Parenting Your Internationally Adopted Child: From Your First Hours Together Through the Teen Years by Patty Cogen

Author:Patty Cogen
Language: eng
Format: azw3
Publisher: Harvard Common Press - A
Published: 2008-04-20T05:00:00+00:00

Flexibility in the Face of Change

Internationally adopted children frequently lose their emotional and behavioral balance when a routine changes or during transitions from one activity to another. Maintaining balance in these situations is an important adjustment skill for adopted children to learn.

Why are these children so rigid? All children are highly dependent on routines to structure their experience; repetition and predictability give infants and young children a sense of security, safety, and control. To a child, things seem safest and most secure when both the caregiver and the routine are consistent. But when caregivers change, as has happened at least once and usually more than once in the life of an international adoptee, routines alone become the most consistent and predictable, and therefore safest, refuges in life.

Routines give a child a sense of control because she can predict what will happen. Mental control leads to emotional and behavioral control, just as much as being physically in control of a situation would do.

Think for a moment of a day when something in your routine was altered and how you felt. When I find my routine changed because the car suddenly stalls and needs to be repaired, I have trouble organizing and remembering what should happen for the rest of the day. Take one routine away and everything else falls to pieces. This is how internationally adopted children feel about their routines. No wonder they treasure and defend them so fiercely.

The flip side of an adopted child’s intense attachment to her routines is the fear or sense of danger she feels when a routine changes.

Imagine the morning of your child’s adoption. The caregiver is more rushed than usual, and your child is being dressed more rapidly and in unfamiliar clothing. Instead of moving on to the next child immediately, the caregiver cries and holds your child for a few extra moments. She talks to your child about “the new family” and the importance of being a “good girl.” After breakfast everyone stands around and says goodbye, and then your child is given several pieces of candy and a little jar of yogurt or rice milk. In short, changes in the routine are the first indication that this day will be radically different.

Over the next days and weeks, and even months and years, your child’s mind will associate these and other small changes with the Big Change, with the trauma of leaving everyone and everything that was familiar. In short, adoptees take little changes quite seriously. By controlling or avoiding transitions or changes in routine, they feel they can avoid the next big surprise, whatever it may be. They feel they can avoid the anxiety and the loss of emotional and behavioral control that they know can accompany the trauma of change.

To a parent a small change in routine seems ordinary, even inconsequential. “What’s your problem?” a parent throws out at the hysterical child, who is completely out of control because the parent read the bedtime story before she brushed her teeth, an unforgivable change in routine.

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