the small percentage of families who experience a reversal find little comfort in its statistical rarity. The concrete reality of an actual placement that is reversed, so that a new baby brother or sister who has already arrived and taken up residence in home and crib and hearts and family is taken away, is almost guaranteed to produce some degree of personal trauma for children in the adopting home. Each individual in the family–mother, father, brother, sister– will work through the normal steps of grief and loss at an individual pace after a reversed adoption. Grieving parents may find it hard to trust that they know how to deal with their children’s grief. There is, after all, no road map for this loss, and grief can be scary. Parents who’ve been there note that advice from others is often off target. In this parenting task, as in others, parents must learn to trust their instincts and their intimate knowledge of their children to see themselves as the experts on their own family’s needs, despite what anyone else may suggest. Trial, error and adjustment are the norm for coping with this unique loss. About three months after the loss of their baby, Terry, Wendy went in to check on her older son, Jamie, and found that he wasn’t in his room. She found him in Terry’s room, holding a pillow from the crib and rocking quietly in the dark, completely ignoring the piles of Christmas gifts that were “hidden” there in various stages of wrapping. When Wendy asked Jamie what he was doing, he began to cry. “I miss my baby, Terry.” Resisting a first impulse to distract him and get him out of the room, Wendy took him on her lap. They stayed awhile and rocked and talked about Terry. A few minutes later he want back to bed quite willingly. The younger the child, the more difficult it may be for parents to know just how a loss like this is affecting their child. Pre-school and early-elementary-school-aged children may be unable to clearly express fears or sadness about such an event. For some children this kind of traumatic loss during a period in their lives when they are simply not cognitively or verbally able to put these issues into words and discuss them can reverberate in future reactions to change and potential danger without anyone being aware that the adoption reversal is at the root of what could become a life-long a pattern of troubling reactions to loss or threat of loss. It’s important to remember that children are individuals, and so will find their own triggers to and pattern of grief. This means that some of the members of your family may be ready for laughter when others aren’t, others may dissolve into tears with little warning. Encouraging full expression of feelings is invaluable. Parents whose own coping patterns tend toward silence may need to prompt themselves to establish verbal communication within the family about this shared pain. Parents should feel no discomfort about letting their children see them cry. Children need to see their parents’ sadness, though they may need help in understanding that they are not responsible for it. Children under ten think concretely, taking everything literally and personally. Often children suspect that their own feelings of ambivalence or jealousy about the arrival of a new sibling may have contributed in some way to the adoption’s reversal. Rarely, however, will children bring this fear up for discussion on their own. Parents should consider introducing it. Alternatively, it is quite common for children to become fearful about their own adoption’s permanency after the reversal of a younger sibling’s adoption. These fears are more likely to be verbalized. Grieving children need a safe, predictable, routine-filled environment and lots of family time. Their need for concreteness also makes it important that children have access to visible reminders of their lost sibling–a picture on the wall, toys or blankets in their own room, etc.–and that they have absolute control over what happens to these pieces of memorabilia, to whom they are shown and whether or not they are shared. Though adults often internalize anger, in children anger is often dramatically externalized. After much second guessing about what was “right,” Wendy and Rob Williams found it helpful after Terry’s adoption was reversed to set limits that prevented his hurting himself or others and then to allow Jamie to scream and yell and trash his room with little reaction to these outbursts from his parents until after the anger had let up, at which time there were hugs and reassurances all around. Because children often feel especially powerless and out of control in reaction to loss, it will be helpful to offer grieving children lots of both predictable structure and choices in their lives to show them that there are many things over which they can feel and have control, despite their powerlessness over the loss of their sibling or their parents’ sadness. Being especially sensitive to this feeling of powerlessness in grief by offering structured, either-or choices about food, clothing, recreational options, etc. and by maintaining the familiar structure of bedtime rituals, day care, daily routines, etc. may be difficult for grieving parents, but is especially important for their children. Children can find goodbye rituals as important in resolving loss as do adults, and may even develop their own. Rituals can be either formal or informal, conscious or unconscious. Children are often better than adults at developing rituals. Thumb sucking and security blankets are actually informal, unconscious rituals. Looking at photo albums, planting a tree in memory of the lost sibling, lighting candles are some options of formal, conscious rituals your family might consider. Jamie Williams’ grief and loss was eventually salved by his own unconscious ritual: soon after Terry moved he began asking his mother to sing the children’s song “In a Cabin in the Woods” over and over. The song is about a hunter chasing a rabbit who is rescued by a man in a cabin. Jamie was insistent on the song, even though he cried nearly inconsolably as the hunter came near. Wendy trusted Jamie’s need for the song and the tears. Eventually the ritual did its work: Jamie couldn’t even force himself to cry and so began to laugh. The song became his own private joke and he still uses it as a release of both good and bad tension. As with adults, the grief of children is often re-triggered by new insecurities, additional changes, or new experiences of unrelated loss, but families who are able to see their experience as the family’s loss and to include their children in the grieving and the healing will find that the family becomes closer by having worked together on grief and loss. While decorating for Christmas several months after Terry was returned to his birthmother, Jamie was thrilled and excited. He would hang one ornament and then run around the dining table for a while, blowing off steam, before rushing to find another bauble to hang. But taking the brass creche out of its box quieted Jamie. He played with it for a while, gently fingering the tiny baby lying in the hay, and finally tucked the baby gently back into the manger, asking him to “take our love to Baby Terry.” Suggested Reading… Baby by Patricia MacLaclan This information was first used in Launching a Baby’s Adoption (Perspectives Press, February, 1997) and has been updated and used again in 2008’s Adopting: Sound Choices, Strong Families. |