Power, Beauty and Legitimacy of Adolescence by Susan Jane Broda Tamburi

Author:Susan Jane Broda Tamburi [Susan Jane Broda Tamburi]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781912850815
Publisher: Clink Street Publishing
Published: 2019-07-14T16:00:00+00:00

5

TEENAGERS FACING OTHER ISSUES

ADOPTED TEENAGERS

I have many friends who have adopted children and most of them have a hard time when the child becomes a teenager. To understand what is at stake, one has to go through some basic knowledge about adoption itself. Many people believe that if a child has suffered an upbringing that was lacking in love and support, he or she will be able to settle and flourish with a new family that provides what is needed. However, while stability and acceptance help to give a foundation in which a child can grow and find a healthy state of being, these qualities make up only one part of what is required.

Donald Winnicott referred to earlier, is one of the biggest references for this topic. His second wife, Clare Britton, was a psychiatric social worker and he learnt a lot from her experience working with disturbed children who had been evacuated during World War II. She examined the difficulties faced by children who were either orphans or displaced trying to adapt to a new home.

Winnicott who was strongly influenced by the two psychiatrists Sigmund Freud and Melanie Klein, notes in his paper entitled Hate in the Countertransference: ‘It is notoriously inadequate to take an adopted child into one’s home and love him.’ Although this sentence can be shocking, let’s see what he meant by this. If fact the parents must be able to take the adopted child into their home and be able to tolerate hating him. Winnicott states that a child can believe he or she is loved only after being hated, he stresses that the role that ‘tolerance of hate’ plays in healing cannot be underestimated. He explains that when a child has been deprived of proper parental nurturing, and is then granted a chance of this in a healthy family environment, such as with an adoptive or foster family, the child begins to develop unconscious hope. But fear is associated with this hope. When a child has been devastatingly disappointed in the past with even basic emotional or physical needs unsatisfied, defences arise. These are unconscious forces that protect the child against the hope that may lead to disappointment. In Winnicott’s view, the child must be allowed to express that hatred and the parent must be able to tolerate both the child’s and their own hatred as well. There are many ways for a child to express that he or she is indeed not worthy of being loved. This worthlessness is the message that was imported by earlier negative parenting.

When they reach adolescence, adoptive children have an added burden to deal with. They have to go through the gruelling questions: “Who am I?”, “Am I guilty of my abandon?”, “Where are my biological parents?” or “Who do I look like?” So many questions that are added to the natural period of questioning that all teenagers go through. The intense need of belonging and all the uncertainties inherent to this position can trigger off an explosive reaction which can be violent and badly interpreted by well-intentioned parents.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.