Adoption

Should we tell our child that we are his adopted parents?

Yes, of course. If your child has known your love since infancy, you have little to fear. Most adopted children were unwanted by their real mothers. Every child psy­chologist knows the sad consequences when a baby gets no love. In a long career, I have found that the children I could not do very much for were those who had never been loved as babies. Such poor kids go through life with a sus­picion, a feeling of inferiority, a fear of emotional contact. Freedom can ameliorate that starved emotional state, but freedom cannot completely cure the damage. The adopted child who is a problem child is not really protesting against his foster parents; he is going farther back-feeling, not thinking-“I was never wanted by my mother. She left me, and I hate her forever.”

Some of my pupils who have been adopted have tried to meet their natural mothers to re-establish a relationship; the experiment has never been successful. The mother that was met was a stranger, not the warm, embracing mother of their infant dreams. I am a little bit nervous about adop­tion.

An adopted child must be told the truth; no matter how old he was when adopted. If yon tell a girl of six that she is adopted, with good loving parents she is likely to forget the fact— if her parents are good And loving;, if you suppress the information, the shock of later discovery may have serious results. Some foster parents think:

The baby was adopted when she was six weeks old. She cannot possibly ever know about it. No need to tell her. That path can be dangerous, for children have ways and means of ferret­ing out secrets. I knew one boy who discovered the truth when he was 16. His foster parents told me that after that shock he had become cool and secretive in his relations with them. Safest to tell the truth.

It is because I fear for the future of rejected children that T am all for legal abortion. Abortion is far less harmful to society than a hating child. It is a scandal that our anti-abortion laws were made by men. Only a plebiscite of women, both married and single, should determine whether abortion is to continue to be a punishable crime. Alas. women, too, have been molded; I fear that the majority of women might’ also be against abortion.

When parents who have their own children adopt another, there may still be a danger. Given the intense jealousies in the ordinary family, what happens when a child of five is suddenly introduced into an intimate group of other children of seven and ten? What must be the con-dieting emotions among the children who now have to share the parental love and attention with an interloper?

A similar situation arises in a boarding school where a married teacher comes with his own child. More than once I have had to ask a married teacher to leave because his own child was becoming a problem. “I had Mommy and Daddy all to myself, now they give all their time to fifty other kids.”

My advice to teachers and housemothers: never have your children in the school you teach in. I was a pupil in my father’s village school and I got leathered more vio­lently than the other ways, partly because my father did not want to show any favoritism, party because he was angry that his son did not set a good example in behavior and studies.

There is something uncanny about a child; he almost seems to have a special sense. An illegitimate child does not know he is a bastard, but he feels there is some mystery about him. Similarly, parents who try to hide from their children the fact that they no longer love each other are astounded to learn that the child sees through it all, despite their attempt to disguise the situation by calling each other Darling or Honey There is really very little that you can hide from children. In two separate instances I have known adolescent girls who were horn a month before their par­ents’ wedding. Then parents lied about their birth dates so that they did not know the fact itself, yet why did they go off to the Registry Office and ask to see their birth certificates? Must have been either a special sense, or some spiteful remark by someone who had heard the gossip. The moral is live the truth, and tell the truth.