Bonding with Your Adopted Baby

10 Post-adoption Tips

By Nancy Vondrak

The anticipation is over! You've waited for months, or perhaps even years, but now you are finally holding your baby in your arms. You know so much about this child, but to this child you are basically a stranger. How can the bonding process be encouraged between new adoptive parents and their babies?

Try the following 10 tips to help build that special relationship you've dreamed of into a reality.

1. Spend as much time as you can with your child.
Parents should be Baby's primary caregivers. Limit the number of visitors as well as caregivers, especially when you first bring your baby home.

"Mom should be the primary person that cares for, holds and feeds the baby for a good week," says Suzanne Schneps, a psychologist in Cleveland, Ohio. Schneps has found that this helps the baby to focus his attention in one place. It will also help the mom to feel how important this new relationship is.

"Limiting visitors is hard to do," says Karen Anderson, director of foster care and adoption for the Adoption Center at Bellefaire in Cleveland, Ohio. "But those parents who do it find that it works out well."

2. Realize that some babies may be developmentally delayed.
"Most children adopted from eastern European orphanages have been very understimulated and are developmentally delayed," says Dr. Gregory Keck, a psychologist, an adoptive father of two and the founder of the Attachment and Bonding Center of Ohio.

Want to see more?

• Bonding for Life: Develop a Special Connection with Baby
• Adoptive Moms and Nursing: Adoptive Moms Still Can Be Breastfeeding Moms
• Infant Massage: The Therapy of a Loving Touch
• From the Mouths of Moms: Priming Your Babe's Voice with Your Own
• Check out our Article Library.
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