Adoption and School Issues

How Adoption Impacts Children at School

Adoption can impact children at school in two ways: educationally and socially. If a child is grieving for or fantasizing about birth family to the extent that it affects his ability to concentrate and learn, that is an educational effect.

If a child is teased on the playground by classmates who say that he must be bad because his "real" parents gave him away, that is a social effect. Yet the teasing can also affect self-esteem, which can affect school performance.

Let's look at both of these areas in three general time periods: preschool and kindergarten, elementary school, and junior-senior high school.

When children attend day care or nursery school, they are exposed to many new experiences beyond the protected world of their immediate family. Often it is the first time they interact socially with a group of children.

They make new friends, learn to deal with a new authority figure (the teacher), master routines, sing songs, pet a guinea pig, and imitate adult roles in a housekeeping area just their size.

Educational goals for preschool children are normally low-key. Supporting the development of the child's self-esteem and self-confidence in the world beyond the family is usually the priority.

Social skills such as taking turns, sharing, and following directions are emphasized. Gross motor development and creative expression are encouraged.

Activities may center around colors, shapes, number concepts, and letters, among other things, but formal drilling in reading readiness or arithmetic facts is usually not a part of the curriculum.

Most preschools want to help children gain self-awareness and a love of learning that will be a good foundation for their elementary school experience.

Children who are 3 or 4 years old and were adopted as infants or toddlers rarely show any adoption-related adjustment problems. Since they do not fully understand reproduction yet, they cannot really understand what adoption means.

They may blissfully tell and retell the story of their adoption to anyone who will listen. Preschool children do not have prejudices about skin color (unless they are actively taught to have it by their parents or other adults) and are usually accepting of all children who behave in a friendly way towards them.

Transracially and transculturally adopted children, therefore, probably won't experience prejudice during this time. However, children this age are aware of differences in physical features and may need some help to understand them.

Whether to tell the preschool staff that your child was adopted is a question with no absolute answer. If your child was transracially adopted, the topic will come up automatically.

If there is a request to bring in a newborn photo for a bulletin board and you adopted your child at age 6 months, it will come up then as well.

Claudia Jewett Jarratt, a Boston-area family therapist for 25 years and adoptive mother of seven children, suggests that telling or not telling the school about adoption is an individual matter.

Says Jarratt, "You do what makes your child feel loved and affirmed in all areas of adoption." If you do tell, it is certainly not necessary to share all the details of the birth family's situation.

Since preschools and day care centers are often private and separate from the public school system, the preschool years are a good time for adoptive parents to practice interacting with school personnel about adoption issues without the fear that any labels will necessarily follow their child throughout his school career.

Parents can start to get comfortable with the idea of sharing information about the child's adoption if they feel it is appropriate or that it can help the child's adjustment to school.

If the children and teachers in your child's class at preschool seem curious about adoption, you might want to make a classroom presentation. If so, you should emphasize that adoption is one of the many ways that families are formed.

Lois Melina, an Idaho-based adoptive parent and author of several books on adoption, says the following points are appropriate for the preschool years:

*There are different types of families.
*People who live together and care about each other are a family.
*Sometimes members of a family do not live together but they still care about each other.

Kindergartners have some understanding of reproduction, although Melina says they are probably more interested in how babies are born than in how they are conceived.

A detailed discussion of reproduction would probably not be appropriate for a kindergarten class. However, you probably could say that every baby grows inside a woman and that after the baby is born, the child may live with the woman who gave birth to him, or he may live with other parents.

This material was obtain from Child Welfare Information Gateway

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