I can’t read minds, not even to see into my son’s mindset. His setting I can do; I kept a journal and I read, read, read. But how my son picked up on the settings he found himself in and how his translation of his environment and interactions with it settled in his mind, I can only make suggestions with what indications I think might be viable. This is why this post turns to psychology.
Yasik’s mindset pre-adoption
Adopting Yasik made us a family. But it was not ‘family’ as we had until then understood family. Yasik came to us with a script of family already written, starting with his biological family.
As backdrop to my teasing out what Yasik’s mindset may have been as he began life as part of a family in Canada, see the summary provided here.
Deborah D. Gray’s presentation of Childhood Emotional Development as it relates to adoptees[i]
For many years I was at the very least annoyed when I heard or read the edict: the first four years are the most critical in a child’s development. Yet I can find nothing that argues against the understanding that the brain is growing to nearly its full capacity in the first four years. Children’s foundational understanding of family comes in these first four years. The science appears settled.
In place before Dave and I had an opportunity to parent our son.
So what might have been already in place?
Christine Kenneally in The Invisible History of the Human Race[ii]citescountries with attitudes of distrust going back centuries. From historical accounts and Russian literature, I think, whether as long-standing or not, Russia qualifies for a cultural attitude of distrust of those outside family and community.[iii]
As Kenneally says, “Sometimes the past matters, …” We are “shaped” by those who raise us and who were in turn given their direction by those who raised them. On and on back into many generations, “The implication is that the way we see the world and act in it …is significantly shaped by internal beliefs and norms that have been passed down in families and small communities.”
Yasik understood family from as early as his first couple of months with parents who were not always available to respond to his cries. He moved on to hospital care which it is not hard to surmise was under staff and resource constraints given the economic crisis in Russia in the ‘90s. Too many sources make the point that his cries could hardly have always been acknowledged.
Is it wild speculation then to suggest[iv] Yasik’s mindset was imbued with distrust? Through what filter was he reading the experience of being part of a family?
Orphanages in Russia in the ‘90s apparently had the same economic constraints of society in general. That tension could quite possibly have spilled over to staff interactions with the children. However sweet the children may have been, staff could not offer them hope for a bright future. Staff may have consciously or otherwise nurtured the children in a message more Pied Piper than Cinderella in the stories read to them, the poems taught, and the guiding comments.
Russian children were often warned to get to sleep or Babayka would come, pop them in his shoulder bag and take them away. Talk about a sweet night time lullaby. Or better yet, seeing the Volga River nearby, one kid may have tried to scare another by saying, “The Black Volga drives around kidnapping children, you know.”
Yeah, but—No, but … kids hear these same messages in the West; the difference though is that such messages are not hailed as healthy messaging.
How often in a day might staff or other children have felt it necessary to warn, “Just keep your mouth shut. Who do you think you are?”[v]
Who did Yasik think he was is right. He was an orphan, cute yes, and in a baby house, yes, but the adults who interacted with him each day likely conveyed consciously, or not so much, that he was still a child with no functioning family. I have read enough literature on Russian orphanages to be aware that the general attitude about an orphan was not as hopeful (to put it kindly) as would have been the case in a family, even a Russian family believing that it’s best their children not be given unrealistic hopes. What perception was Yasik left of himself and his place in his world? In a culture that placed a premium on family, of belonging, was a sense of being less important, a ‘lessness’, to those around him creeping into his developing sense of himself?
Once again, Yeah, but—No, but: a young man who supported Russian activist, Alexei Navalny, and now lives in the U.S.A. sees value in the Russian perspective. “I miss that unguarded intensity, that baseline reckless abandon of the soul. That baseline depth Russians operate on manages to produce great works of art and science and endure unbelievable levels of hardship while doing so. And on a more personal level, it allows us to cultivate connections with others that are just hard to match in Western cultures.”[vi]
Orphanage personnel often reason too that it’s best, considering the future of most orphans. Better not to sugar coat the future in a world that has little place for a child without family. How many stories read to the children in Yasik’s orphanage would have been about having a momma and poppa? How did he see himself in such stories? If at any time parents of other social orphans dropped by, Yasik would have seen mommas and poppas. No one was dropping by to check on him. How could he not have been aware that he was without family?
In perhaps a bizarre way, children in orphanages may have a sense of family, one that has ‘jumped’ the usual developmental phases, turning to peers as family. Instead of consolidating first with parents and nuclear family, they are in a setting that is largely and most intimately with their peers, even thwarting or confusing the early awareness of family.
‘Peers as parents’ in early childhood is dealt with often in writing about institutionalized children. The child knows peer parenting or self-parenting or peripheral parenting that may have changed often as staff and children come and go from institutions. Bruce Perry, in The Boy Who Was Raised As A Dog provides an example in the story of Peter who spent the first three years of his life in an orphanage described as a “baby warehouse”. In eight-hour shifts children received about 15 minutes of individual staff care and likely far less interaction with other adults.
With no one but each other to turn to, the children would reach their tiny hands through the bars in to the next crib, holding hands, babbling and playing patty-cake. In the absence of adults, they became parents to each other. Their interaction, as impoverished as it was, probably helped to mitigate some of the damage such severe deprivation can cause.[vii]
These interactions became their expression of their understanding of parenting, developing out of whatever they could hobble together to cope with their emotions and desires. The adults were on the periphery, like overseeing, but emotionally detached, butlers to their needs. Yasik too may have been prematurely turning to peers in the absence of adult interaction.
Yasik should not have been orienting toward his peers until around 6 years of age. What does it mean if a child has entered Phase VI prematurely having learned to turn to other children when looking to satisfy emotional needs and perceptions of the world?
Did being told the night before he was adopted that he had a poppa and momma need much explanation?
Yasik’s mindset post-adoption
24 hours later Yasik had a poppa and momma, a family. His mind now had to reach out to accommodate additions to the narrative built in the first four years.
It remains reasonable to me to wonder if he tried to start a new one or simply adjusted the first narrative to one which included him, not one where he knew he was outside. But possibly a narrative that had a shaky foundation.
Sitting in a Kerrisdale Starbucks, our adoption facilitator began our first post adoption visit by pointing out that Yasik looked like Dave and had my eyes. How was that perceived by a young mind now trying to concoct or restructure a concept of family, belonging, difference, and self?
Psychological theories look at how a mindset might be evident in the way the body and brain/mind express the impact of thoughts and feelings[viii]. Psychology also has to do with theories about how our actions communicate the mindset of our thinking and feeling. These ‘actions’ encompass how people learn, make choices, feel emotions, and get along with others. This will be the closest I come to ‘reading’ Yasik’s mindset.
Yes, Yasik was hardly yet developed in terms of his understanding his world and his place in it, but he came from four years of, as Deborah Gray presents, uncertainty about caregivers and his value to them. Gray also points to a learned helplessness that may have come from his not being able to conjure up a momma or poppa when he yearned for them.
And then one sunny day in August he is called to the kind doctor’s office just as he may have seen other children called. Just like in a fairy tale he now has a poppa and momma too. As magical as that now sounds, he seemed to us to be taking it all in stride. Weeks later the social worker assessing our family fit noted that he seemed to be keeping pace with all the developmental charts.
The youngest child two doors up just turned 5. She is currently 43 inches tall. She likes to drink apple juice out of an old champagne glass. And she likes to take care of getting this drink herself. The apple juice jug is 10 ½ inches tall and weighs 3.78 liters or just over 8 lbs. When she drags it out of the fridge and over to the counter, it looks like her arm is being stretched a few inches. For added flourish she plops a freezie into the glass. As Gray notes, she wants to take care of things herself, to be competent. She will start kindergarten in a couple of weeks. Now not wanting to be different will also begin to kick in.
Yasik too was wanting to try out his competence.
He was also showing signs of wanting to fit in.
Starting kindergarten a few weeks after joining our family, it was not long before he didn’t want to see pictures of the other kids at the orphanage and would say he remembered nothing of his early years.
While he thought for a short time that he came from the moon, he, for a time, also referred to his arrival in Canada as “when I was born”. And again, ‘Yeah but, – No but’, that may simply have had to do with the limits of his English at the time.
Was he trying to counter that already resident sense of lessness with a compromising explanation of differentness? As I have written in earlier posts, he explained to us, that as he saw it, some people came from their mommies’ tummies and other kids are ‘picked kids’. Nor did it take long before the ‘real’ parent questions came up. That ‘hole in the heart’ message that comes up so often with adoptees.[ix] Another time he asked where some part of his being (whatever it was, I didn’t record it) came from in him and then said, in a tentative manner as though uncertain whether to say it or not, that this part must have come from his ‘real’ parents. He did not want to be different. He wanted to fit in with the kids in his neighbourhood, school and on his sports’ teams as would fit right in with his age[x].
The one certainty is that he had family narratives for relationships on his mind from almost the beginning of his life with us. Ready or not for a kid still formulating a concept of family, these were experiences Yasik was also gravitating toward.
Adaptations. To find some sense of security as many, many manuals state, we all find coping strategies for homeostasis. The first I noticed Yasik using adaptations was with his school work but later I realized he had adaptations from well before he came into our family.
Facing a harsh reality, lacking responsive caregivers, what does the child do? An unnurtured child will find ways to take care of his or her own nurture. Yasik would hoard toys for himself, hum along to music or rock himself. Because he continued to rock himself for most of his first year in our family, I assume he developed rocking, as did many children in orphanage care for their early years, to self soothe[xi]. Again, what did “I have a poppa and momma now” mean to him?
My brother when he saw a doctor advancing toward him with a needle that from his perspective could have been a dagger, wriggled out of mother’s grasp to hid under a chair. Yasik, was never medical treatment adverse. Because it offered some adult attention?
In Detachment: an adoption memoir,Maurice Mierau found it curious enough to bring it forward as noteworthy that neither of his children resisted taking medications. “[Peter] and Bohdan both enjoyed taking medicine of any kind. In the orphanage, visits by the doctor had been one of the few times they got sustained individual attention from an adult. Both of them hugged and kissed me and Betsy when we administered routine cold remedies or children’s aspirin”.[xii]
From our naïve perspective we were happy that Yasik seemed to be keeping in step with the stages of childhood development, if we had any awareness of childhood development at all. Yet there he was, turning to his dad to be lifted into his arms and cry into his shoulder when struck by a ball while up at bat in T-ball. There he was cuddling and kissing with much less restraint than his little buddies did with their parents. There he was crawling into bed with us even though he had a whole big bedroom to himself. There he was, using soothing techniques like rocking himself to self soothe, and there he was, as his teachers informed us, more often playing at recess with younger children than those of his chronological age. Born for Love: why empathy is essential – and endangered notes, “…previously institutionalized or otherwise neglected children tend to bond better with younger boys and girls. Even though they can catch up surprisingly quickly in loving homes, they tend to seem younger than their chronological age”.[xiii]
Footnotes
[i] Gray, Deborah D. Attaching in Adoption: practical tools for today’s parents. Jessica Kingsley Publishers, 2002,Chapter 8, “Emotional Development: Promoting Attachment at Every Phase”, 189-257.
Cruz, Mimi Ko “Studies reveal how instability may shape infant attention, brain activity and emotional regulation” Medical Press, August 29, 2026
https://medicalxpress.com/news/2026-08-reveal-instability-infant-attention-brain.html
[ii] Kenneally, Christine The Invisible History of the Human Race: how DNA and history shape our identities and our futures Viking, 2014, 139-158, 218-219, 264, 305, 311, 314
[iii] Nikolova, Milena, Olga Popova, Vladimir Otrachshenko “Stalin and the origins of mistrust” Journal of Public Economics, Volume 208, April 2022
Szalavitz, Maia, Bruce D. Perry, M.D., Ph.D. Born For Love: why empathy is essential- and endangered William Morrow, 2010, 119
[iv] Szalavitz, Maia, Bruce D. Perry, M.D., Ph.D. Born For Love: why empathy is essential- and endangered William Morrow, 2010, 111-114
[v] “The Russian Obsession with Suffering: where it comes from” Polyglottist Language Academy Sept 17
Shipman, Matt, Amy Halberstadt, Julia Chentsova-Dutton “Studies of Children’s Stories Shows Differences in Russian, U.S. Approaches to Emotion” NC State University, December 2, 2021
https://news.nscu.edu/2021/12/childrens-stories-and emotions
[vi] Siewart, Rafaela “Two Drinks With … One of Russia’s Most Wanted” The Free Press, 08/14/26 https://www.thefp.com/p/two-drinks-with-one-of-russias-most?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email
[vii] Perry, Bruce MD, PhD. and Maia Szalavitz. The Boy Who Was Raised As A Dog: what traumatized children can teach us about loss, love and healing. Basic Books, 2017, 244-245.
[viii] Pollan, Michael A World Appears: a journey into consciousness Random House LP, 2026, The chapters 2&3 on Feeling and Thought
[ix] Szalavitz, Maia, Bruce D. Perry, M.D., Ph.D. Born For Love: why empathy is essential- and endangered William Morrow, 2010, 59
[x]Gray, Deborah D. Attaching in Adoption: practical tools for today’s parents. Jessica Kingsley Publishers, 2002, 246-247.
Johnson, Lesli “10 things Adoptees Want you to Know” U.S. Edition HuffPost Updated, November 1, 2019 https://www.huffpost.com/entry/adoption_b_2161590
Szalavitz, Maia, Bruce D. Perry, M.D., Ph.D. Born For Love: why empathy is essential- and endangered William Morrow, 2010, 58
[xi] Perry, Bruce D., MD, PhD, and Maia Szalavitz The Boy Who Was Raised As a Dog: and other stories from a child psychiatrist’s notebook Basic Books, 2017, 70, 87
Szalavitz, Maia, Bruce D. Perry, M.D., Ph.D. Born For Love: why empathy is essential- and endangered William Morrow, 2010, 70, 130,135
[xii] Mierau, Maurice. Detachment: an adoption memoir. Freehand Books, 2014, 120 – 121.
[xiii]Szalavitz, Maia & Bruce D. Perry, MD, PhD. Born For Love: why empathy is essential – and endangered. William Morrow, 2010, 57,70.
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