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Keeping Ties After Adoption
Help Your Child Hold on to Heritage
By Julie Laatsch-Kitchen
h=250 height=167 align=left>2. What do you think your children gained from the experience of traveling back to their birth country? 
Ties does a wonderful job of balancing the cultural and emotional aspects of a visit to the homeland of adopted children. Our children gained a rich emotional experience, visiting the agencies where they were processed, meeting the people at the agencies who helped connect them with foster homes and with us through the adoption process and for our older son, seeing his file (the policy for our younger son was that the files are not open to them until they are 13).
Getting to meet their foster mothers and their families was probably the highlight of the trip. Visiting an orphanage and a maternity home, where we and our children had the opportunity, through interpreters, to have a dialogue with expectant mothers [was also special], and seeing many parts of the country, from Seoul to Mt. Sorak National Park to Busan and experiencing the varied food and cultural amenities of Korea.
3. Will you travel again when they are older?
It's very likely that we or our children, on their own, will travel to Korea when they get older. We would like to take our youngest son back so that he can better understand some of the emotional issues. He was too fidgety to sit through the dialogue with the expectant mothers, while our 16-year-old was riveted by the experience. They both seemed to have developed some level of comfort with the country so that they will have the confidence to travel back to Korea alone in the future.
4. How did you feel about the experience?
As we indicated above, it exceeded all of our expectation