An adopted child has appeared in your family. What's next? What does an adopted child need? What should parents give to an adopted child?

I have often heard from colleagues the opinion that adopted child cannot become family. He will be loved, he will be accepted into the family, he will be given affection and warmth, he will be provided for, educated, etc. But he won’t be able to become family. Because “native” comes from the word “clan”, and a child born from a different mother and father does not belong to this specific clan of the adoptive family.

To be honest, I never understood this idea. Interestingly, it became especially popular after the Hellinger constellation method penetrated into our psychological community, although whether everything can be “attributed” to Hellinger is a difficult question. And yet, I will try to justify why I do not think it is right to mystify the genus. And I hope you will understand a little later that it is a hoax that is happening.

I think that there is essentially no difference between an adopted child and a natural one. Provided, of course, that the decision to adopt a foster child is a conscious and sincere desire of the parents. Then raising adopted children will be no different from raising relatives. Let's just say that the blood factor is something that people tend to pay too much attention to.

Most of our families, unfortunately, are too fixated on this factor. If you think about it, the blood factor provides the basis for all sorts of things. “You are our blood, our son/daughter, therefore you are obliged...” - then there is a list of what the child owes to his parents due to the fact that he was given life. However, children also get involved in these manipulations, sometimes considering their parents obligated to help them until the end of their days.

Adopted child- the one who can say “you are not my family” (the consequence is “I will not listen to you”). This is exactly what mother and father are afraid of, tormented by issues, for example, the adoption of children if for some reason it is impossible to have their own. But the most interesting thing is that a natural child can also say “you don’t owe me anything, I didn’t ask to give birth.” It’s just that blood seems to many to be a sufficient basis for presenting possessive ambitions and serves as something like a guarantor of their fulfillment.

In fact, in such cases everything is built not on blood, but on the systematic intimidation of the child, the consequence of which is often a feeling of guilt. In fact, you can effectively intimidate both relatives and non-natives, and I assure you that there will be an effect. The only question is - why?

But there is an answer to this: because the parents themselves have a strong fear of not being influential enough for the child and not being able to control him. And the essence is not in blood, but in control, fear and guilt. Blood itself, its type and composition do not in any way affect the child’s perception of his parents’ attitude towards him. Parenting can give rise to the same emotions in adopted and natural children. Because of the attitude towards children, and not because of the composition of the blood.

Another form of “obsession” with this factor is the desire for the offspring to be exactly like the husband/wife/relatives. But this is essentially not a desire to raise another person, but a desire to repeat oneself (or one’s feelings for a woman/man), to love oneself and one’s feelings in a child, or to symbolically “appropriate” a loved one.

Although, more than once there have been stories when a mother, who was “crazy” about some man, having given birth to a child from him, then became disappointed in him, and even worse - when he abandoned her and/or did what in her understanding was called meanness, and it doesn’t matter what it really was.

The important thing is that the child quickly ceased to be so loved. And then he had to carry a fair part of his own life on his shoulders (or rather, in his soul) the unconscious revenge of his mother, who gave birth to him “for the wrong reason.”

The blood factor is considered by many to be mandatory in order to love a child. The most important thing is the resemblance to the mother and father, and the expectations that are placed on such a child. As a rule, no one wants to think about his personality, his possible interests, his characteristics and the dissimilarity from his parents, which will always be in his personality, even if he is by blood.

Our patriarchal society also “helps” this - often a family will be considered a full-fledged one only if it has its own, that is, the ability to physically give birth to a person becomes the main one for judging the happiness and completeness of the family. But how children are raised and what grows out of them - all this is sometimes not taken into account.

The presence of adopted children instead of their own, natural ones, is sometimes considered something like a disability - “since they couldn’t give birth to their own, well, at least this”... As a result, an adopted child risks becoming something like an attempt to compensate for “inferiority”, and the children themselves turn into into “bad substitutes” for what should actually be. And as a result, adopted children actually feel unloved, but for the time being they have little understanding of why.

Meanwhile, injuries, which colleagues write a lot about regarding children from an orphanage, in 95% of cases also happen to natural children in their own families. Because in many ways they are given birth because it is “necessary”, “accepted”, “supposed to be”, and in some cases, wanting to, as it were, appropriate a part of the husband/wife, to continue again themselves.

And as a result of this, a child of blood often suffers no less than those of an orphanage from a lack of parental attention, a lack of tactile contact, a lack of unconditional acceptance of his personality, which is not like his parents, from the fact that he does not live up to the expectations placed on him.

In practice, I have more than once encountered adult children whose parents, to this day, never tired of reproaching them for being born “not beautiful enough” and “not improving the breed.” This is the reality of our Soviet and post-Soviet reality, alas.

In fact, a lot depends on the attitude towards the child and on upbringing. From the awareness of parents. If parents want to invest specifically in helping another person, in helping them grow, realize themselves (and not the parents’ expectations), want to help them open up, want to give a start to a new life - raising adopted children will be the same as it will be or would be for blood.

Yes, children from orphanages may turn out to be more traumatized initially, but if the parents are conscious individuals, then it will be easier for such a child to cope with their traumas and grow that basic trust that all psychologists talk about.

The reality of our country, in which this whole situation with abandoned children exists, is the fruit of an unconscious, primitive, I would say, attitude towards children. The deadlines that parents often “pressure” their children with (“it’s already 25, you need to give birth urgently, otherwise you won’t have time,” “delight us with grandchildren,” “continue the family line”), a society that promotes childbearing as part of social usefulness, poor education in the field of contraception gives rise to a huge number of abandoned children.

And there are very few conscious parents. And sometimes adopted children end up in the same families, where there is not a sufficiently conscious attitude towards them, and where they are again faced with the need to realize not themselves, but expectations, and solve their problems - their self-affirmation at the expense of children, their attempt to find the meaning of life at the expense of the children, to receive a portion of approval from society (praise for mercy and dedication in raising adopted children, etc.)

There is only one conclusion from this - normal, full-fledged, truly psychologically adapted children, developed and healthy, can only grow up in a family where the parents are sufficiently conscious. And whether they are adopted or relatives is not so important.

Moreover, one cannot even pose the question this way, because adopted children for whom adults have taken responsibility are, by definition, relatives. Based on responsibility and the desire to build relationships for life.

Who else can become your family if not the one who lives with you for the beginning of 20 years under the same roof, and then, in one way or another, relies on you all his life?

This question is also faced by those who plan to adopt children. We will now talk about those who were adopted in infancy and do not remember the very fact of adoption.

But how? Especially if this family is in another country, became an alcoholic, etc. and does the child need such contacts? Another argument was that children would allegedly be deceived. I will try to speculate on such arguments.

Consanguinity and family mystification

I believe that the family is a system, and that the clan is a special reality, mental, physiological, cultural. But, it seems to me, everything can be either together or not at all. Does the human body exist without a brain? Can the psyche live without the surrounding reality? And is it possible to have a culture that is not expressed in thoughts and actions?

Now think: if a child has nothing other than blood that would make him belong to another clan, and with his mental, cultural, emotional and even territorial life a person lives with another clan, then by whose rules will his body “play” in the world? O to a greater degree?

According to those in which he lives, there is a lot of evidence of this.

I had an interesting example in practice: a woman became pregnant from one man, but the relationship went very wrong at the very beginning of pregnancy. And that woman met someone else. And he wanted to accept her along with her unborn child. Their relationship turned out to be strong, he adopted the girl, her own father did not try to communicate with her. The girl always knew that she had a dad. She found out that he was a stepfather later, as an adult. And this did not change her relationship with her dad, whom she still considers dad.

Something else is interesting. This girl is like 2 peas in a pod... to my stepfather. At the same time, the stepfather and her own father are not similar to each other, and the mother is of a completely different type, of a different “suit.” And at the same time, the girl looks exactly like her stepfather. Eye color, hair structure, facial features. This marriage also produced a common son, the girl’s brother. He doesn’t look as strikingly like his dad as his step-daughter does.

Can blood itself exist as a separate reality, influencing a person to a greater extent than would be influenced by the environment, the psychological situation where he lives, the cultural reality of the family that accepted him, traditions, customs, and the level of development of the family? Blood, of course, carries some special genetic information, but this may be only a drop in the number of factors that can significantly affect the development of the child and the perception of oneself in the context of the family. Family is not only blood and genetics. This is a combination of a huge number of factors.

An abandoned child is abandoned for various reasons. It happens that the child's mother is a teenage girl who may regret what she did, but believes that it was better for everyone. The news of such parents does not always traumatize the child, and as he grows up, he will most likely understand the reasons why his own mother did this.

But it’s a completely different matter (and this is more common in adoption practice) when parents are, for example, alcoholics, deprived of parental rights, or are unable to exercise parental functions for other reasons related to social and other inadequacy in behavior. And in such cases, the news of such parenting often causes a feeling of guilt in growing children, a feeling that they are “not like normal children.”

I have encountered similar cases in practice. Often children, upon learning about adoption, began to be ashamed of their past, which they did not even remember. But, while developing in a normal family and learning about adoption, children often began to worry about whether they would be able to fit in with their new family, which they had previously perceived as their own.

And this gave rise to a lot of unpleasant effects - shame, guilt, which I already mentioned, fear that something from their real parents would manifest themselves in them, and the like (even if the adoptive parents did not speak badly of their natural parents). Sometimes children also felt resentment towards their adoptive parents for telling them about adoption. Children often perceived this as rejection by their adoptive parents, and no words of love were effective enough.

The feeling of rejection arose because in the stories about adoption, the children themselves saw the reluctance of their adoptive parents to fully consider them theirs. Calls to honor such blood relationships may not help the child, but, on the contrary, may traumatize him. After all, if a child’s whole life is connected with one family, and, nevertheless, it is pointed out to him that there is also another one with which he is connected, he feels torn, split.

Could knowing he has different blood somehow improve his life? None of the psychologists talk about this. And this is not surprising. We know little about blood factors. Perhaps they really mean something, and there are some special energies of the genus, but we can interact with them productively when we can touch the history of the family, build relationships with its members, study ancestral programs and scenarios.

However, this is only possible when a child was born in this family and has access to the “family archive.” In the case of adoption, this is unlikely. And an adopted child carries much more programs from the adoptive family than blood programs.

Even if the latter somehow manifest themselves, they will still be adjusted and lived within the framework of the new family. What, then, is the deep meaning of telling a child about something that he is unlikely to ever be able to study, and which he most likely will not be able to touch in reality?

The trauma of abandonment will always be with the child in his unconscious. But any psychologist will tell you that not all traumas should be removed from the unconscious. It is not for nothing that the human psyche has protective mechanisms, sometimes displacing into the subconscious what a person cannot cope with. And some deep experiences of the infancy period may well be leveled over time by a new attitude towards oneself, which a new family can help raise.

The trauma will go into the deep past and has every chance of not manifesting itself in an active format in adulthood. But a story can sometimes activate this trauma, bring it into the realm of awareness. And a child of any age may not be ready to accept this trauma.

I wrote about the effects of such a story in the previous paragraph. Therefore, parents should think carefully - are they ready to face the consequences of this self-activated trauma?

Child protection

The secret becomes clear - just a beautiful formulation. In fact, it is enough to analyze your own life. Has everything that you don't want to tell others become clear? Hardly. And with a competent approach to the issue, any disclosure can be avoided. To do this, it is sometimes enough to change your place of residence or at least arrange the appearance of a child in such a way, for example, by leaving for a while, so that “well-wishers” simply have no reason to gossip.

Yes, these are certain sacrifices. But parents who care about them adopted child, I think, they will make such sacrifices in order to protect their child from unnecessary conversations of some outside people. And to base their confessions to a child on fear of some potential “well-wisher” - it turns out that then the parents of the adopted child solve their problems of fear, rather than thinking about the feelings of the child himself.

“Adopted children feel that something is wrong” is a common belief among many people talking about adoption. Yes, children feel. If the parents themselves constantly think that he is “not his own”, they are tormented by the questions “will someone tell you?”, or “when to tell?”, they are tormented by assumptions “whether something like that will manifest itself in him... » etc.

Children always feel their parents' anxiety. But what if parents don’t feel anxious? Then the children will not feel any “trick”. This has also been verified by practice.

I happened to know several families with adopted children. And despite the fact that these families had their own children - one or two, the parents decided to raise the adopted one as their own and absolutely on an equal basis with their natural children. The effect is quite adequate - adopted children do not feel anything “like that”. Because their parents do not experience chronic anxiety about this issue. And one should not mystify such mechanisms.

About the parents themselves

Of course, I do not want to say that there are no cases where it makes sense to tell a child the truth about his adoption. But all this is individual. Another thing is important - if parents decide to take into the family an adopted child of such an age when he can easily not remember the very fact of adoption, then why and why are they so actively worried about their status and the status of the adopted child? What is the fundamental difference here?

When giving birth to their child, parents take 100% responsibility for it. And here they also take 100% responsibility for the adopted child.

And the question arises: isn’t this need to tell in the parents’ heads? What are they afraid of? That the child won't love them enough if they don't tell the truth? Or that they themselves will not love him enough, and they need to have an excuse for such a case?

The other extreme...

When parents are afraid like hell that the child will find out the truth about adoption. Then it turns out that the parents themselves greatly mystify this blood factor. It’s as if a child, having learned that he is not his own, will immediately devalue everything that was done for him, cross out all the care, and stop loving his only parents.

What are these parents worried about? Most often, this is a latently experienced guilt/shame for not being able to give birth to one of our own. Probably, the parents in such a family were left with a feeling of inferiority. And inside there may be a hidden conviction that the child, having learned that he is not his own, will definitely, as it were, reveal this inferiority, make it obvious both to others and to him, the child. And he will reject his parents because of their “inferiority.”

In fact, this is only the conviction of the parents themselves and that layer of society that “helped” them to internalize this idea. And in order to stop being afraid of disclosure, it would be good to sort out your “inferiority” with a psychologist. Because otherwise the child will have to be raised in constant tension and fear, and children feel everything perfectly well, and, as noted above, the child is able to feel that “something is wrong,” but this is “wrong” - solely the condition of the parents, and not the fact of the adoptive family itself.

….I happened to work in a shelter where abandoned children were brought. We already had more or less adult children, from 4-5 years old or more. And they knew they were abandoned. Their biggest dream was to have a family, and simply forget about what was somehow wrong: abandonment, shelter, and, in fact, other people's educators. They wanted to become family to someone and forget about what happened to them.

It didn’t matter to them whether they would be their new mom and dad’s relatives or adopted ones. They wanted warmth, affection, care and sincere participation; they wanted to have people who would support them, protect them and whom they could trust.

After all, family is those who raised and loved us, and not those who simply provided biomaterial for conception. And all our mistakes, injuries, problems, successes and achievements depend on those with whom we grew up. To a greater extent at least.

So that, with their family behind them, the child needs, first of all, a mother and father who are not afraid of life, the way it turned out for them, and there is no single unambiguous strategy for when and how to speak/not speak. There is you, your life and your child. And if there is acceptance, trust and love in the relationship, you and your child will be able to cope with any situation and maintain good feelings for each other forever.

A child needs a family! Not even the best institution can replace family members and create a real family atmosphere - it would seem that this is clear and obvious. And the questions about what a family can give a child are answered: care, support, treatment, needs satisfaction, important skills and abilities. However, sometimes this is not enough - the expected happiness and harmony does not occur, and the family comes for a consultation with a specialist to figure out what’s going on. There can be quite a few reasons, but among them there are those that are repeated with enviable regularity.

A strong, confident adult. Many (in fact, not only adopted, but also blood) want to be sure that adults will be able to cope with any, even the most complex tasks. This happens because once the child already had the experience of adults being unable to cope with something, and he was left without their help and support. Therefore, he has fears that the one who is now nearby may well turn out to be the same unreliable person. That is why the child tests the “strength” of new parents, offering him more and more new situations to solve, for example, dissatisfaction with educators, teachers and parents of other children.

Children often confuse the concepts of “strength” and “protection” and in every possible way bring an adult to a state of rage and anger, in which the adult looks, although scary, but clearly strong and powerful.

When preparing to welcome a child into your family, it makes sense to think about what will give him a sense of confidence in your family, what words or actions will emphasize the resilience of adults in difficult situations.

Acceptance of difficult events in personal history. Coming to the family, the child brings with him and, which is often full of rather difficult events: deaths, crimes, violence, rejection. And in this situation, adults should not ignore the child’s past and pretend that it did not exist, but try.

Understanding what happened and how the child felt is really important. But no less important is the fact that all these events were and will remain a part of his life - and, in addition to recognizing them, he needs to find the strength to move on.

Unfortunately, sometimes it happens that the pain for a child’s past is so overwhelming that, due to the powerlessness to change the situation and hatred of those who caused it, the adult loses understanding of how, in fact, to help the child survive this.

Here it can be valuable to turn to your own life experience: who and how helped you cope with difficult situations in childhood, who helps now, what strategies can be used and what definitely doesn’t work.

Understanding development needs. Finding himself in a new family, and in this place in a safer environment, the child may begin to behave as if he. This phenomenon is called regression and is associated with several reasons. For example, when a child was forced, due to a number of circumstances, to become an adult, and now he can catch up. Another reason is that with new parents he wants to live through all the stages of childhood and feel what it means to be a child.

Despite the popularity of this phenomenon, a new family may not be prepared for what it looks like in real life: a ten-year-old child cries like a two-year-old and is hysterical, and a child who knows how to use the toilet suddenly begins to demand diapers and a pacifier, lisp, crawl and scream. “He behaves like crazy”, “He’s just making fun of me!”, “He understands everything! Why do this? – adoptive families can turn to a specialist with such questions, because many manifestations of regression cause them.

As you prepare to welcome a child of a certain age into your family, try to imagine what he was like as a baby, three-year-old, or elementary school student.

It happens that a family wants to accept an older child precisely because they want to leave everything related to babies (whims, feeding, diapers) behind. And here it is very important, precisely at the decision-making stage, to assess your readiness to interact with a small child, albeit purely psychologically.

Parental involvement and support. Unfortunately, in our culture, the roles of parents and educator-mentor can be confused, and the parent takes on the functions of teaching, teaching, and coaching, instead of helping, encouraging, and supporting.

When an adopted child finds himself in a new family, it often turns out that he does not know and cannot do much. And adults want to teach him everything as soon as possible, show him everything and tell him everything. And if the child already goes to school, then very quickly: lessons, clubs, extra classes. And here, unfortunately, something important that a parent can give can be lost - participation and acceptance in any situation.

The time that could be spent simply being together is spent on something useful for learning and development. As a result, the most important thing is missed - time to get to know each other, say good and encouraging words, and hug.

Cognitive activity is much more successful when the child is calm emotionally. Because in the most ordinary development, everything happens exactly like this: first, several years of acceptance, filling, and only then – training. If the main value for future adoptive parents is the education of the child, the desire to give him as much knowledge as possible, it is better to look in advance for a place, time and ways to organize supportive emotional contact, to think about why and what it is needed for.

Jessica Frantova, psychologist, teacher at the School of Adoptive Parents

Over the 11 months of its existence, it has already prepared 30 graduate families. Ten of them were taken in to raise children. In addition to the standard program developed by the city Department of Family and Youth Policy, at the school future adoptive parents can undergo catechesis, communicate with a priest, and also meet with those families who are already raising adopted children. Upon completion of training, a state document is issued - since September, such a certificate of completion of special courses has become mandatory for potential adoptive parents.

The organizer and confessor of the school, chairman of the department for church charity and social service of the Russian Orthodox Church, Bishop Panteleimon of Smolensk and Vyazemsk, tells the portal about what future adoptive parents should learn and how they can cope with spiritual difficulties.

What are the main things potential adoptive parents should know? And does theoretical preparation for parenthood really help in practice?

Of course, it is necessary to acquaint adoptive parents with the characteristics of children who, for some reason, find themselves outside the family. These features, as a rule, are common to all such children: a complex psyche, lack of physical health, and often developmental delays. The usual criteria of pedagogy do not apply to these children. Since the adults who live and work with the children in the orphanage change all the time, the child does not develop a stable attachment to them, and often he does not know how to love. Traumatized children easily switch from one thing to another, they do not have any stability in life... In general, an adopted child is not a blank slate; life has already written various scribbles and even bad words in his soul.

In addition to psychology, adoptive parents must find out in detail the legal side of the issue in order to know both their rights and the rights of their blood parents.

But in addition to special knowledge, the main thing that future parents should learn is the ability to love such children themselves. And for this you need to constantly turn to the Source of love - to God. Through prayer, church sacraments, reading the Holy Scriptures and keeping the commandments, the Lord gives us a feeling of true love. A person must have an understanding that raising a child is a feat for which only the Lord gives strength. “Whoever receives one such child in My name receives Me” (Matthew 18:5).

Parents, fulfilling the words of Christ, must ask for help from the One who commanded us to treat the grief of others with compassion and sympathy, especially since here we are dealing with a child’s misfortune.

What reasons most often make you think about adoption? How do you know if a person is ready to take on a first child?

First of all, we work not with the desire of any person, but with the family. There is no goal to educate as many families as possible. We try to find an individual approach. It is important that the decision to adopt a child is informed.

There must be normal relationships within the family - a conscious desire to have children among all its members. The consent of the husband is required, as well as blood children, if any. We do not consider single women who want a child as candidates for adoptive parents. But, of course, each case is individual, so only the confessor of a particular family can give such advice: whether to take a child or the family is not yet ready for this.

Adoptive parenting courses are exactly what is needed so as not to hide all the difficulties, but to honestly talk about them - and the decision remains with the family. You need to realize that if there is misunderstanding and jealousy in the family, then all these problems will increase many times over if a child appears from the orphanage, who, moreover, will immediately draw all the attention to himself, because he does not know how to share his love and does not know how to live in family.

Sometimes you have to take off the “rose-colored glasses” from parents who think that the child they adopt will now be grateful to them for the rest of their lives. A deliberate decision to adopt becomes when a person understands that he is going to great lengths for the sake of the child.

Most often, difficulties do not frighten those who have not been able to give birth to their own children for a long time. The desire to be a parent is inherent in everyone. Despite the fact that in our time people often do not even think about family and children until they reach mature and very mature age, as a result, the majority still come to this decision. But there are other cases when people who are already raising several children understand how important it is for a child to live in a family, and decide to take in another one - an adopted one. It happens that someone else’s grief simply touches you to the depths of your soul.

When our own natural child is born, we, fortunately, cannot choose what eye color, character, illness, etc. he will have - parents have to love him for who he is. But how to choose a child in an orphanage? And is the choice itself acceptable?

I think that choosing an adopted child is acceptable: you need to see and understand whether you will love him, whether your heart will be inclined towards him. Of course, this choice of the heart must be checked with the mind. To soberly assess whether your family is able to take in a child if he is seriously ill, for example, or is already quite old and has managed to acquire some very bad habits - you will not be able to radically change him. But the voice of the heart is still worth listening to - after all, the Lord Himself can indicate that this is exactly your child. Moreover, the child himself should like you.

In practice, it happens that it is not you who choose from a large number of children, but the consultants themselves who advise you - it is not the children who are matched with the parents, but the parents who are matched with the children. It is worth listening to these recommendations.

Many parents complain that they cannot bring their own natural children, even at an early age, to the Church. What about the children from the orphanage? In your experience, are they able to live in a church-going family?

Knowing the experience of Orthodox orphanages, I can say that a very large percentage of their graduates then do not leave the Church. There are cases that some graduates become wives of priests.

Without the fear of God in you, you cannot teach it to your child. Conversely, if the ordinances are of great importance to the parent, this example is passed on to the children. The most important thing is for us to constantly be with Christ, to be in search of the main gift, the main goal - the acquisition of the Holy Spirit.

And although we can and should force ourselves to love, follow the commandments, and simply get up early in the morning on a day off and go to church, you, of course, cannot force a child. A creative approach is needed here, because family traditions of pious life have not been preserved. Each family needs to find its own path. Therefore, it is still important to communicate with other families and share experiences.

- Is there a continuation of the school for adoptive parents - a club for those who have already adopted?

To provide real help, it is necessary to maintain relationships with our foster families even after adoption. We already have such a club, and in the future our goal is to create an association of Orthodox parents that would help families raise children, including adopted ones. After all, the Church is a family, and all communities should ideally be such friendly families, where they help each other, and in raising children too.

What today is perceived by many as some kind of exotic: adoption, and so on, is in fact natural and normal, but this can only be learned by having a living example before your eyes.

Moreover, over time, we must come to the point where such family clubs unite into a parent association and become a real social force - they can express their opinions on various dangerous trends. Ultimately, due to the fact that legislation in the field of social protection of children is changing, this association could participate in deciding whether to remove a particular child from a particular family or not.

Still, despite all the differences and problems that adoptive parents face, the life of all families develops according to certain general rules: there are fasts, holidays, and common affairs. Parents must take care of their child’s churching from early childhood, and given that many of our adults themselves still know little about church life, they have to overcome many difficulties along this path. In this, families should support each other and help.

- Do people with such experience teach foster parents at an Orthodox school?

Yes, the courses are taught by a priest and a novice of the Marfo-Mary Convent - both themselves grew up in families with many children. Or, for example, some classes are taught by a woman who worked as a director in an Orthodox orphanage for ten years, raised children deprived of parents - one might say, lived with them as one family.

But the main thing I would like is for those who come to the school of foster parents to firmly understand: without God we cannot do anything, and for them to turn to Him more often. Raising other people's children, without exaggeration, is a feat, but it is important to remember that in the person of an adopted child you can serve Christ - the Son of God, Who gave His life for us and adopted us all as sons to God. This is the path where it will not be at all easy, but here the Lord Himself will help you. “Take My yoke upon you and learn from Me, for I am gentle and lowly in heart, and you will find rest for your souls,” says Christ, “for My yoke is easy and My burden is light” (Matthew 11: 29-30).

Reference

The Orthodox school for foster parents is one of the areas of work of the Center for Family Arrangement, a project of the Orthodox help service “Mercy”.

If the thought of an adopted child periodically comes to your mind, then different pictures are probably drawn in your head - he hugs you and thanks you, affectionately calls you “mom-dad”, goes to first grade in new trousers and blows out the candles on the birthday cake. And this has a place in life together, but there are also difficulties. And, oddly enough, the unpleasant situations and simple discoveries that almost all adoptive parents face in one way or another are predictable. We have collected here the most common surprises during the first year of an orphanage child's stay in the family.

1. In the first days or weeks of his stay in your home, where you, his new parents, surround the child with care and attention, he will announce that he wants to go back. He will demand to be taken “to the old house” and sob, sob, sob. You will be confused and decide that you failed and will never be able to make his life happy, but you will be wrong. Any person gets used to his home; “that house” was the only one possible for him until recently, even if he was waiting for his dad and mom. He was a reality, and to change him and your stay in him so quickly, to forget and cross out a whole large piece from life is not an easy task. But that’s not even the main thing. The child must remember what happened before. He had a past, albeit not the kind that usually happens in happy families, but his own story is important, and not a picture made up by someone.
2. Once in your apartment, he will find that people are washing themselves in a bathtub that can be filled with water. Before this, his life had only been a shower. He washed on strictly defined days - Tuesday and Friday or Wednesday and Saturday. And he did it in the company of other kids. Further there will be variations on the theme - does he know about the existence of shampoo or shower gel, or was he washed only with soap before coming to your house? But one thing is for sure - bath foam was irrelevant for him; he had definitely never had a bath in which he could sit, lie and splash around with toys.
3. The first night will also bring surprises for him, and it’s not about the new, bright bed linen (versus his old official one) or the cozy bed with a canopy. Such a simple thing as pajamas will be a surprise for him. Previously, he slept in panties and a T-shirt, and did not realize that there were special clothes for sleeping. “Why should I sleep in these pants and shirt?” - such questions confuse what to say to a person who has never changed into sleepwear.
4. If the baby is still small, and he came to your family from an orphanage (children under 4 years old live there), then he probably hasn’t tried many fruits and vegetables, hasn’t eaten sweets and ice cream, but this is understandable. The products in such establishments are hypoallergenic; children are not given anything that could cause an unpredictable reaction in the body. Porridge and jelly, mashed boiled zucchini and cottage cheese casserole - this is an approximate daily menu. This will not be unexpected; you will be informed about what the child was fed in the institution. But they won’t say that no one ever drinks with straws there. Yes, yes, such a simple thing for an ordinary person, like a straw for drinks, will surprise a new family member.
5. Adoptive parents should be prepared for the fact that the baby’s vocabulary does not correspond to the norm that is accepted in your family. If the child is old enough, his speech may be full of curse words, which are widespread in orphanages. At a certain age, everyone knows bad words, but they are not said out loud, in front of parents and adults. It's taboo. But for an orphanage resident, such restrictions in speech are incomprehensible. If his old house was not located in the center of a large city and was not looked after by volunteers from some university, conservatory, institute with the ensuing trips to the theater and concert hall, then simple and unpretentious speech can be found not only among students, but also among those who works with children. And he doesn’t perceive swearing as something out of the ordinary. Obscene speech is not the only thing that can hurt your ears. Colloquialisms and incorrect accents, illiterately constructed phrases and a very limited set of words - this is what you will have to work with for many months so that the speech of your adopted child does not differ from the speech of all other family members.
6. A little time will pass, maybe a few months, he will stop asking to come back, will get used to the new routine, and it will seem to you that the main difficulties are behind you. But it will soon become clear that only the first stage of addiction has passed. The child will suddenly understand that the time has come to check the authenticity of your words. “They say they love me, but I won’t always be as good as I am now. Will they be able to love me differently - bad, disobedient, unpleasant,” - something like this is how a little person subconsciously decides within himself. And after this a new period begins in your life. Perhaps you are ready for his whims or arguments; you understand how difficult it is for him now. But you are unlikely to calmly accept the fact that suddenly, at some point, he will stop visiting the toilet, his pants will regularly be wet and so will his bed. You will suffer once, twice, and a third time. But then you’ll explode: “You’re such a big kid, you know how to use the toilet perfectly, why...” He will look at you silently, unable to explain that this is just a test of your ability to accept him as anyone.
7. One day you will take him to a toy store, and he will ask you to buy you a toy motorcycle (or a doll, or a construction set). You will be happy - this is such a natural desire for a normal child at home. And buy him everything he wants. But when he brings new toys home, he most likely won't want to play with them. It can't be his thing, he never had anything personal. He brought this “to the group”, everyone can use these toys, and when he gets tired of them, he breaks them. Because you don’t feel sorry for them, they belong to nobody.
8. If the adopted child is not the only one in your family, then you need to be prepared for the fact that, one way or another, he will begin to push your natural children away from you. He will subconsciously create situations where your attention will have to be paid only to him and no one else. For the sake of this right to sole ownership of mom and dad, he will be ready to misbehave, disobey and quarrel with other children. For example, he will take your blood child's new toy and break it. But this is not enough. He will shift his blame onto someone else, and will resist even when the evidence of his guilt is undeniable. Will you be able to find that calm and correct tone in relations with children that will help the blood ones understand that they are still loved and in no case will be preferred to anyone else, but to the adopted one, that he is equal to others in the family.
9. Of course, not right away, but sooner or later you will begin to introduce him “to the world” - you will want to show him animals in the zoo, paintings and sculptures in the museum, rare plants in the botanical garden. He will be very pleased, and not only you, but all those who will be with you within a radius of 200-300 meters will understand this. The child will shout out the names of animals that he had previously seen only in cartoons, and from an excess of feelings he will call a camel a giraffe, and a pony an elephant. It’s worth getting used to and stop noticing the judgmental views of “correct” parents, who, of course, taught their children not to confuse such simple things. After all, in the end, he will stop confusing chlorophytum crested with aloe vera.
10. If all the previous points have not discouraged you, and the decision to go through this path to the end has not diminished, then let this last surprise that the adopted child will present become for you a continuation of all of the above, and in no case an illogical contradiction. One day, when a year or more has passed, you will catch yourself thinking that you do not remember a time when your beloved baby was not in your life.

There are more and more adoptive parents. In Moscow alone in 2010, the number of foster families increased 15 times. According to the Department of Family and Youth Policy of the city of Moscow, more than 2,000 children ended up in families - they were adopted, taken into custody, into foster care or into a foster family. What motives prompt the decision to take one, and sometimes several children?

“Of course, childless couples thus get the opportunity to become parents, but for many the main motive is to take the child from the orphanage and become a family for him,” explains psychologist Lyudmila Petranovskaya. “More and more adults are deciding to adopt a child because they understand that they have the strength, health and resources to change this child’s childhood and be responsible for his fate.”

Adoption is a difficult and lengthy matter. It requires such energy that parents often endure it only because their hearts are warmed by the ideal image of a long-awaited child. But, as with the birth of their own children, they are inevitably faced with the fact that their ideas about the child, to one degree or another, do not correspond to reality.

The more future adoptive parents know, the fewer illusions they have, the fewer disappointments they will face

“It is dangerous to burden children with your expectations of what they should be,” warns the psychologist. - Too often this ends in disappointment of the parents and protest of the child. After all, it is important for him, like any person, to be loved unconditionally, simply because he is.”

When an adopted child enters a family, everyone - both him and his new parents - needs time to get their bearings and build a new order. And he will not always behave like the one his adoptive parents dreamed of. The more prepared adults come to this meeting, the fewer illusions they have about the future child, the less disappointment they will face.

1. It’s better to adopt a baby

An infant is not a blank page at all; he already has his own story. Those who believe that they can completely “rewrite” it and forget that the child is adopted are mistaken. Until he is six months old (and sometimes more), it is difficult to assess the risk that he may have suffered any illness or injury before or after birth.

“Not all parents can cope with this level of uncertainty, and not everyone is ready to bother with the baby,” emphasizes Lyudmila Petranovskaya. “But for the baby himself, it is undoubtedly important that he is taken away from the orphanage as early as possible - every day he spends here slows down his development.”

Of course, more can be found out about the physical and mental development of older children. And it is easier for adoptive parents to make an informed decision. In addition, children with experience of family life with biological parents - even if it was not the best experience, but they were loved and cared for at least occasionally - adapt faster to a foster family, they develop sincere affection earlier.

“Such a child knows what it means to “be a child in a family,” he is oriented towards adults, is ready to listen to them, to trust them,” continues the psychologist. - In a sense, he shares the adoption process... and he himself also “takes” new parents into the family. And for those who do not have experience of close relationships with adults, it is more difficult to believe that they are loved; such children simply do not know what it means to love. Therefore, they are easier to cope with for adults who are not having their first or first adopted child.”

“I immediately had the feeling that this was my child”

Seven years ago, 45-year-old Inna, a manager in the hotel business, decided to adopt a child. Now, together with her common-law husband, they are already raising three adopted children.

Inna and her adopted children: Maria, Makariy, Irina

“I grew up with brothers and sisters and always dreamed of a big family. But for a long time this was not possible. When, after several years of infertility treatment, doctors suggested that I undergo IVF, I decided that it was enough to abuse my own body. And she refused. But the desire to have children remained - I thought about adoption. To better understand what it is and how everything happens, I graduated from the school of foster parents. However, I did not submit the adoption documents right away: it took me another six months to make the final decision and prepare for the birth of the child.

My common-law husband has a child from his first marriage, so I was the main “ideologist” of adoption. My husband always supports me, he has a wonderful relationship with my children. I saw a photo of one-month-old Marusya on one of the forums where adoptive parents communicate. There were three children in the picture, but for some reason it was her face, with its touching eyebrows, that caught my attention. I realized that I wanted to meet the girl, and called the guardianship authorities.

When they brought Marusya to the hospital, I immediately had the feeling that this was my child. It’s such a natural feeling, as if I took her to the nursery in the morning, and now I’ve come to pick her up... This is how the first daughter appeared in my family. Similar feelings arose when I met Makarushka and Irisha. Each of these meetings was associated with a chain of accidents and coincidences. And at the same time, I understand: they would hardly have happened if I didn’t have determination, some drive and a very strong desire to have children.”

Similarity in appearance or character has no meaning for family relationships. Any child, as soon as he develops an attachment to his new parents, becomes like them. “He involuntarily begins to copy their facial expressions and gestures,” says Lyudmila Petranovskaya. - I often see such cases. Children's behavior does not depend on their nationality or race. So, in a loving family with two adopted children, after some time, people around them, representatives of completely different nationalities, began to mistake them for twins.”

Still, Asian-looking children have a harder time finding families. This is due to the prejudices of potential parents.

“The inability to accept representatives of a different culture, fear of people of a different nationality or religion means that they are also not ready to tolerate any discrepancy with their own views and traditions of the family,” continues the psychologist. - And this is a serious contraindication to foster parenting. Xenophobia is rarely limited to intolerance only towards one or another nationality. This means that parents will be just as partial to everything in the child that differs from the stereotype they are accustomed to.

When we say that we love a child, it means that we accept him unconditionally, we love him simply for who he is.

The parents are overweight, but the child is thin, the parents are active, and the child is slow and unhurried - it is impossible to predict in advance where rejection may arise. The more traits and qualities parents reject in a child, the worse the relationship between them. Intolerant parents have less margin of safety in the face of possible difficulties.”

3. We must love him like our own.

When we say that we love a child, it means that we accept him unconditionally, we love him simply because he exists and he is our child. Sometimes parents, especially if they have experience of “blood” parenting, worry that they “can’t love their adopted child as their own.” What to do then?

“Emotionally people are very different from each other,” answers Lyudmila Petranovskaya. - Some people manage to fall in love easily and quickly, while for others the process of developing attachment is extended over time. We cannot control our feelings. All that remains is to wait... and love actively: take care of the child, listen to him, delve into the details of his life outside the home, try to understand and accept, rejoice in his successes.”

Sometimes rejection arises at the bodily level: in order to pick up a child, an adult needs to make an effort. “Usually such rejection first arises at the moment of acquaintance,” says Lyudmila Petranovskaya. “You shouldn’t fight yourself: no one is to blame, and it’s better to give the child the opportunity to feel welcome in another family, with other parents.”

4. It is better for the child not to know that he is adopted.

Cheating distorts relationships. “Ask yourself,” suggests Lyudmila Petranovskaya, “would you like your loved ones to hide something very important from you? It is difficult to find a person who would like to remain in the dark... And information about adoption is an important part of the personal history, and therefore the personality of the child.”

Trying to circumvent this fact, adoptive parents deny what happened to the child and deprive him of the opportunity to organically integrate this event into knowledge about himself. Sometimes adults explain their behavior by not wanting to injure their son or daughter.

“This only happens if the parents themselves see adoption as a problem,” objects Lyudmila Petranovskaya. - The child does not know the real picture of the world; he is focused on how adults relate to what is happening. In addition, by hiding the truth from the child, adults make themselves hostage to chance: a “friendly” remark from a neighbor, found documents, a mismatch of blood type... Sooner or later, the secret becomes clear. And it’s difficult to predict what the reaction of a grown child might be when he finds out that the people closest to him lied to him.”

5. He will have bad heredity

The biggest fear of parents is that their adopted child will inherit some disease or some kind of “trouble in life”: he will drink, go out, will not study... “Indeed, there are diseases that are inherited,” states Lyudmila Petranovskaya. “In the case of an adopted child, potential parents are frightened primarily by the unknown.”

The very fact of adoption is an important part of the personal history, and therefore the personality of the child. You need to talk to him about this

In Russia it is difficult to find a family in which there is not and has not been at least one person who drinks. Many residents of our country have a predisposition to alcohol dependence. But this does not mean that each of them becomes an alcoholic. “There is a predisposition, and what a person does with it, in what atmosphere he grows,” continues the psychologist. “It is very important that parents not only support the child, but also can limit and warn about danger.”

6. He will want to find his biological parents.

“Such a desire more often arises in adolescence, during the period when a child tries to understand, to truly know himself in order to become an adult,” says Lyudmila Petranovskaya. - It can be of a different nature, from passive (“it would be nice to know”) to very active actions. Sometimes it is enough for a child to simply learn something about his parents, sometimes it is important for him to see them, to meet them. In this case, it is worth helping him find relatives. There is nothing dangerous in this desire for adoptive parents - children value the relationships they have.”

Some people have fantasies that their real parents are famous people, movie stars or show business stars who dream of being reunited with them... Adult support is needed to survive the disappointment that may arise after meeting biological parents. At the same time, teenagers, as a rule, are very grateful to their adoptive parents if this topic is discussed in the family, and even more so if adults are ready to help them find their story.