For National Adoption Month, the Accrescent Institute team sat down with our founder, Thomas C. Rector, to learn more about how his family's adoption journey influenced his parenting, his thinking, and how it played a role in developing BioSocial Cognition.
Join us as he shares stories from his adoptive parenting journey, encouragement and advice for other adoptive parents and prospective adoptive parents, and insights into how BioSocial Cognition developed and its impact.
Adoption Interview with Thomas C. Rector (Transcript)
Table of Contents
Parenting from a Child Standpoint versus a Cultural Standpoint
Examples of Changes You Personally Made to Support Your Kids
Open Adoption Can Feel Very Scary - Insights into How to Make it Easier
How did Your Open Adoption Journey Clue You in to How and Why Memories Matter?
Encouragement for an Adoptive Parent Running up Against Challenging Behavior
From an Adoptive Parenting Standpoint, What Does It Mean to Be a Memory Maker?
An Example of Being Intentional in Building Positive Memories
An Example of How A Foster/Adoptive Parent Use the Training with their Teen
Words of Advice for Adoptive Parents and Parents Considering Adoption
Intro:
What we’re going to talk about today is adoption. That’s really our focus for today is your story on adoption, how that plays into BioSocial Cognition and the training that you do, and what are some of the benefits that adoptive parents can take away having had the BioSocial Cognition training.
Adoption Journey - What Led You to Adopt?
Q: One of the things that we really wanted to ask first was if you could share a little bit about your own adoption journey and what led you to adopt, especially foster-adopt, and then direct adopt.
Thomas C. Rector: We raised two children. We were married early. The children moved out when we were still young enough to think in terms of starting again, which is what we chose to do.
Our three youngers came to us when we were in our 40s, and the two youngest of them came to us through adoption. They are siblings by mother with different fathers.
My personal experience was that I like being a dad and I thought that the children as adults are great people, they’re productive, they get things done, they are self-sufficient, they’re honest, they’re responsible, they’re great people.
So, of course, I assumed that I knew what I was doing.
When I started the adventure of the three youngers and two of them being adopted, I discovered that I really didn’t know what I was doing and it was a different pool of genetics that I was working with.
What worked for the first two didn’t necessarily sync up and work for the two younger adoption children.
So, I went searching, looking to find other ideas, other ways, other thinking. That was a huge component of it was what was a model of thinking that I had as far as my role and as far the impact of the things that I did as a parent, as a father, that created a different result for the younger adopted children.
I did a lot of reading, a lot of looking, and found a couple of things.
One is I didn’t realize and recognize how narrowly biased I was in what was a parenting role and not a role. Out of that recognition was the recognition of how much culture has to do with what our parenting styles and parenting methods are.
That whole stealth process was going on at the same time the real thing is going on, which is I have three children that need to be successful and raised as adults.
Out of that came a considerable amount of reading and a conclusion that there are many solutions out there, there are many recommendations, there are many techniques that are available, but they were really specific to the scenario. They weren’t underlying, they weren’t the basis that you would build a response off of.
That led me to what is the basis and where is that. BioSocial Cognition is a result of that personal experience, personal learning, and personal thinking.
Parenting from a Child Standpoint versus a Cultural Standpoint
Q: You touched on culture there. I’ve heard you say before that you didn’t realize you were parenting from a cultural standpoint versus a child standpoint. Can you get a little deeper into what are those two, what do they mean, and what do they look like?
Thomas C. Rector:
For me, culture is something that represents my self-learning. I learned this, I am a product of my learning, the culture defines what’s right, what’s wrong, what should be, what shouldn’t be in all aspects of our interface with the world. That represents one perspective. It doesn’t represent the baseline.
From the children’s standpoint, they start off not having a cultural element in them if they come to you young.
Our two youngest adopted children, one came at birth and one came at eight-months. The recognition was that I needed to not start with my cultural conditioning, if you want to call it that, to respond to a particular behavior that’s coming from my child.
But I need to start from what the child is experiencing and who they are, and then figure out what works for them rather than what works for my culture for them.
What that does is put a huge amount of demand upon me as dad to truly understand who they are as a person, as an individual, free-standing and separate. Those are given.
Then how do I engage that, how do I teach that, how do I help it evolve, how do I get the potential that’s in the child itself to rise to the full blossom that it can have?
Example Changes You Personally Made to Support Your Kids
Q: Can you give a tangible example of maybe some of the changes that you personally made in your own family dynamic to support your kids under this new understanding?
Thomas C. Rector:
I would name probably three different components. First and foremost was to be able to recognize in myself that this is a cultural reaction on my part.
An example of that was culturally I was raised that crying was not okay, crying was a weakness, crying was something that you stiffened your back and you didn’t need to do that. Where in fact crying is a natural biological response to how a person is feeling.
The example on my part is that crying is okay, it’s normal, it’s natural, it should be able to be allowed. Therefore, one is I had to recognize that it was a hang-up in my culture.
Two is that I had reactions to crying that were culturally conditioned that I needed to be able to filter and recognize.
Then from the child’s standpoint, the crying is no longer being interpreted as a cultural kind of behavioral expression but is telling me something. It’s telling me something that the child is experiencing. What is that?
That drives down further, which is I need to understand how the child’s self is inclined to process the world. For example, if you’re an extrovert or an introvert, those are very obvious things, you process exactly the same situation differently. All right, I need to get clear on that.
Getting a clear understanding of the natural, innate, genetic makeup of my children became a really driving new space to get into. With that knowledge, it was easier to push back, correct, reevaluate cultural kinds of responses [within myself].
How do You Learn More About Your Adoptive Child's Genetics
Q: As an adoptive parent, how do you learn more about your child’s genetic makeup and how they naturally process the world when they’re small and you don’t have that background? How did you solve that?
Thomas C. Rector:
Multiple ways. Probably the more profound way, which was a huge gift on my part, was to embrace open adoption. That was from a couple of standpoints. One specifically is the open adoption creates a wholeness to the child rather than an emptiness in that space, whatever it can be.
Shannon:
Is that wholeness as far as identity?
Thomas C. Rector:
Our self-identity is so connected to who our family is. If we get disconnected from our family, then the roots of the family that just generate through our living and perception and social connections is hurt.
The open adoption exposure for the children has to be appropriate and productive. But that exposure means that this is their mother, this is their father, and how does that all fit in.
The other part of the open adoption was the more I could learn about their mother and their father, the more clues I had for who my children were. As an adult, a great deal of this is being expressed, whereas in a child it’s not expressed as much.
The big huge shift for learning information was to embrace open adoption and figure out how to make that productive and useful, investing into their future and investing in their particular awareness of how that works.
It has to be the truth. It can’t be rose-colored glasses. It needs to be the truth, but it doesn’t need to be ugly either. It’s a balance and it’s case-by-case, situation by situation.
To get a clue of the genetic disposition of the children, the better I knew the mother and father of each, the more clues I had for understanding what their individual behavior was.
Open Adoption Can Feel Very Scary - Insights into How to Make it Easier
Q: My perception is that open adoption can feel very scary, the idea of an open adoption can feel very scary. How valid is that and do you have any insights on how to make that easier?
Thomas C. Rector:
For sure. Absolutely, for sure it can be scary. It’s scary for multiple reasons. One, it’s just totally new to most of us. The first time we go through that particular relationship is just totally new and how does it work.
Two is that’s their father and I’m Dad, how does that work, what are our roles, what are our boundaries, what is acceptable and what isn’t acceptable, how do I convey communication to their father and how do I hear the information that they convey to me.
All of that for most of us is just totally new. Any new experience always has some sort of intimidation and scariness to it.
The other thing is that there is a messaging out there that says that the parents of children that have been removed from their parents there is some level of dysfunctionality and we don’t know how scary that is.
Is that just because of lifestyles or is that because of how they treat or how they interface with society in general? You just don’t know how that’s going to work.
I would say the last is that when you adopt, you wrap your arms around this child and say mine, I’m dad. To have the father come into the conversation, does that threaten how I perceive that? What’s my role and does that threaten that particular part of it?
In our particular case, this was easier for me to cope with, handle, figure out than it was for my wife. As a general statement, I handled most of the interface with the birth parents, which I think turned out good for an unknown reason, which was there’s only one channel of communication going on so there isn’t this his wife said, they heard, that kind of stuff.
It helped narrow that down, which is a good thing because there is so much opportunity for miscommunication between adoptive parents and birth parents because there is so much personal investment from the two different viewpoints.
So, in our particular case, I handled most of that. As much as possible, I managed the scenario, the environment that we were going to be in so that there was the least amount of unknowns that were going to occur out of it.
The very fundamental component of that was that they were environments and situations that the children were familiar with. It wasn’t an unknown kind of thing.
In the very beginning, McDonalds was a safe place. In those days, there were playgrounds. Now there aren’t many playgrounds. They were playgrounds, they could play and run while I and father or I and mother could sit and chat a little bit but be interrupted.
It was a public place, so it was safe. McDonalds is a very known environmental, behavioral kind of thing, so it provided the birth parents with a very known condition.
As the relationship developed over the years, when they were in grade school, there were school programs, so we could invite the mother or the father to participate and tag along.
That one was most interesting because there was so much bias out in the world of…I would use the word condemnation because this parent had not successfully raised this child to the point where they had to be taken away.
In specific, I can think of a couple instances at school programs where we invited the birth mother to come with us and people were questioning my wife with regard to, "How does that work? Aren’t you uncomfortable?"
In our world, that wasn’t a concern at all. We were normalizing our family for our children.
The open adoption brought our family together at whatever level we could do to make this a normal thing, this is how it is. It’s not some exception or burden or requirement. It’s family. It’s their mother, it’s their father, they need to know them.
How did Your Open Adoption Journey Clue You in to How and Why Memories Matter?
Q: One of the things that’s very key and core to BioSocial Cognition and the training that you do for Accrescent Institute is around memories.
How did those experiences, both interacting with birth mother and father and your three younger children in the adoption process and foster process, how did that clue you in that memories actually matter here in the different ways that they do?
Thomas C. Rector:
Our first adopted child, a boy, he came to us at eight-months. This was the beginning of oh my goodness gracious I need to learn because it isn’t clicking right, there’s more going on than what I was clued into.
The end result was that right off the bat, he as an eight-month old couldn’t sleep at night, or he could only sleep a little bit and then wake up crying, then go back to sleep and wake up crying again.
After doing that for some weeks, it’s like there is something more going on, more than I’m waking up, I’m uncomfortable, I’m in a new house and there are new smells, whatever it is. There’s more to it. That prompted me to learn more about what had happened in those eight months.
We had a very super couldn’t-have-been-better relationship with his birth grandmother. Couldn’t have been better. She became grandma to all three of the children and fulfilled that role. You couldn’t ask for better, so she was a resource for information.
I specifically made an appointment to go to her home and ask the hard questions that would inform me as to what was the life of the first eight months. Out of that came all kinds of clues and also understanding that there is a natural reason why deep sleep was full of dreams.
Like all of us, doesn’t matter who we are, dreams are kind to us sometimes and not so kind to us sometimes. Given what I learned about the world that he lived in for his first eight months, that clued me in that those dreams are probably just not very nice.
So, crying at night, in spite of the fact that I’m up for the third time, holding my adoptive son, rocking him back and forth and singing Old Macdonald… By the way, I can’t sing worth a hoot. I’m sure he went back to sleep simply to shut me up.
I could understand this was a comforting, this was getting past the experience of what the nightmare dream was and he could settle back down again, and that this is going to be a process.
A little bit later, a few months later, he couldn’t go to sleep at all, so then I was get him up out of the crib and put him in the car seat. I’d drive out and head north until he fell asleep.
Then drive back, take him out of the car seat, put him back in the crib. He never woke up after he fell asleep, he was fine, but every night we got to do that.
I could do that now not because that’s what I needed to do, that was an obligation, this child has a need, but I could do that because this was providing an alternative experience to what he was experiencing from sleeping.
Not going to sleep made sense. If you’re going to go to sleep and have nightmares every time, why would you want to go to sleep?
So, it made sense. Learning what those were.
Along the way, that brings forth the understanding that those are memories. How do memories work?
That brought me to a deep dive into the neurons and how memories are formed and how they stay there, how come you lose them, how come they get stronger, and what’s really truly going on with regard to trauma and what are the dynamics of it, so you can figure out what to do to make that difference.
How did You Start Training Others on BioSocial Cognition?
Q: At some point in your journey and learning and growing, you were asked to start training others on this information. How did that come about?
Thomas C. Rector:
In our community, there was the Social Services Department, which was a local level organization, county and state kind of thing, and then there was the adoption community, adoption people. Those two groups worked hand-in-hand trying to facilitate a positive future for the children.
The adoption people were very thorough about understanding us to make sure that we were in it for the right reasons, that was very important to them, and that we had the capacity to adapt to the situation.
To try to tell somebody what it is to be an adoption parent, to truly understand what being an adoptive parent is like before you’ve done it is kind of like trying to tell somebody what it’s like to be married before they’ve been married.
Until you’ve walked in those shoes, it’s really hard to understand the true experience. This organization ended up working and evaluating and doing their processes and approved the adoption process.
In the beginning, they of course are doing interviews. They’re very clearly registering that this was a closed adoption mental model in my head.
Their agenda was that they knew from what their experience was that open adoption is better for the child. What happened was they saw over these months and couple of years the evolution of my perspective of oh my goodness gracious open adoption is the solution and the fact of how we engaged it, literally engaged it.
From there, when they did training for potential adoptive parents, they would do a panel and they would have three people come in. They invited me one time to come in and do a presentation. Apparently, my communication and what I was saying resonated with the audience, so they continued to ask me back and that role expanded.
My personal learning and my personal development just continually grew. It settled into we need to not be culturally bound, we need to be child-centric, and that is fundamental to being successful with each child, whether it is of your own genetics or someone else’s genetics.
Advice to an Adoptive Family or Prospective Adoptive Family
Q: At this point, this is 20-some years later and you have developed training and you have developed BioSocial Cognition and your thinking much further along than you did then, and then also formed Accrescent Institute and provided additional trainings out into the community and out into conferences and organizations.
If an adoptive family or prospective adoptive family, someone who wants to adopt but hasn’t quite gotten there yet, hasn’t gotten their placement, where do they start with making that shift to embrace some of the things that you did with understanding where memories come from, understanding the background of their child? Aside from taking your training, where would they start?
Thomas C. Rector:
You took away my answer. I was going to say start with my training.
The more you know, the better off you are. The more diverse the learning is, the deeper understanding a person will have.
In truth, I’ve been doing it for a long time and at many conferences, I have not seen an alternative training that speaks from the viewpoint of the adoptive parent. The trainings are about specific techniques or they’re about specific knowledge that is available.
They’re all good. There’s no question about being good. But it doesn’t speak from I’m a parent and I have a huge responsibility and tremendous caring in this, and I want to be successful. It doesn’t speak from that point.
When you go into the trainings that I’m doing, the knowledge is provided, but the meaning and usefulness of the knowledge in the day to day of being a parent is what the goal is. You can walk out of there with not a specific recipe to go by, but walk out of there with a perspective that informs how to make those decisions.
I’ve said it many times, there are lots of books out there that you can read, and they’re all great. There’s two problems to that. One is we don’t have time to read all of those books.
Two is that we can’t remember if we could read them.
We need to have a way of responding as a parent from an understanding standpoint rather than from what I would call a recipe standpoint. BioSocial Cognition and how we teach and use it in our teaching training is set to be that way.
Did Your Experience as a CASA (Court Appointed Child Advocate) Inform or Assist your Adoption Experience?
Q: One of the things that Rachel wanted to know is whether you felt that your experience as a CASA (Court Appointed Child Advocate) informed or assisted in your adoption experience.
Thomas C. Rector:
Absolutely.
To be more specific, my experience as a CASA started the day the adoption was finalized for our first child.
The same day. I went from court to the CASA office and said, “I want to help. What can I do? How can I do this?”
The end result of it was that I was a CASA to two boys. They started off as 9 and 11 year olds. I was CASA to them for 10 years.
The experience gave me a deep dive into the rules. What are the rules, what are the laws, what are the processes that are in place that are supposed to enable a successful life for a child, adoption, foster, or whatever it is? That’s one.
Two is that it put me in the trenches next shoulder to a parent who was struggling. It put me in the parent’s side of the perception of the services provided.
In my particular case, there was a mom only, there was no dad in the picture at all. And what it was like for her to navigate, deal with, put up with, endure all of the processes that are in place that are supposed to help things go along.
Just walking in the other person’s shoes or trying them on, to be around them, that was very useful for me, besides just knowing what the system was, how the system works.
We say system in a very generalized way. There are so many twists and turns, and so much of it is subjective. You have to be really watchful and careful about it because human behavior is subjective, it’s just really hard to quantify it and put numbers on it. You can’t take us and plug us into the wall and say here’s the reading of you.
Encouragement for an Adoptive Parent Running up Against Challenging Behavior
Shannon:
Something came up in that for me, and I’ve heard this from a variety of different people who have gone through the adoption process, and you’ve touched on it slightly.
We come into adoption with a desire to make a difference, to add to our family, we have a variety of different motivations coming into adoption. We may have what you called rose-colored glasses going into it and then run up against situations like you did, like I don’t know how to handle this, running up against challenging behaviors with our adoptive child.
What words of encouragement can you give to an adoptive parent running up against challenging behavior? What would you give them as a starting point?
Thomas C. Rector:
I think that we need to know why. Not what to do, but why is it here. That question can be asked continually until it’s driven down to a particular grounding point.
By being able to answer the question of why, why, why, then there is a body of knowledge that allows a decision to be made upon. The more information we have to make a decision, the more accurate opportunity there is for that decision.
So many times, we ask and we get prescriptive or recipe-like answers rather than fundamentally what’s going on underneath this, what is it. There are behaviors that are not correctable because there is a trauma piece that’s in there or there is a genetic disposition to be that way.
I could name specifically our youngest daughter, adopted to us, came to us at birth. Her genetics are such that she is going to be high pitched. Her genetics are she is also going to be much more inclined to react in an emotional fashion. Her genetics are such that that emotional wash over her brain is going to be three or four times more than the rest of us [in the family].
Therefore, asking why is she behaving this way? Why is that behavior there? Why is it used? Why until we get down to the bottom. Then we don’t want to react to it. We want to understand it and then be able to respond to it, not react to it.
In her particular case, what it required on my part was get over it. That’s a cultural thing on my part.
Shannon:
Is that you getting over it?
Thomas C. Rector:
Yes. Me getting over it. I need to get over my reaction to it and understand that this is normal, natural, biological, this is who she is, and therefore learn to parent within that particular setting.
The asking why is really important.
The other part of it, and this would come with learning about memories, memory forming, and behavior choices being based off of memories, is that parenting is a pragmatic process.
It is not a fixed process. It is not an event process. It’s pragmatic, it’s day after day.
The expectation to be able to fix something, which is the wrong wording, but fix something now isn’t realistic, it isn’t productive, and it is hurtful many times.
The second part of it is that why and adapt to the why and your response is pragmatic, “What do we need to do with this?”
In our youngest daughter’s case, what kinds of tools can we give her so that she can be who she is and still be okay and functioning within the world as we have it?
Generally speaking, people who are highly expressive, highly emotional, reactive, they kind of get isolated because it can be a little bit much. How do I give her tools?
In this particular case, that was bringing self-awareness to her that this is what’s happening to you, this is what you’re experiencing, and this is what’s going on up here and you need about this much time before you’re ready to have a conversation. That’s what we did. It was pragmatic.
It isn’t day one or day two or week three or year four. It’s pragmatic, it has to happen. But it’s founded on knowing why, pragmatic why.
The key to that is having a very clear understanding of how memories are formed and how they’re used. From a parenting standpoint, we need to be conscious about being memory makers.
From an Adoptive Parenting Standpoint, What Does It Mean to Be a Memory Maker?
Q: From an adoptive parenting standpoint, what does it mean to be a memory maker?
Thomas C. Rector:
The huge opportunity we have as an adoptive parent is the experiences that our child will have going forward. All of those experiences are memories.
As we can shape those experiences, not the preaching but the experiences, then as we shape that we are making memories. We are literally purposely wanting to create memories.
Through the training from BioSocial Cognition, we learn how those memories are being used and then that informs why being a memory maker is important.
An Example of Being Intentional in Building Positive Memories
Shannon:
I have two thoughts that came out of that. Can you give an example of being intentional in a positive way toward building memories? What’s a good example that you can share of how can we as an adoptive parent create positive memories that our child can use in the future?
Thomas C. Rector:
Let’s start with what’s the goal?
The goal is to develop an adult who has positive self-esteem and the tools to reach their potential. That’s the goal.
We’re all going to become adults, at least body-wise. I don’t know if our behavior will make it, but our bodies will get there. That’s really what we’re doing. We’re not raising a child. We’re developing an adult. The end goal of all these particular experiences need to thread into that goal.
A very specific example on my part is we did backpacking and we did RV traveling and camping kinds of things. Those events were not orchestrated by me, they were facilitated by me.
The children were the ones looking at the maps and how to read the maps. Where do we want to go? What about this place or that place?
Then what dates are we going to use? When should we leave? When will we get back? What are we going to have for breakfast? What are we going to have for dinner? And what are we going to do for snacks? How much weight can be in the backpack?
All of the planning, set a goal, set up a plan, figure out the logistics, go to the grocery store, push the shopping cart around. It’s a little bit entertaining, but shopping for we need this and this. There’s a certain amount of negotiation going on between siblings. Negotiation sometimes is the nice word.
Then packing, how do we pack it and what is important and what isn’t important.
Throughout all of that is the opportunity to have an experience that is teaching skills about setting goals, creating a plan, figuring out the logistics, implementation, answering what’s doable. I want all these things in there, but a 50-pound pack is a little bit heavy for a 10-year-old.
All of those things are just built into that particular experience and it’s fun. We all have fun. Even Dad has fun.
That’s a really good one, but there are thousands of things, everyday things. Birthday parties can be treated the same way. Stay over nights can be treated the same way. They may be smaller, but goal, planning, logistics. The world is a classroom. You get to be a memory maker.
Shannon:
I know that you use the word doingness a lot. What I heard from that is that the children were doing, the children were building their skills and their self-confidence in doing.
Using the Idea of a Being a Memory Maker to Understand and Move Forward through Our Child's Past Memories
Q: The other part of that question is when we’re adopting an older child, they come with memories and experiences and a past that not only we may not know about, but we can’t change what happened with them. They also come in with their own expectations of what being adopted means to them.
As an adoptive parent, how can we use this idea of being a memory maker to understand and to move forward through these past memories that our child has?
Thomas C. Rector:
I would say we never move past our past memories. They’re always there. What we are trying to do as a parent is to make those past memories be wisdom. We want it to inform us.
When we’re a little tyke and we touch that hot stove for the first time and burn our hand, that’s really not a fun experience but we are much wiser for it. Life in general is the same way.
The challenge when an older adoption occurs, whether it’s 10, 13, 15, or 17, the challenge is figuring out how we can bring new experiences that utilize their experience in a wisdom way. How do we bring experiences to them that creates a different perspective of it?
I’ll use an example that I did with the CASA boys.
In their world, police were bad people, lawyers were people that imposed all kinds of things on them, they weren’t positive. It was not only them, but their mother and the whole message of it. Court was a scary intimidating thing that almost always imposed something on them or their mother.
What I did to create a different perspective is I set up three visits for the younger boy – the older boy was not able to do this – to go to lawyer’s offices.
We were in there to learn, see, feel, know, share, decoration, conversation, and just change it from being them over there to that person works in this particular environment and this is what they do. In those days, they had books. Now they don’t have many books. But it was to create a different perception of what their life is like.
I did the same thing with a police officer. Police officers were that force over there to them, this force that you have to watch out, dodge whatever is going to happen. Instead, I set it up so they could come and sit inside the police officer’s car and he could go through all of the various things that are in the car and what it is and try to create a different perspective.
That’s not a recipe, but an example of how you can use experiences to change perspective or use experiences to inform a choice.
The teens from 12 or 13 on up, from my experience and my teaching, they are perfectly capable of grasping, understanding, and assimilating the understanding of memories and the understanding of how they’re being used. In doing that, they then become self-empowered to understand why rather than being judged, told, directed, contained. That’s really important.
I did a six-week training thing for probation lockup youth, and they were typically 16 to 17 or 18 years old.
They’re there for the wrong choices made, whatever it was, and they have a perspective. That perspective was formed by the social group that was around them, it was formed by the legal system and the power system that tries to contain them and push them in a particular direction. They were very interested in "that’s why."
They would start talking among themselves about this person or that person or each other, or whatever it was. It was a very rich experience for them.
That’s leverageable. It isn’t the answer, it’s the formula. It’s the understanding, it’s the perspective.
An Example of How A Foster/Adoptive Parent Use the Training with their Teen
Shannon:
If I remember correctly, sometime in the last year you had somebody come up to you that had been to a Teens and their Choices training and implemented it with their foster child, and there was something about it being important to their adoption process. Can you explain a little about that?
Thomas C. Rector:
Yes. An adoptive parent, a year before I had been at this foster conference up in Washington, and they had sat in on the training Teens and their Choices.
There is an understanding component to that training and then there is a doingness of that training. The understanding is first and foremost how are memories formed, how are they being used, and what is the development stage of the brain, where are they in the brain.
Then the second part of it is a specific tool, which is The Agreement. The agreement process is a way of empowering the voice of the youth and creating a platform for the parent to guide that voice toward positive choices.
The next year, I was there at the conference. It was the very first day, and we’re sitting at round tables with the introductory conversations going on. A lady was sitting at the table next to me and she came over and said,
“I have to tell you, our son is going to go out on his own here shortly. He’s going to be 18, he’s going to go out on his own. This past year, we have used your Agreement method and the understanding of what it is, and it has made all the difference in the world for him. He has just been great.”
Of course, I was feeling somewhat humbled, but good that this was such a tangible response. They had taken the information and integrated it into their lifestyle, and then brought it to their adoptive teen and worked together using this knowledge, understanding, and using this methodology so that the youth could become what they are.
She was so very pleased. Aren’t all of us when we have a successful child?
Shannon:
Yes. Frances, do you have any additional questions that you’d like to ask on the topic of adoption and BioSocial Cognition?
Frances:
I think you ended up covering them all just by going in the circles. I think it was really informative and helpful. It has been neat to watch these programs come together and hear Tom speak about them. I think we covered them today.
Words of Advice for Adoptive Parents and Parents Considering Adoption
Q: Do you have any additional comments that you would have for a prospective adoptive family or for a family that is in the adoption parenting journey?
Thomas C. Rector:
It’s very much a learning experience. On-the-job learning. There’s no question about it. Not to be afraid of that. That’s okay. It’s fine. Nobody is perfect. There are so many opportunities. The human mind is so resilient. Many things can be achieved.
The good old word of consistency is very important. Where you can get to the place where you are leveraging your knowledge about how memories are made and how they’re used, it will make a huge difference.
You’re a memory maker and you’re investing in an adult.
To Learn More about BioSocial Cognition Training, visit AccrescentInstitute.org
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