My last blog talked about my shock when my Regina, aged seven, reacted to a film showing a young St. Patrick being captured and taken to Ireland as a slave by remarking that St. Patrick was being “adopted”. I described a conversation I had with her the next day, asking her what she’d thought, and she’d talked about adoption meaning being taken from one country to another to live. I got in a few points of clarification before she lost interest.
After that conversation, I remembered that two days before we watched that movie, Regina had overheard my telling her 12-year-old brother about an abduction of a 12-year-old in a neighboring town (to warn him that his certainty that he was too old to be kidnapped wasn’t true). I had explained to him that “abduction” was “kidnapping”.
Regina is going through a phase where her favorite book, believe it or not, is a children’s dictionary. She is constantly asking for the definitions and/or spellings of words. So it’s possible that Regina saw the kidnap scene in the film, remembered the word “abduction” and confused it with the word “adoption”.
As I’ve mentioned, auditory processing can be an issue with adopted kids, who often have more language-related problems than the general population of children.
Since I have a problem hearing when there’s background noise (in fact I watch people’s lips a lot), and my older daughter Meg has word retrieval difficulties, we have a lot of interesting “conversations” at our house, conversations which begin with something like “The clothes are in the dishwasher”. (Two other comments recently heard from my son and daughter include: “Patrick has decided to be a shellfish” and “First of all, I am NOT a lemon”.)
Adoption counselor Joyce Maguire Pavao says it’s not at all uncommon that, when she’s counseled a family to tell their young child they were adopted, the family will heave a sigh of relief after “the talk”—and then the child will bounce into Pavao’s office a few days later and say, “Guess what, Joyce, I’m a doctor!”
The point is, don’t assume your child has retained everything from past conversations. Even with adults, marketing students are taught that people need an average of eight exposures to a thing or idea before they really take note of it.
I like Holly van Gulden’s “ripple technique”, from her book Real Parents, Real Children. She advises parents not to push for a single long conversation about adoption, but mention it every so often as a signal that it’s okay to talk about it.
When my Meg was young she used to tell people she was from IKEA. (Well, the store name does rhyme with Korea.) Before we went to court to finalize her adoption, she kept telling people she was going to be “a-dotted”. The judge gave her some stickers of spotted Dalmatian dogs, which she promptly applied all over her dress. So, she was adopted and also “a-dotted”–all in one day.
How did she know?