Foster and Adoptive Parenting

Session 5

Unit Four: Adoption

Core Issues:

This section is being included at this point in the training because adoption is created through loss. Without loss, there is no adoption. All birthparents, adoptees, and adoptive parents have experienced at least one major loss before becoming involved in adoption.

The adoption experience usually impacts three different parties: the adoptee, the birth parent(s), and the adoptive parent(s). Foster parents, foster children, and their birth parents are often affected in similar ways.

In adoption, the participants are said to form a “triad” for whom certain core issues keep coming up throughout their lifetime. These core issues were discussed in the article "Seven Core Issues of Adoption" that you were asked to read on pages 115-121 of the Resource Guide.

Key concepts of this article include:

Adopted children, adoptive parents, and birthparents have common emotional experiences that make them more alike than different, and as a result they are forever intertwined. This is referred to as the Adoption Triad.
“Adoption is permanent. Adoption is making a lifetime commitment to a child. Foster parenting is temporary. Foster parenting is making a commitment to be meaningful in the life a child.”
Birthparents lose the child born to them, adoptees lose their birthparents, and adoptive parents lose the child that would have been born to them, or the child they imagined would have been adopted.
The experience of loss by adopted children, adoptive parents, and birthparents is not only the loss of a child or family. It is also felt as the "Seven Core Issues of Adoption;" loss, rejection, guilt and shame, grief, identity, intimacy, and control.

Activity: The Adoption Triad

Since separation is an ongoing part of the foster care and adoption process, an understanding of the grieving process is essential for adoptive and foster parents.

With this understanding, you can help the child work through, express, and adjust to feelings caused by separation. You will better understand how feelings of loss and grief affect the behavior of children. You will be able to empathize better with parents who have been separated from their children through difficult circumstances.

An awareness of the grieving process will also help you to prepare yourselves and your families for separation from the foster child. This exercise is designed to help facilitate a better understanding of those issues and provides an overview of the ways grief and loss may impact each person involved.

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