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In Reply to: Re: Adoption by known or potential members of TF posted by Blondie on November 28, 2003 at 19:30:24:
Adoptive parenting is actualy a fairly complex psychological process. There are lots of loss issues to work out. You can love the adopted child as your own flesh-and-blood, but if infertility is why you adopted, there will also be the "ghost" of the child you could not conceive and give birth to. As the adoptee matures, s/he also realizes s/he has lost a biological mother & father. Sometimes people have trouble resolving these loss issues satisfactorily, and it becomes a source of conflict and emotional abuse.
Parents who have not resolved their loss issues may turn their anger onto the child. Or the child may turn his/her anger onto the parents, who respond inappropriately. This often happens during adolescence, when the kid begins his/her identity formation. We know that adoptees are over-represented in clinical populations. The vast majority of adoptions are successful, but some turn into disasters.
While there is often an effort to match parents and children, sometimes adoptees turn out to be so different than the adoptive parents in terms of disposition, personality, intelligence, etc., that the parents don't know how to deal with their "strange" child. Kids are not blank slates: they are born with many inherited character traits. Parenting shapes these inclinations and traits, but it cannot radically alter the cloth from which a child's personality is cut.
For example, two introverts may feel frustrated and disappointed by an extremely active, extroverted child. An vice-versa. This can happen in biologically formed families, but in such cases the parents can say, "Well, he's just like Uncle Ned--he was a wild child, too. Grandma always dealt with him this way and it seemed to work." Adoptive parents don't have such points of reference to help them adjust to and accept a child who has a fundamentally different disposition than theirs.
This is why prospective adopters are evaluated so carefully--not everyone can successfully negotiate the special challenges of adoptive parenting.
