International adoption and the formation of new family attachments |
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| Authors: | Vivian Shapiro PhD Janet Shapiro PhD Isabel Paret PhD |
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| Affiliation: | 1. Emeritus professor of social work , University of Michigan;2. Assistant professor and Alexandra Grange Hawkins Lecturer at the Graduate School of Social Work and Social Research , Bryn Mawr College;3. Clinical associate professor in the Department of Psychiatry at Robert Wood Johnson Medical School , UMDNJ;4. Supervises at the Graduate School of Applied Professional Psychology , Rutgers University;5. Member of the executive council of the Association for Child Psychoanalysis, Inc.;6. Board member of the New Jersey Association for Infant Mental Health |
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| Abstract: | Clinical studies of children in international adoption reveal unique patterns of psychological adjustment to permanent family care. Pre‐adoption history often includes early object loss, medical and nutritional deprivation, multiple care‐giving disruptions, and the lack of primary care‐giving relationships. These factors and the age at the time of adoption are risks to positive emotional and cognitive development. Adoptive parents may be unprepared for the resulting developmental problems. Most significantly, parents and children are often at different points in readiness to establish an attachment relationship. The parents are eager to claim their child, but the child is unready to respond because of emotional fragility and lack of previous attachment experiences. Two clinical vignettes illustrate the importance of a developmental and medical framework in assessing the unique needs of these survivor children, as well as the necessity of an empathic therapeutic holding environment that can sustain the emerging family attachments under stress. The psychological impact of cross‐cultural adoption and traumatic early beginnings reverberates across time but with empathic parental care and treatment recovery can be significant. |
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