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The Hurting Child
Managing the Aftermath of Adoption By Sue Marquette Poremba
Nancy Hemenway's daughter was 15 months old and 13 pounds when she was adopted in China.
"My beautiful child was ignored and abused by Western standards," says the Arlington, Va., mom, explaining how her daughter, now 6 years old, still suffers from chronic post-traumatic stress disorder andsevere sensory processing disorder and still doesn't verbally communicate.
Despite the life her daughter had in the institution, where young children were tied to cribs and potty chairs, the orphanage was still the only home she had known until she was adopted. "It's almost like you kidnap the child from the home she was in," Hemenway says. "There is no easing into it. It's traumatic."
with their adoptive family immediately after birth. This is because infants have an innate need to bond with their biological mother, according to Marcy Axness, an early development counselor from Granada Hills, Calif. "Though in general we don't tend to think about pre-verbal children needing to 'process' the myriad experiences that go on around them, they do, especially when those experiences fall outside the realm of what is natural and biologically expected, as happens in adoption when there is separation from the biological mother at birth,"Axness says. "If we don't support and participate in this processing, the 'undigested' experience will get 'acted out' in a variety of ways that might not be so pleasant for them or for us as parents!"
Melanie Tem of Denver, Colo., director of theWaiting Child Program with Adoption Alliance, agrees. "Conventional wisdom holds that the younger the child is when placed in an adoptive family, the less damage there will be from the abuse and neglect that led to termination of birthparents' rights," she says. "Sometimes this is true, but sometimes younger children are more seriously affected, and often their trauma is harder to heal because it occurred pre-verbally, before they had words to conceptualize and name what happened to them."