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Welcome Home, Adopted One
Easing Your Newly Adopted Child into the Family
By Keath Castelloe Low
Most of today's adoptions are not infant adoptions, according to Deborah D. Gray, who has spent more than 20 years counseling adopted children and their families. "Children tell me that being moved to a new family is the most frightening experience they have ever gone through," says Gray, who is also the author of Attaching in Adoption: Practical Tools for Today's Parents (Perspective Press, 2002) and Nurturing Adoptions: Creating Resilience after Neglect and Trauma (Perspective Press, 2007).
Children will try to hide their fears and anxieties during this transition into your family, Gray says. "It is best to give them time to 'nest' and celebrate the creation of a new family," she says.
Jenny*, a mother of two adopted children in North Carolina, has experienced two very different transition times with each child. Her oldest daughter was brought home straight from the hospital at 2 days old. "The birth parents wanted us to bond with Carrie right after the birth and take her home to join our family immediately," Jenny says.
Once they returned home and settled in, friends and family came over to meet Carrie and celebrate her arrival. "We were so excited to be parents that we wanted to share our joy with everyone!" Jenny says.
The experience with her son, who was adopted at 15 months of age, was very different. "Nate had spent his first two months of life with his birth mother in Russia, then she brought him to the hospital because he developed pneumonia," Jenny says. "His birth mother signed his consent for adoption because she could no longer take care of him."
Nate remained at the hospital for four months. When he was discharged from the hospital, he was transferred to the children's orphanage where he remained until he was 15 months old. "We arrived home from Russia at 10 p.m. to a wonderful waiting crowd of 25 family and friends at our local airport," Jenny says. "This was exactly the homecoming that we wanted because we love to share our celebrations with big groups of family and friends. In retrospect, I recommend keeping gatherings and events relatively quiet and small during the first year at home when you adopt a child older than 2 months. No one had told us about how different the attachment experience would be with a toddler versus a newborn."
