Understanding Your Adopted Child: Why "Better" Doesn't Feel Safe

For adoptive and foster families, the path to connection often requires a shift in perspective. Gain critical insights with Thomas C. Rector, founder of Accrescent Institute, as we dive deep into the crucial questions that help us truly understand our children's experiences.

In this quick 4 minute video, Thomas explains how BioSocial Cognition answers an aspect of parenting adopted (and foster) children that often surprises parents:

Why does my child prefer their difficult past over their new, better life?

Understanding Your Adopted Child, Interview with Thomas C. Rector

Understanding Your Adopted Child: Why “Better” Doesn’t Feel Safe - Interview with Thomas C. Rector (Transcript)

Shannon: 

We've been talking about adoption and in talking about adoption, we've talked a lot about your story, but we were also talked a little bit about how BioSocial Cognition can help adoptive families understand what's happening with their adopted kids.

One of the things that we've heard is sometimes that transition into adoption, we think we're bringing our children, and we are, bringing our children into a better environment. But yet our child is still clinging to their past.

What, as adoptive parents, do we need to remember about what we perceive as a better environment and what our child is perceiving?

Thomas C. Rector: 

Well, first I would say we got to be careful that “better” is subjective. I've had the opportunity to be in very nice facilities and this is considered very nice and better, but I'm uncomfortable. It's not “better” to me.

It’s perceived as better in a different context, but it isn't better to me because it's foreign. It isn't consistent with what I'm used to, or have operated in. And what that refers to and references to is that within the brain, our memories form the comfort zone that we are wanting to be in.

And so in a very generalized statement, the typical foster adoptive child is coming from an economic environment that's much less than the adoptive world or the fostering world. And that creates the more economic strength we have, the more things we can have, the shinier they can be, the richer they can be, the more convenient they can be.

Those are all totally new experiences to a child that never was in that world. And so what we're doing in one way is we're putting them into a foreign country and expecting them to think this is great and wonderful. And yeah, it will be, but it's got to translate. It's got to be added to. It needs to be understood.

Just sitting at the table, for example, all the family sits at the table and waits for everybody to sit down before anybody starts eating. For some of our families, that's just the way it is. I mean, that's just the “right way”. It's courteous, it's respectful. It's a unity of family. And for many of the children that are coming into foster or adoptive environments, that's totally weird. That's [to them]…why? Why? And there's all kinds of things.

What's really important for us to do is to understand that we are adopting their memories, and all that they've learned, and all of their lives. And that's our starting place to then share - and share I think is the right word - to share this new experience. And somewhere along the line, the new experience will become familiar, and familiar will become safer. And the safer we are, the more relaxed and less reactive we will be.

That takes time. It takes time, takes patience, takes consistency, lots of opportunity to practice consistency. And keeping it simple, repetitive, will help that grow that experience so it can become familiar.

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