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Rejection
The Common Thread By Yvette Pompa
I suppose that if we adoptive parents of "older" children wanted to define rejection, using our past experiences, we'd reflect on a time when we asked somebody to a dance and he or she immediately,without a nanosecond thought,said "NO." Boom! It's rejection with a capital R right in our face. Of course, I'm thinking we're maybe 16, 17, and we're old enough to have something from our past to get us through that rough time: a best friend or a large box of chocolates.
Now take the same human emotion of rejection and place it with a child who is in foster care, after foster care and is only 5 years old. Ouch! How does that child deal with his pain of rejection? Susan Smith, program and project director of the Evan B. Donaldson Adoption Institute in New York, says that a child's ability to cognitively adapt to the loss varies on age.
"Children around 7 or 8 reach a stage of cognitive development where they are aware of the loss of aspects of adoption," she says. "Before this age, you can tell a child a story about how special being adopted is and they will feel very good about all of this. But eventually they have developed the ability to reason out situations and begin to wonder why a mother would have given them up. At this age, they may struggle with feelings of having been rejected and sadness."
It is difficult to imagine a child so young having experienced such deep-seeded pain, and many young children are unable to verbalize their feelings of rejection. Without assistance and guidance, the child may be moving on the wrong side of the highway, and we all know where that can lead CRASH!
That is a huge and tough emotional bit of knowledge to swallow. It sounds right when we first hear it, and we take heed, yet when our child tells us in the heat of an emotional upheaval, "I hate you!" the pain of rejection pounds the heart.
