It may not be a physical pregnancy
but adoptive parents without a doubt experience a
time of “pregnancy in the sense
of expectation and waiting. This pregnancy
begins when you first receive and accept a
referral and continues until your child
arrives in your home and the adoption is
finalized.
This time, while joyous, may also be highly
stressful. Legal proceedings, gaining
approval from the agency, birth
parent, foreign government, or
whoever else might be involved, and
the general fear that something
could go wrong are just some of
the stresses you may encounter as
a prospective parent.
Unfortunately, such stresses don’t always
disappear on placement day. Sometimes they carry
over into the early months of parenting and the
emotional reactions if experiences
don’t match the parents’ expectations.
By recognizing those things that create
preplacement stress, understanding how each
parent responds to stress, and finding healthy
ways to cope. parents can prevent this
process from affecting the relationship with
their new child.
Stress
&
Powerlessness
While
You Wait |
As an adoptive parent you will
probably face many of the same prearrival jitters
that biological parents experience; but the
preplacement wait in adoption also poses several
unique issues and sources of stress. In
particular, adoption often presents a greater a
greater sense of powerlesness and
unpridictability for the expectant parent than
does pregnancy.
A pregnant woman can do many things to help
ensure everything goes well with her pregnancy.
She can take care of health through diet, rest,
exercise and regular doctor visits. Both she and
her partner can experience the reality and
inevitability of the baby-to-be every time it
kicks, makes her nauseous, or causes her body to
change. Expectant adoptive mothers, on the other
hand, often feel at the whim of agencies, courts,
governments, and birth parents, not only for
information and reassurance that all is moving
along well, but also for ultimate
“permission” to have a child.
Parenthood is one of the most adult roles we have
in our society. Yet those of us who choose
adoption often find ourselves at the direction of
other adults, at least until the adoption is
finalized The outside involvement in the normally
intimate decision can be particularly poignant
for infertile couples. These couples often have
already undergone the unpredictability and
invasivness of medical treatments aimed at
enabling conception. They have also faced the
ramifications of infertility, including what it
means about their sexuality and how it affects
their sense of mortality and immortality
(“What will I leave behind when I am
gone”). If the grief and loss
surrounding the infertility have not already been
addresses and resolved, the stress posed by
adoption can compound existing issues surrounding
the infertility, often without the couple even
knowing it.
The array of opinions pertaining to the type of
child you wish to have and the method of adoption
you wish to pursue, while offering a regained
sense of control, can also be a source of
confusion and stress. Biological parents
don’t have all the choices. Biological
parents indirectly choose their child’s
potential genetic endowment when they choose a
mate.
|
A
pregnant woman and her partner might also opt for
certain prenatal biotechnological test
(amniocentesis or maternam serum alphafetoprotein
testing) as potential safeguards against giving
birth to a child with severe abnormalaties. But
when it comes down to it, biological parents are
not asked to choose a child or to decide-or have
others decide for them-in advance whether they
are
appropriately suited to raise a particular child.
Another potential source of stress is the
relative uncertainty of the period between
selection of a child and placement and
finalization.The countdown in adoption is far
more variable than the nine months of gestation.
Once parent and child are paired for adoption,
the process can take two months, two years, or
even sometimes longer to complete, depending on
the type of adoption and special circumstances
that might be involved.
Each form of adoption (e.g. international or
domestic involving openness or closed
arrangements, agency-facilitated or private
placement, and adoption based on voluntary or
involuntary termination of parental rights) has
its own average time frame, and each also has its
own potential complications that can prolong the
wait.
| Upcoming
articles:
|
| Going and
Growing Throught Grief And Loss:
Parenting Traumatized Adopted Children. Family
Preservation: Vietnamese
Style.
Normative Crisis In The
Development Of The Adoptive Family: The
stages for which families can prepare.
|
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