Pitfall # 1 – People Just Don’t Know What Trauma Can Do

Pitfall # 2 – People Don’t WANT to Acknowledge that a Child can be Traumatized.
There are lots of people who don’t want to know about how trauma impacts our children’s lives. Because if we look at the reality of how many adoptive or foster children are “at risk” from manifesting complications due to their traumatic pasts, it’s downright scary. So who are the people who really don’t WANT to know:

1. adoption professionals. Let’s face it; those whose business (albeit non-profit) is placing children for adoption don’t really want to know that some of the children they are attempting to place will require years and years of specialized therapies and interventions and parents who are willing and able to endure all this, and provide the child a loving, stable, therapeutic home despite all the child’s issues. It’s nearly impossible to find parents for those children who have been identified as having attachment disorder or other issues stemming from their trauma. It’s just as impossible to find professionals and resources to provide the therapies, support, respite and training that these families will need. Not to mention how much this all costs. So the pre-adoptive efforts to education parents on parenting traumatized children are not what they could (or should) be.

2. pre-adoptive parents. Before the adoption professionals cry foul, I readily admit that some do attempt to be forthright with their prospective parents and report that most pre-adoptive parents don’t want to hear it. We don’t want anything standing in our way of that “dream adoption”. And even those, who like me, could admit that there might be challenges, will read the “horror” stories and declare that it is not going to happen to them. Prospective parents dealing with infertility issues have an extra layer of desperation in their adoption dream that may lead to them totally rejecting any mention that the child’s past could greatly impact their ability to be a healthy member of the family. In those situations where pre-adoptive training is not mandatory, many pre-adopts never even bother to show up for class.

The interesting thing about this dichotomy is that a don’t-ask-don’t tell “dance” of sorts results. Adoption professionals make a mild mention of attachment difficulties or that a child’s early abuse/neglect background might result in delays. Prospective parents might give this information a nod, but not much more than a cursory glance. If a prospective parent happens upon information about how abuse, neglect and other maltreatment can produce traumatized children and mention it to the adoption professional, it is likely downplayed. After all, “children adopted from ______ or before the age of ______ are not nearly as likely to have those problems.” Let alone the dreaded Reactive Attachment Disorder. (Insert gasp here!)


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