Hi, Katie (CEO/Founder of Purl) here again, following up as promised about the things I did wrong in my own adoption journey to help other prospective adoptive parents.
When we started the adoption process we were naïve, and definitely should have had more education and preparation. We desperately wanted a child, we were unsuccessful with IVF, we weren’t aware of embryo donation or adoption and has seen adoption be successful in both of our extended families. At the time, I used the term “I felt called to adopt” without really knowing much about adoption at all.
But the main thing we did wrong was that we centered ourselves as parents in so many of our decisions in adoption, rather than thinking about every decision from the perspective about what would our child think/feel. That is a common theme amongst all my mistakes. I should have been asking myself, “what would he or she want?” As I have written previously and I believe is always a good reminder, It is Not About You and You Likely will Be Uncomfortable, there are times when you need to actually go against what YOU may want (and what your family may want), for the interest of your future child.
It is important that every prospective adoptive parent understand that adopting a child is not the same as having a child biologically, you will have to do things differently, you’ll have to parent differently, you’ll have to make decisions differently because this child was originally someone else’s, was placed with you at birth (or after, depending on the case), has had trauma because of that, and will need different things than a biological child of your own flesh. I’ll dig in on different topics relating to this over the coming weeks, but it all relates to this. Everything you do needs to be analyzed from the perspective of “how will my child feel about this” when he or she is old enough to understand…
Hi, Katie (CEO/Founder of Purl) here again, following up as promised about the things I did wrong in my own adoption journey to help other prospective adoptive parents.
When we started the adoption process we were naïve, and definitely should have had more education and preparation. We desperately wanted a child, we were unsuccessful with IVF, we weren’t aware of embryo donation or adoption and has seen adoption be successful in both of our extended families. At the time, I used the term “I felt called to adopt” without really knowing much about adoption at all.
But the main thing we did wrong was that we centered ourselves as parents in so many of our decisions in adoption, rather than thinking about every decision from the perspective about what would our child think/feel. That is a common theme amongst all my mistakes. I should have been asking myself, “what would he or she want?” As I have written previously and I believe is always a good reminder, It is Not About You and You Likely will Be Uncomfortable, there are times when you need to actually go against what YOU may want (and what your family may want), for the interest of your future child.
It is important that every prospective adoptive parent understand that adopting a child is not the same as having a child biologically, you will have to do things differently, you’ll have to parent differently, you’ll have to make decisions differently because this child was originally someone else’s, was placed with you at birth (or after, depending on the case), has had trauma because of that, and will need different things than a biological child of your own flesh. I’ll dig in on different topics relating to this over the coming weeks, but it all relates to this. Everything you do needs to be analyzed from the perspective of “how will my child feel about this” when he or she is old enough to understand…
