It is normal for any parent to feel jealousy if a child seems to bond with someone else more easily than with them. Perhaps those feelings are exacerbated for adoptive parents who’ve waited a long time to be parents and who may secretly wonder if they are missing some primal biological connection.
But it’s important to keep the situation in perspective. In reality, all children, adopted or not, will go through periods of seeming to prefer one parent over another.
One common reason is simply time spent together. This works both ways. Naturally a child may bond first to the caregiver he spends the most time with. Conversely, the parent with whom he spends less time may appear to be favored. Countless moms echo the refrain, “I change his diapers and feed him all day long and then when his daddy gets home from work I might as well be chopped liver.”
Sometimes parents might find that a child prefers them for different things—wanting one parent if he is hurt and the other if he is frightened, for example. Or sometimes kids simply seem to go through phases. I remember my husband joking, when our birth son seemed to suddenly prefer him, “You get year one, I get year two, I guess.” By the next year he had reversed this phase again and we joked about being the “favorite” parent in odd years or even years.
There are downsides to being the preferred parent, of course. It gets tiring to be the one your child always wants to be held by. Of course, you needn’t give in to your child’s preferences at all times. A child needs to know that his parents will take care of him, but they as adults get to decide who will do that. A parent can’t always say, “Sorry, she wants you to change her diaper”!
When our first daughter arrived, she reached for me most often. She had been cared for primarily by a foster mother and we chose to do what felt natural for her. My husband was involved, and I didn’t realize the degree to which Meg turned to me until she’d been here six weeks. She crawled over to Charles one day, lifted up his arm and wrapped it around her. I was surprised how moved he was, not having realized the degree to which he’d been allowing her and I to have our special time even though it was hard for him.
When our second daughter came, my husband went to get her while I stayed with the older two children. She seemed to prefer him after that. We would give her to him when she cried, but decided that I would take over the feeding so she would learn to rely on me. A couple of times we would see her visibly torn between wanting to be held by him, but also wanting the bottle which was held by me. It felt almost cruel, but, I reasoned, my birth son (whom I breastfed) had had to get used to the idea that I was the only one who could feed him.
It seemed to work. Regina is really attached to me. However, she still seems comforted more by her father when she wakes up at night. This is a big problem when he travels on business, and I’m still a little jealous. But, kids are different, and so are parents. We can trust that our children love us both, even if they express it differently and at different times.
Please see these related blogs:
“Do You Love Them Both the Same?”
Developmental Vs. Chronological Age