Birth Parent Fantasies

This post is in response to a comment made on the previous post asking for more information about birth parent fantasies. Hope this provides some useful information and answers questions that many people might have.

Child development research shows that most children around elementary school age, will create a "family fantasy."  For the child who has not been adopted this is just a stage, a short-term fantasy that is fun and can aide continued attachment development with parents despite disappointments and realizing those parents are not perfect or solely good.

For the child who has been adopted it is usually not "just a stage" or a short-term fantasy mainly because this fantasy is based on some actual facts--the child actually has "other" parents before the adoptive parents. The birth parent fantasies are also not as much fun for the child who has been adopted. They will often feel very conflicted about their fantasies. One reason why birth parent fantasies develop is to help protect the child from and also help the child to make sense of hard facts, such as relinquishment.  In fantasies dealing with relinquishment and abandonment the child may wish and fear at the same time his birth parents coming to reclaim him. The child who has been adopted, often wants her birth parents to want her but not to actually take her.

Another conflicting aspect about birth family fantasies is that the child is still in the developmental stage where everything and everyone is either good or bad. These fantasies may categorize birth parents as "bad" but then the conflicting aspect is what does that say about the child himself; the biological child of said "bad" parents? If the fantasy categorizes the adoptive parents as "bad" it puts conflicting thoughts on practically everything the child has ever known of family and life. Then the last option is for the child to categorize herself as "bad" and obviously this is not conducive to healthy emotional and/or identity development.

So what do we do as adoptive parents or others involved with children who have been adopted?

• We do not encourage or discourage per se, the actual having birth parent fantasies but are to encourage the expression of the fantasies if they develop (and they most likely will develop in some form). 
• You cannot help a child with the difficult emotional work, or the resolving of conflicting and ambiguous thoughts and circumstances or  integrate hard facts about their life story that are contained in their birth parent fantasies if you do not know what their fantasies are.
• The fantasies can be expressed verbally but as the fantasy might have lots of conflicting and strong emotions attached to them it might be difficult for a child to just talk about them. The lifebooks can help bring about discussion of birth family fantasies safely through the use of prompts, the child's birth and adoption stories and pictures.
• When creating a lifebook, sharing the adoption or birth story etc...be careful to neither idealize or vilify people in the story. Birth parents should not be "sacrificing saints" nor "losers"; adoptive parents should not be "rescuers" or "saviors" and the adopted child should not be "lucky" etc... One possible underlying theme is we are all humans, who make both good and bad choices and no one is solely good or bad.
• You might encourage other forms of expression besides verbal, by having the child draw pictures of the birth parents and birth family fantasies.
• When discussing the birth family fantasy, name emotions both the positive and the negative that the child expresses or are most likely underlying the fantasy. Again highlight that it's hard and often uncomfortable to accept people as both good and bad but it's the healthiest path.
• Be aware of your own emotions. For example, as an adoptive parent listening to the birth family fantasy do you feel threaten? Recognize and acknowledge your emotions. Your feelings, especially if left unrecognized, can influence and even sabotage your efforts of communication with and help to your child.
• Resist transmitting society's pressure to choose "sides" and to have loyalty to only one person/family. Having a relationship, interest or love for the birth family does not mean the child cannot or does not have relationships, interest and love for the adoptive family and vice versa.
• Revisit the fantasy, rediscuss the birth family and other facts and details about adoption. Just because you have been using the term adoption or birth parent since the child was young doesn't mean they understand the meaning or concept. Children will usually need to come to terms, a new understanding of what it means to be adopted, at each new developmental stage.
• Open adoption and/or sharing the facts that you have about the birth family and adoption has been shown to help discuss and ground the fantasy in reality but don't assume that this will eliminate the child's birth family fantasy all together. Many children take the facts and elaborate on them further in their fantasies. For example, one young women who knew her birth mother did not finish high school, elaborated on that fact with the belief her birth mother went to beauty school instead, just like many of the girls who dropped out in her own school did. The young woman started considering going to beauty school, too. If an adoptive parent or other individual involved with the young woman, knew of this elaboration or the fantasy, they could help her find ways to be her own person and find other ways to feel connected with her birth mother.  

This post was written using the research article: Birthparent Romances and Identity Formation in Adopted Children by Elinor Rosenberg and Thomas M. Horner.

Lifebooks

What are Lifebooks

A Lifebook is a record of a foster/adopted child’s life that uses words, photos, the child’s artwork, and memorabilia. It is like a scrapbook but provides different information and details than your average scrapbook.

Lifebook Page Ideas

• The day you were born
• How your parents found out about you
• Waiting for you
• Meeting you
• Your birth family and/or foster family or orphanage
• Your family tree (both families as much as possible)
• Adoption day
• Visits with your birth family
• About your birth country

Lifebook Journaling Ideas

• Dates of important events and milestones
• Names of social workers, facilitators and agency officials
• Locations and names of foster families and orphanages
• Meeting birth family members or correspondence with them (if available)
• Weather and news headlines on their adoption day and/or birthday
• Making the decision to adopt
• Your thoughts and feelings about the adoption process
• Poetry and quotations about adoption
• Foods eaten, sights seen on their day of birth or adoption day
• Stories about traveling home
• Details of the first days together as a family

Reasons to Make Lifebooks

Throughout the adoptee’s life, he or she will hear about the day she arrived into the family. Stories abound from that point. The child’s birth and birth family are not discussed as often, usually because the new family members lack the personal knowledge of the birth family’s story. The lifebook helps to fill that void.

Lifebooks Provide:

• A concrete tool for meaningful conversation
• An adoption security blanket
• A prop to use as part of attachment rituals
• A structure to use when discussing difficult subjects (such as reasons for relinquishment)
• A way to normalize adoption language
• A way to discuss fantasies about birth parents
• A method of embedding positive messages during childhood that will be remembered during adolescence strengthening postive adoptive identity
• An opportunity to strengthen other facets of identity such as self-esteem and positive ethnic identity
• A method of reducing society's pressure on children to have divided loyalties between birth and adoptive families
• A space to document future events

Examples

Recommended Books & References

• LifeBooks: Creating a Treasure for the Adopted Child by Beth O'Malley
• Adoption Lifebook: A Bridge to Your Child's Beginnings by Cindy Probst
• http://www.nacac.org/adoptalk/celebration.pdf

Save the Date

Indiana/Kentucky/Tennesse
FSA & LDSFS Conference

in Franklin Tennesse

September 17th-18th

We are having a combine conference

with the Adoption Specialists who serve LDSFS

and our whole FSA chapter which now includes 3 states!

Friday 17th:

Family Picnic 

Temple Session at the Nashville Temple

Saturday 18th:

Conference with a variety of break-out sessions, 

adoption panel

& food 

We encourage all to attend, especially our members in southern Indiana, Kentucky and Tennesse.

We also encourage all to attend the
Regional Conference in Kirtland, OH on Oct. 8th-9th
but understand if you choose to attend only one conference.

More detailed information will follow in a couple weeks about times, workshops schedule, possible hotel discounts and more. 

Chad & Natalie Hoping To Adopt

We have been married for almost 9 years. We have three biological children ages 7, 5 and 3. We just really believe that adoption is a blessing and want to be a part of it. We want to be a support to a birth mother and want to provide a mother and father for a child.

We have been trying to adopt for 4 years. In 2006, a month after we got our profile posted on itsaboutlove.org, I found out I was pregnant. Sooo, that put the adoption process on hold for about a year and half since you have to wait until your child is a year old to resume the adoption process. We had one birth mother select us in Sept. of 2008 before even meeting us or even talking to us, but then she disappeared. We started with Parent Profiles in September of 2009 and have had a contact from a birth mother at least once a month. Some of the contacts never contact us again and some have resulted good discussions.

In December of 2009 we got a call from a birth mother and met her three days later! At our meeting she asked us if we would adopt her baby. We formed a great relationship very quickly. We talked every other day for at least an hour. We had to up the minutes on our phone plan! Her family was not supportive of adoption and we were so happy to be a support to her during such a difficult time. She was not living near family, which was hard on her, but also kind of good for her, so that she didn't constantly get pressure from them. She ended up going into labor in February 2010 at just 19 weeks and lost the baby. It has been difficult for her and for us. Luckily, we have been able to stay friends with her. To learn more about our feelings on adoption here are links to our profiles:

 

https://www.itsaboutlove.org/ial/profiles/15949857/ourMessage.jsf

http://www.parentprofiles.com/profiles/db24521.html

 

We haven't had our happy ending yet, but we are hopeful.

Finding vs. Waiting

I remember when my husband and I were new and just beginning the adoption process. We verbally told friends and family, usually in person, that we were adopting. One friend told me that she just received an email from another friend that was adopting. She said the email had a link to their profile and they encouraged her to send the email on to more people.

My internal first response was "Weird." Being rather new still to the adoption world, I hadn't heard about "finding" techniques that help adoptive couples connect with potential birth parents. When Jared and I discussed doing something similar we felt uncomfortable with the idea of advertising ourselves in this way. We were still situating ourselves to the fact that we, for all appearances, were "applying" to be parents like you would a job. I think planning an advertisement campaign was beyond our emotional capacity at the time.

Since then, I have heard and seen more and more successful adoptions that have taken place because the couple was actively searching and finding their child. We have changed our opinion from "weird & uncomfortable" to "good idea & helpful." So I encourage you to prayerfully consider different ideas and options on getting the word out that your family is hoping to adopt.

Here are just a few ideas:

Facebook
Here is an article about how one couple connected with their birth parents by posting their adoption flyer on Facebook.

Jeff & Anna members of our Indiana/Kentucky FSA have an adoption page on Facebook. If anyone else in our chapter has a Facebook adoption page, we would like to hear about it!

IN/KY FSA is now a group on Facebook. Make a request to join our group!

Adoption Pass Along Cards

Here is a link to a company where you can see examples and order adoption pass along cards.

Check out this post from another FSA blog about different ideas on how to pass out your adoption pass along cards.

Read this post about an LDS couple who connected with their birth mother because she received their pass along card.

You could potentially make your own professional looking pass along cards using Photoshop. Would anyone be interested in attending a workshop at our next FSA conference on making your own adoption pass along cards?

We will post more ideas on how to find and connect with birth parents in future posts. If you have ideas and/or success stories on "finding" techniques please email them to us at indianafsa@gmail.com or leave a comment!
-EE

Sophie & Kelly's Adoption Journey

Our adoption journey began a year ago in Hawaii. When Kelly returned home from Iraq, we quickly (within 2 weeks) got all our paperwork and visits taken care of with LDS Family Services in Hawaii. You see, I have always known (since I was a young girl) that the Lord had a special child or children in mind for me and my future hubby to adopt. I was always okay with not being pregnant, I really wanted to adopt because that's what I felt the Lord wanted for our family.

Well, the years passed and Kelly really wanted to be able to make our babies, so we were able to get pregnant and we had three children. But, my body didn't seem to want to let our babies "bake" long enough--they were all born prematurely. We decided that we were probably done, so on our youngest child's first birthday, Kelly had a vasectomy. However, the night before, I had a dream that a little girl was waiting to join our family but I didn't tell Kelly in time.

For a time, my heart was saddened because I knew a special spirit was meant to join our family. However, Kelly did not have the same feelings about adoption. And so I waited for the Lord to touch his heart. More time passed and Kelly's best friend and his wife adopted a beautiful baby girl through LDSFS in Utah. They had a wonderful experience with adoption and Kelly's heart was softened. After he returned home from a 7 month deployment in Iraq, he told me he was ready to proceed with finding our baby girl. YEAH! I felt a real sense of urgency so we got right to work and got everything in within two weeks.

I thought we would adopt really fast, but we waited and waited and waited..... In that time we worked with LDS Family Services, Parent Profiles, and some other agencies in Utah, but ultimately we were led to Premier Adoption Agency in Nevada in November 2009. Just when I had lost all hope, we got the call from our agency in Nevada that we had only been working with for three months. Our baby was waiting, but she was recovering from being really sick and we were told that she might have some problems in the future because of her birthmom's prenatal drug-use. So, we prayed really hard for confirmation and called her doctors; discussing our options, but we knew from the first time we saw her pictures that she was ours! Everything just fell into place and our feelings were confirmed over and over through the Spirit that we had found Our baby, the One meant for our family.

Sophie is also breastfeeding their new baby girl through Induced Lactation. (See these two articles here and here for more info). If you want to know more about her experience send an email to indianafsa@gmail.com.

Book List from Esther Edwards

At our adoption conference on October 1oth, Esther Edwards gave a great presentation about using children's books to foster a positive adoptive identity in our children.

Here is a list of her favorite children's books about adoption.

Esther Edwards Top 12 Favorite Children's Books about Adoption
My Family is Forever by Nancy Carlson
How I Was Adopted by Joanna Cole

Three Names of Me by Mary Cummings

Tell Me Again About the Night I was Born by Jaime Lee Curtis

All Together Now by Anita Jeram A Mother for Choco by Keiko Kasza

Over the Moon by Karen KatzHorace by Holly Keller
The Red Thread: An Adoption Fairy Tale by Grace Lin

The Family Book by Todd Parr

Sam's Sister by Juliet C. Bond
Logan's Journey by Kathy Heath & Karla Martin

Have you fully explored the new itsaboutlove.org?

As most of you know, LDS Family Services has recently released a new version of itsaboutlove.org. This new website is much different than the previous version and has many additions that will benefit birthparents and adoptive families as well as church leaders and professionals working with them. If you're in the waiting process, you've probably already explored how to browse through profiles as you've searched for your own and others. These new user-friendly search options allow birthparents to be more selective and to quickly find profiles for families who would best fit their needs and interests. In addition, if you haven't had a chance to check out the following, be sure to do so:

Once you've clicked on "Hoping to Adopt," you can view the following:
Adoption facts, myths, and proper adoption language (under "Adoption Basics"). This holds a wealth of information that would be good to send to friends and family who might need a little more education about adoption.
Questions, stories, and other information to help you know if you're ready to adopt (under "Is Adoption Right for Us?").
Stories of adoptive families' experiences with adoption (under "Real Life Stories").
Church talks, web links, and other resources (under "Adoption Resources").

Have you been curious to know what birthparents see as they explore the new website? After you click on "Pregnant," check out some of the following to help you get a better feel for a birth mom's perspective:
Information about pregnancy (under "My Pregnancy").
Advice and information to help birthparents understand the realities of abortion, single parenthood, marriage, and adoption (under "What Are My Options?").
Videos and stories about real birthparents' experiences (under "Real Life Stories"). We found these enlightening and also very emotional to watch, so they are probably our favorite addition to the new website.
Ability to send an email to a birth mother or a counselor in order to get support and guidance (under "Get Support").

This is just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to exploring the new itsaboutlove.org website. It is a valuable resource for birthparents, adoptive families, persons considering adoption, friends and families of those involved in adoption, and for church leaders.

For those of us with online profiles who are waiting to be selected by a birth mom, it can be encouraging to look at your profile statistics. After logging in to your application, click on "Phase 4: Finding Your Child." At the top left of the page, click on "View Profile Statistics" to see that people actually ARE seeing you! (Or maybe you've just been clicking on your own profile a few too many times… J).

The new itsaboutlove.org is also much easier to find online than the previous version. You can, of course, type in www.itsaboutlove.org. Or, access it from www.lds.org by selecting "Home and Family" and either "Adoption Services" or "Pregnancy Counseling." One of our favorite activities to share with others as we educate them about LDSFS is to go to Google and type in "adoption." It's as simple as that. The first non-sponsored link is adoption.com, and from that page you will often (though not always) see a big advertisement about halfway down that when clicked takes you to itsaboutlove.org. You can also google "abortion alternatives" or "pregnancy counselor," and the first link listed for each of those terms will take you to websites sponsored by LDSFS with additional links that take you directly to itsaboutlove.org.

As you can see, the adoption program is important enough to the LDS Church that it has decided to increase the usability of its website and to expand its marketing campaign. Seeing the great effort that has been put into the new itsaboutlove.org website has helped us recognize the important role adoption plays in the Church; it's something that the Lord cares enough about to direct Church leaders and others to help match children and parents together as eternal families.

We have been telling all our friends and family about the new itsaboutlove.org website, and we encourage you all to do the same.

Libby and Ethan Sproat
(FSA Members in West Lafayette, Indiana just waiting to be selected!)

LDS Family Services Adoption Program: Same Old Faces, New Focus

Okay despite a receding hairline and maybe a more mature and distinguished look, I hope my face is not considered old, but while some of the faces and characters in our office have not changed you will notice a new look to the face of our adoption program. Above is a picture of my great looking family. What remains the same is our programs focus on building families.

In the spring of this year LDS Family Services completed an evaluation designed to assess and potentially reshape our service programs. In conducting this evaluation welfare services and the presiding brethren were considering how we can, 1. Best meet the needs of the growing church, 2. Improve the quality of our services and 3. Better support and coordinate with priesthood leaders. As we were assigned a new commissioner over LDS Family Services, Larry Crenshaw, he set the vision for staff, viewing ourselves as “Healers of Souls”. Much discussion went into what aspects of our services were aligned with this core and thus needed to be maintained and strengthened. To help us to become stronger, quicker and leaner as an organization we also needed to release ourselves from those aspects of our services that are not at our core.

Fortunately the decision was made to continue with our adoption program and engage in means to make it the best that we can. To help us accomplish this goal our program has been reshaped in a number of areas to not only heal souls, but to build eternal families. Below are a summary of some of these changes.

Focus on the Needs of the Child – Okay this focus is nothing new, but even more so we are recommitting our efforts to the interests of children. More than the birth parents, the adoptive families or others, we hope to reorient ourselves to serving more and more of God’s precious children who need the covenants of the temple.

Specialization of Services – We will increase the quality of our services as we move from LDS Family Services program generalists to specialists. I have taken the assignment of “Adoption Supervisor” in our office allowing me to focus the majority of my time on adoption. In time we are working to add other part time or contracted workers that will focus exclusively on adoption work.

Menu Driven Approach – While in the past we have been the primary provider for every component of adoption from start to finish, we now will be looking to outsource some services and strengthen others. This will depend on local laws and the quality of community resources, but in the future this may include home studies, placements, supervisory visits and legal work. Doing so will allow us to focus even more on what we see as the most crucial aspect of adoption, the matching. We plan to improve our case work as we partner with birthparents seeking to make a tremendously important decision and coaching adoptive couples through the rapids of adoption processes and resources.

Partnerships within the Community – We will work within adoption communities drawing upon the best resources, talent and services of other agencies. As we do this we hope to offer the best services to those who walk through our doors, but we also help to support the collective synergism that will help support and preserve the practice of adoption.

Use of Technology – As part of drawing upon the best in information and resources we have just launched http://www.itsaboutlove.org/ . This site is a tremendous resource to birth parents and adoptive couples alike. As this is promoted and marketed throughout the church and internet it will be a wonderful means to strengthen adoption and place more children in covenant homes.

Families Supporting Adoption – As you can imagine the herculean task of building this program is well beyond the scope of one adoption supervisor. To accomplish this task we need the active and energetic support of a coalition of adoptive advocates such as Families Supporting Adoption. For the benefit of the many children needing covenant homes we need the put our FSA organization on steroids (or at least intensive weight training). We need to build and focus in ways that increase mentoring, training, support, advocacy and legislation for the good of children. As you visit this blog you will see an increase in activity as we align with this vision.

I hope that in reading through this you can feel of my love for adoption and excitement concerning this new program focus. I greatly love my children and am amazed and grateful for the courage and strength that it takes for birth mothers to place their children in adoptive homes. Truly few other decisions have such a tremendous impact for good in the life of a child. I appreciate your patience with some of the bumps and delays in getting to this point. I invite your full participation as we partner with the Lord in moving forward with wonderful miracle of adoption.