From my Journal: vignettes and questions

Entry #1   The Adoption Process Officially Begins

I have kept a diary since my 20s.  When I finally obtained a satisfactory level of cool, I started calling it a journal. Now when I am wanting to understand more about becoming and being a family via adoption, turning to my journals is like cautiously pulling the thread Isabel Allende imagines in Of Love and Shadows (140) to unravel the conflict her story narrates. Allende may have used the metaphor to suggest that pulling on a thread would start a dangerous or damaging domino effect but it struck me personally as a way to see what my experiences were made of. This is not an unusual curiosity.  I have read a library shelf worth of studies and memoirs written by people who because they themselves were parents, both birth and adoptive, or children of an adoption, turned to the study of adoption. They wrote to pull on the thread of their stories, to unravel the parts of their lives that helped them to see the knots and hopefully work them out. I think most of these writers, or artists, or musicians or film makers were compelled from within to do so.  I know this is why I read, watch movies or documentaries, sometimes get directed to music by my husband, sift through my journals- to seek some understanding of our family’s experiences as it has come through adoption.

And a word to address veracity: Someone says, “I remember it like it was yesterday.” Science arches an eyebrow and responds, “I doubt you do.”  A first year psychology text addressing memory makes the point that we are constantly reconstructing memory as time weaves new perspectives into our narratives, changing a certainty into a gist well peppered with what must be acknowledged as fiction.  In the stories I share from my journal, there will be new perspectives and a fair bit of ‘gisting goin’on’ but I do have a first person primary source, my journal to guide each narrative.

The entries I select to draw together into a post have been first read by my husband and sometimes my son.

I start with an entry from June 24, 1997.  Yasik was about 4 ½ and living in an orphanage in Yaroslavl, an ancient city about 250 kilometers from Moscow. Because he was considered cute enough to still have potential for adoption, even at the advanced age of 4 + years, he had been allowed to remain in an orphanage for younger children and on a roster of adoptable children.  He had three older siblings in other orphanages.   His full name was Yaroslav Guerin Nicolavich; someone told us that Yaroslav is a name he was probably given more as representative of the region he was born into than because his parents saw their new born son as ‘fierce and glorious’, the meaning the name has in Slavic regions.

Drawing by Nadine Paul Jacobs

Dave and I had been trying to adopt for about two years; this is an average time though for those determined to have a newborn the wait averages out to seven years. Those two years were about learning what the process involved and then standing before the doors labelled: domestic adoption, open adoption, friend of a friend adoption, international adoption, guessing behind which door we would find our child. We chose the door labelled international adoption.

Dave’s hand was firmly on the door handle.  My fingers were still a bit twitchy.  I have boxes scattered all over the floor and shoes well broken in before I walk out of the shoe shop with a new pair of shoes. And there is much, much more to consider when looking for a child than a pair of shoes. Yeah, really.   In the midst of laying down money to the society facilitating our international adoption, I would find myself still toying with other possibilities.  Having a biological baby is a desire that is woven into our beings by biology, tradition, culture, religion, and societal expectations. This was the desire to be as normal as possible despite now living in a body beyond the age of reproduction. I was 47 and could no longer give my husband his own child, even though I had never wanted to do anything other than adopt.  But Dave, how was he feeling about never having a little David or Dianne growing into a remarkable likeness of himself?  Dave stopped me up by asking how he could make a big deal of having a child that came from his DNA when he was adopted himself.  That settled my twitchy fingers.  We were on the same page about adopting.

The first child we were offered when we started to apply to Russia was a 7 month old boy.  The woman who was facilitating our adoption, Julia Ivanova, told Dave to be considered for this baby he should shave his beard because it had gray in it. I was already well dyed.  But it didn’t help because Russia came back with a policy that said we had to be less than 40 years old to adopt an infant and we weren’t, I being more years beyond 40 than gray-bearded Dave.

We looked at our options, a biological or adopted infant was out for us.  When I told a friend who was on maternity leave with a toddler, her less than sympathetic response was, “Good, you will not have to deal with diapers.”  I think she saw them to be a waste of good money.   The child was going to be an older child.  I was teaching adult education classes, Dave was working on his art degree, and he was meeting our mortgage payments with a week-end job.  We each tucked in minor surgeries; mine left me with a pee bag sloshing around on my thigh while I was stopping in at various offices to get signatures, and sign away lumps of money. The pee bag would rock and roll as I rushed about and sometimes surprised me enough that I would jump or yell for what looked to others like no particular reason. So did we stop to check out what it meant to adopt an older child?  No.  We knew little even about the state of affairs in Russia.  Would the KGB be following us around? What would the weather be like in August?  At this point all we knew was our adoption process and a bit about the stories most common at the time regarding adoption, the miracle of a god given ‘forever child’.  I knew this label, ‘forever child’ as it had begun to trend, but I was decidedly unaware of the decent body of research on adoption beginning well back in the twentieth century.  No one hinted to us that we might consider even a visit to the SFU library where a study of Romanian adoptions was into its fourth year. We were simply running through a domestic to do list.

We were working through pages of paper work about our home, our finances, our jobs, our families and our health.  And we had started to put down money to pay our way through the process of adoption.  If we backed out now we would have to do all that over for another child.  Money always has a loud voice.  So we asked what was available to us if we were not going to be allowed a baby. Julia told us about a 3 year old boy, wheel-chair bound with cerebral palsy, and a 4 1/2 year old boy.  We were not open to the 3 year old because we worked as caregivers for challenged people for many years. We thought we might have a hard time distinguishing between a sense of being at work and being in a family.  We wanted family, not more job.  Is there a stone to overturn here in terms of becoming and being family?  This was not the pursuit of altruism or joining the ranks of rescuers of the destitute. And we were not alone in the drive to seek a family rather than seek to save the lost or destitute. Valerie J. Andrews in her book, White Unwed Mother: the adoption mandate in postwar Canada, begins her study by noting:

By the end of the twentieth century, adoption discourse shifted, as adoption practice and popular culture placed the emphasis on prospective adoptive parents, …. “the emphasis has changed from the desire to provide a needy child with a home, to that of providing a needy parent with a child.”

And yet….. In I Love Russia: reporting from a lost country Elena Kostyuchenko writes of the tragic events of 2004 at the public school in Beslan.  Toward the end of the chapter (215 & 216), she notes that some people adopted children perhaps in an attempt to fill the void left by the children they lost that day.  Yet she notes a quote from Sigmund Freud under a picture of a child killed that day: “Extreme grief after the loss of a child will subside, but we will remain inconsolable, and will never be able to find anything to take the child’s place. Even if something can fill the void, it will remain strange and foreign. This is as it should be. It is the only way to hold on to the love that we are incapable of renouncing.”

Yes I was pursuing the dream that refused to fade which I write about on the home page.  But even my dream of adopting a little blond boy was not about saving his sorry little butt; it was because in my dream I had been given him.  And I know what flags pop up on the landscape with that admission.  I will deal with them in time, if not already in other posts.  And here is another admission found in this entry: Dave liked that the 4 year old would allow him to keep going on his studies because the 4 year old would go to school part of the day.  Doesn’t that sound convenient?  Neither Dave nor I had altruistic ideals fueling our desire to adopt.  We wanted a child and if we found one who would fit our finances and work demands, nice.  BUT… hear a very firm ‘however’ here: being near to aging out as prospective parents, and being low on discretionary funds, we had little leeway to be choosy.  We were two people stretching our necks to be counted as middle class, yet about to pack our lives with some serious financial demands. Factor into these constraints an odd little piece: our school had managed to get us unionized in negotiations that decided maternity leave for adoptors could be dispensed with because those at the meeting knew of next to no one planning to adopt at the time.

Julia gave us the first picture of Yasik: blond- just like my dream, chubby- well, pictures add 10 pounds, and one definitely crossed eye, and as someone at my school pointed out, a very cute nose.  I was looking at this picture of Yasik while calling Julia to tell her we had chosen to go ahead with adopting Yasik.  The little fellow in that picture was drawing me in.  A question I wrote down that day was: How do you hold back dreams?  We were about to do as James Michener suggests at the end of The Drifters when the character Brit says, “[people] ought to inspect their dreams.  And know them for what they are.”  So we went shopping – always a nice way to put a dream in action.  We went shopping for a 4 year old boy. Dave got him a book of paper airplanes.

Entry #2  Name and Identity

I have a snapshot in my mind of Dave and I driving through the intersection at Lougheed and Gaglardi Way in Burnaby testing out names for Yasik.   His birth name was Gurin, Yaroslav Nikolayevich –the surname, his given name and the patronymic.  Recently I read Out Of Line: growing up soviet by Tina Grimberg (Tundra Books, 2007, 6) who says this about the importance of naming in the time of Soviet Russia.”In our culture names are very significant. Your name not only tells the world about you, but also about the people who came before you, because your father’s name, adjusted for gender, is added to yours“.  Yaroslav as I said was possibly homage to the region of his birth.

In respect to impressions we picked up somehow in the pre-adoption phase, we felt Yaroslav should be included in his name.  We cannot say that we did so in full-hearted desire to respect his culture.  I thought Russia was a country with mysteries I might like to explore but I wanted my son to become as deeply Canadian as I was.  I think Dave felt the same.  Including Yaroslav as one of his names was a requisite nod to approved behaviour for adoptors.

This moment in the van testing out names was our, emphasis on ‘our’, naming ceremony for our son-to-be.  We may not have called in the relatives or secured a reservation at the local place for religious ceremonies but the moment stays with me.  Naming a child has always seemed to me something held to be a precious privilege for parents, whether the recipient child would agree or not.   And with good reason sometimes. Case in point, a couple have just named their new born twins, Corona and Covid, as a way to provide a more positive message in a time of stress.  They were wobbling along the right track though, for most of us want to find a name that is a positive message to the child or a way to acknowledge those we love or is a name that sounds cool to us because it is a name trending in the particular decade we inhabit.  We were no different: we registered our son-to-be with a given a name we liked and then were happy to find had meaning that we thought appropriate, and we tucked in a second name to honour three relatives in one. The end result was, with the inclusion of Yaroslav, our son’s full name is so long it never fully fits in the allotted space given for names in online documents.

The name we use in these journal entries is Yasik, a diminutive of Yaroslav which we were unaware of until we met our son. Had we known we might have retained it for him; he was used to it; we liked it, and in fact, we used it in the early days, mixed in with our given name.  A Google scan shows the questions around naming an adoptee are common among adopters, even though adopting older children: a practical guide to adopting and parenting children over age four does not mention the issue of appropriate names while asking adopters to consider ways to become aware of their child-to-be’s culture.  But then turn to Journey of the Adopted Self: A Quest for Wholeness (268) written by Betty Jean Lifton, which has been considered ‘The Bible’ for adoptees.  Lifton devotes a page to the question of naming and her words carry a potency I do not wish to water down with paraphrase.

As an adopted child, my birth name had been taken from me, and, therefore, according to the beliefs of many old cultures, I was vulnerable to all kinds of dangers.  A name was considered a vital part of you, like your eyes or your teeth, and had to be kept secret so that an enemy could not harm you ….  By taking possession of my birth name, by sealing it away [in sealed adoption files] with the names of all adoptees, society took away my power and the power of all the adopted.

It is impossible to describe how adoptees feel when they learn that first or last name given them at birth.  The birth name is a confirmation that an individual was born and exists.  It is as integral a part of a person today as it was in ancient times.  As the poet Stanley Kunitz tells us: “Nothing is mine except my name/ I only borrowed this dust.”

Even when they cannot have a relationship with their birth parents, adoptees may reclaim their names as a way of reclaiming their original identities ….  Sometimes adoptees will use both their adoptive and their birth names, as if not sure which is the real one and which the imposter.

My husband would be one of the latter.  He has included his birth surname in his public name.  Does its inclusion suggest a question of identity?

A follow up to Lifton can be found online. At the time I wrote this post, I found the following articles.  Robyn Chittister put up a piece on adoption.com to say a name doesn’t reflect a child’s personality, and it is easy [not sure about that point] to change although adopters do need to think about what impact a name change will have on the child’s world as best they can know at the time.  Jennifer Kadwell put up a piece on adoption.com to say there are no parental manuals to confirm the rightness or wrongness of their choice, but again, Lifton’s observation cannot be ignored. In our global village no name is too ethnic to be considered an albatross.  Jodi Meltzer wrote in cafemom, “It is not about erasing what happened in the past.  You build on their foundation.” which is the point Fraser McAlpine wanted to make in a Guardian piece, agreeing, “[I]t should never be about making the child ashamed of his [or her] birth world”.  In fact, Google has shown us how common our son’s name is in Russia, even attached to some illustrious persons in the Yaroslavl region.

With paper work done, passport prepared for Yasik in the chosen name, some child-sized clothing bought, airplane tickets in hand, the night before the flight we opened one of the bottles of wine we had packed as gifts meant to smooth our way into Russian offices; we had crossed off every note on our naive checklist preparing for an adoption. We dusted off the peeling paint and sat on the cement steps of our front porch under what stars we could see through all the street lights and passing cars, and dreamed about our coming life with him.  We saw ourselves as very lucky people.

In the morning we dressed for the nine hour flight.  We had to get new American dollars to pay for the items on our Russia trip checklist, the one that would secure our adoption proceedings in Russia.  To be sure those American dollars looked crisp, Dave ironed them.  I had sewn a pocket in my bra for half of them and I had sewn a pocket in Dave’s shorts.  When we stuffed the pockets with the money – $5,000, I looked like I had three breasts but Dave was sporting a male fantasy, packing around enhanced boys.  Many of our extended family saw us off at the airport and then it was a nine hour flight to Frankfurt.  We were on our way to the next level of a partnership – up to then we were more like friends helping each other through life, now we were evolving into a unit – a family- with a life bigger than just us.  The trip was cramped, but hey, they gave us each a small hand towel, maybe for the morning shower in the tiny toilet.  And on to Moscow.

When we arrived, we were told we would need to declare our money.  I went into hysterical giggles wondering if we would have to be strip searched to declare, but no, so maybe it was all on paper; I don’t remember.  Our driver and hostess showed up to rescue us though they didn’t speak English. Driving through Moscow we kept seeing signs that read Mockba (in Russian letters) 850.  Having done no research before we left, we thought it must be a popular radio station.  It was the 850-year anniversary of a city with a long and rich history of which we were ignorant.  The driver, Alexi, took us to a Soviet-era apartment to our eyes in serious need of ‘renos’ – an ancient elevator, heavy, steel, double front doors, a tiny deck with ¼ inch steel siding.  You could see where a bullet had dented it –a design built out of fear.  The furnishings in the interior may have had the touch of a little old lady’s place from the 50s and may not have been Ikea branded, but a sense of art remained evident, complete with an old piano and beautiful wood furniture.    We turned on the TV, which had not left the 50s too far in the dust either, to see little men dressed in what we did not know were the traditional dress of Georgians declaring their proud determination to emphasize their independence from Russia, Papakha, not Cossak, hats and Choka coats.  We knew so little of Russia that we were not aware this program had to do with the worsening relations between Russia and Georgia.  Books encouraging an attempt at cultural awareness should be given heed.

Entry #3   The Adoption Procedure in ’90s Russia

After playing tourist for a couple of days in Moscow, we were taken about 250 km. north-east of Moscow to the city of Yaroslavl.  It appeared more attractive than Moscow and full of the look of things ancient – over 1000 years old.  Yasik has very old blood in his veins.

Although we had been driving for several hours we were taken to a variety of offices before heading to the orphanage. In each office, we were left to wait while our facilitator conducted the business required in each office.  Our only contribution was to offer the gifts we had brought from Canada to whomever was handling the issue at hand, basically the removal of Yasik from the files of Russia. Otherwise we sat to the side while each transaction took place. In one office where we waited in the outer office on wooden benches while the interpreter talked to the staff in an inner office, we watched an inch worm work its way across the floor.  Dave tried to help the little thing and it freaked in terror.

Once we had stopped at several registries to begin the process of removing Yasik’s Russian footprint, our driver turned the van in the direction of the orphanage for our introduction to our son-to-be. Perhaps knowing her time with us was limited, the interpreter suggested we use this short drive to write down questions we might have for the orphanage staff but that turned out to be a bit useless.  When I pulled out my questions later, translator or no translator, I got blank but respectful stares.  I would have loved to know why. Subtext: careful control of the flow of information?

While I was naively writing down some questions, the translator, a school teacher possibly conversant in several different languages, came up with an even better way to use five or ten minutes.  She began to teach us some phrases she thought would be helpful in communicating with Yasik.  Monolingual Dave started mimicking her without hesitation.  I have worked in a couple of foreign languages and know what a nightmare language learning can be so just wanted to throw up — I was going to one of the truly important moments of my life and being pushed on the way there into doing something which has given me some of the most stressful experiences of my life.  I get it, if books written to guide people through the adoption process are merely suggesting adoptors, already highly primed to prove how perfect they will be as parents, learn a few tourist-level phrases, but some of these books sound like they are suggesting adopters learn their child-to-be’s language by ordering an app from Amazon. Do they have any idea what that means? It is doubtful though even they would dare to suggest language learning be all wrapped in a few minutes. I thank Yasik for learning English so quickly.

The amazing expectations of those few minutes did not end there.  The translator also managed to tuck in some information about Yasik’s history.  Yasik’s mother visited him in the hospital where he lived for the first two years but “she moved around a lot”, whatever that meant. I did not question the comment at the time.  Did Elvira expect a show of concern or some awareness of that oblique FYI?  Now I wonder if my blasé reaction was because my mind was pre-set to an assumption against this mother’s care of her children. I have since learned much more about how many Russians saw adoption at the time. Somewhere I cannot currently validate, I was either told or read parents left their children at a state-run orphanage or what was also called a boarding school (often a more literal label than the boarding school as private school) while they attended to commitments like education or work away from home.  One source I did manage to secure is Russian Babies, Russian Babes: Economic and Demographic Implications of International Adoption and International Trafficking for Russia written by J.R. McKinney.  She writes of how the Soviets in the early years of their regime decided the raising of children would best be done by the state.  In time the costs to the state measured against desired results of producing the ideal Soviet citizen led to backtracking to the tradition of the family-raised child.  The children being raised by the state were generally weaker intellectually, physically and socially than family-raised children. Moving away from the Soviet aspiration to the tried and true was likely done with as little fanfare as possible, leaving Russian society with a stronger acceptance of placing a child in state care than would have been true in other cultures. If Yasik’s mother “moved around a lot” then state care may have been an obvious choice not only for someone struggling with drugs or alcohol but perhaps someone struggling with other pressures of poverty.  Yasik was, after all, born in the decade after the collapse of the Soviet Union.

I have no journal entries referring to the role of the father in Yasik’s life because it appears no one told us anything about him. Was this because only recently has research begun to look at the impact of the father on prenatal and infant development?  J.R. McKinney in Lone mothers in Russia: Soviet and Post-Soviet policy (now an article appearing to need access) notes in Post-Soviet Russia, 70% of Russian children lived in households where needs exceeded income.  The article points to the demographic called ‘Lone Mothers’ as very specifically mothers who never married and therefore could look to no one else for support of any kind.

Added to the difficulties Russian parents faced in those years was the negative attitude in Russian society toward domestic adoption, seemingly still prevalent but actively countered for Russians were concerned about the population drain, even though, again at that time, Russia was open to the money foreign adoptions brought to the country. These ‘on the one hand’ but then ‘on the other hand’ considerations demand that we understand we cannot simply assume a child in state care arrived there because someone else was willfully negligent or no longer living.

Things changed dramatically a few years later as adoption got dragged into Russian-American politics, but this was the environment in which we were adopting.  Children who had either been dropped off or placed in care were designated ‘social orphans’ when they had living biological parents who had the right to return for their children.  Numbers from 70% to 90% are offered to account for ‘social orphans’ in the state system at the time.  Yasik was a ‘social orphan’.  Adoption was not on the table if Russians had just dropped kids off at the boarding school-cum-orphanage while other issues are being worked out.

While I walk our dog, Brodie, on the Log Train trail I listen to books. Listening to From the Ashes by Jesse Thistle, about when he and his brothers were taken from their addicted father by Children’s Aid Society, I am struck by some similarities with the time he spent there in early childhood. As the brothers settle into a housing situation that sounds fairly institutional but is clean and provides regular meals, the oldest brother explains to other kids residing there that their “‘dad was away and that we’d be going home as soon as the police found him.  “I used to think that, too,” one kid said. “But we’re orphans now – don’t cha know?  I didn’t know what that meant.”‘ This young kid thought that his parents dropped him off at the Children’s Aid Society because he wanted Cheerios and they had none.  He saw it as his fault that he was now an orphan.  Jesse Thistle thought that his parents too were gone from his life because he had “asked for food too often“.

Kids were questioned, checked over for infections and parasites and some afterwards “never came back.  That was the scariest. It was like they had been eaten by monsters. No one knew what happened to them, but the older kids said they were the lucky ones because someone wanted them.  I didn’t understand that; our mom and dad wanted us, why didn’t theirs want them, too?” A few weeks later a foster home that would take all three of them was found.  They were told they were lucky.  They were “cleaned up” … and … “packed up“(39-42). So wouldn’t this too be a Canadian version of ‘social orphan’ with a family somewhere, government intervention and children confused and frightened.

However, as we later found out, while Yasik would have been labelled a ‘social orphan’ with living family, a copy of the court papers given to Yasik’s sister and adoptive family show that the state took away Yasik’s biological parents’ rights.  Yasik was not boarding at the orphanage while his parents were working away from home.  He was in process of becoming available for adoption though the actual court decision came a year later.  Yet because at the time of our adoption, Dave and I were given no assurances that the parents had either relinquished or had their rights removed, when I came across articles of illegal adoptions a few years later, I did worry.   I read that a number of Russian adoptions involved illegally obtained children, lacking parental surrender.  I googled this issue and found articles that say, yes, Russia is as haunted by trafficking in children as many, many other countries. And Russia’s response is not to turn a blind eye, having distaste for the idea that Russians are being taken from Mother Russia. In fact, “In 2008, an amendment to the Russian law on human trafficking re-established that the activity of buying and/or selling a person constituted trafficking regardless of whether it was done for an exploitative purpose” (Transaction Costs: Prosecuting child trafficking for illegal adoption in Russia Lauren A. McCarthy– this article now needs access). One article questioned the money laid out by people from wealthier countries in the quest of adopting a child even for the most wonderful of reasons, family making.  This money alone likely outweighed the cost of raising that child in his or her social setting.  Does this constitute “regardless of whether it was done for exploitative purpose” with the phrase ‘or not’ left unsaid? LUMOS and other organizations like Human Rights Watch make the contention that orphanages can be big business.  The desire to help solve a problem can sometimes be turned by others into something hurtful to society. It is an aspect of adoption I only wanted to turn away from as too sickening to contemplate before we read the copy of the court decision.

In balance to the generally negative perspective the West has toward the care provided by Russian orphanages I would insert this research article (see Orphanage Risk Factors): Psychology in Russia: State of the Art, 9(3), 103-112). Structural characteristics of the institutional environment for young children ( Muhamedrahimov R.J., Arintcina I.A., Solodunova M. Y., Anikina V. O., Vasilyeva M. J., Chernego D. I., Tsvetkova L. A., Grigorenko E. L. (2016).  Two orphanages in St.Petersburg were studied, making it evident that not all orphanages were damaging to children in their care.  Although because we are ultimately talking about human beings with as much love as any the world around, it should be a given and unnecessary to say again here that there are in Russia, as anywhere, people working in orphanages who actively seek to do their best for the children in their care despite given the need to be pragmatic in difficult circumstances.  The care-givers at the first orphanage were working on changes that show these Russian people were as aware as Dr. Bruce Perry who writes,

Now, of course, we know that an infant’s early attachment to a small number of consistent caregivers is critical to emotional health and even to physical development….While we don’t know whether there is a fixed “sensitive period” for the development of normal attachment the way there appears to be for language and sight, research does suggest that …[when] children are not allowed the change to develop permanent relationships with one or two primary caregivers during their first three years of life, [they will] have lasting effects on people’ ability to relate normally and affectionately to each other. 
Children who don’t get consistent, physical affection or the chance to build loving bonds simply don’t receive the patterned, repetitive stimulation necessary to properly build the systems in the brain that connect reward, pleasure, and human-to-human interactions (The Boy who Was Raised as a Dog 90, 92, 93).

And in our particular adoption, whether we were on our game or not, our adoption agency was doing due diligence. They were adhering to The Hague Convention on Protection of Children and Cooperation in Respect of Intercountry Adoption which came into force in Canada on April 1, 1997.  As the Fact Sheet handout given to us says, “The convention is an international law created to prevent abuses from occurring in intercountry adoptions“.   The Fact sheet does go on to say, “The adoptive family is responsible to ensure that the child they plan to adopt is legally free for adoption and that all legal requirements of both countries have been met, including adoption consents, validity of adoption order and immigration requirements”.  Ooh, with a squeegied up face, I might admit that I don’t remember doing that sort of due diligence personally.

Yet here is an article showing these concerns remain:

Former WA Rep. Matt Shea, accused of domestic terrorism, working to secure adoptions for Ukrainian children in Poland   March 16, 2022 at 6:00 am Updated March 16, 2022 at 7:55 am   By David Gutman Seattle Times staff reporter

Summary

Former Washington state Rep. Matt Shea’ group, Loving Families and Homes for Orphans, is not registered as an adoption agency with the Texas Department of Health and Human Services or with the Intercountry Adoption Accreditation and Maintenance Entity.

Now is not an appropriate time for international adoptions from Ukraine because there will be uncertainty around the situation of the children’s parents. Even if the children are in orphanages, they may be there as ‘social orphans’.

“‘The United Nations High Commission on Refugees and UNICEF put out a joint statement calling for temporary and foster care for children but saying “Adoption should not occur during or immediately after emergencies.”’

So yes concern re: adoption remains viable.  Marion Crook in Thicker Than Blood says this about the urge to adopt based on the need to ‘save the children’:

In the early 2000s, evangelical groups began to advocate for a Christian mission to rescue orphans by adoption.  They cited scripture to support the notion that Christians were called to bring orphans into their homes as a way of both advancing the role of Christianity in the work and ensuring their own salvation….  Some adoptive parents were grateful for the addition to their family and truly had wanted to adopt.  Others paraded their mixed-race children as proof of their Christian faith…. If God willed that a family must adopt, then any obstacles to that adoption — laws, agency oversight, the best interests of the adoptee, and consideration for birth parents — were against God’s will …. the underlying philosophy of the Orphan Crisis Movement…(53).

Yasik didn’t become available for adoption until just before we applied, presumably because the court case was by then being considered.  A short time before we left for Russia, we were given the heads up that a Russian family or two were considering adopting Yasik and that another packet of money would secure our position in first place.   We laid the money down immediately. Jessica O’Dwyer  in Mamalita: an adoption memoir writes more extensively about the issue of bribery in adoption in Chapter 16, “The Fix”.

Rebecca Wellington in Who is a Worthy Mother?: an intimate history of adoption also brings forward these concerns, suggesting that when the USA demanded openness in domestic adoptions, parents turned to transnational adoption to ensure “a clean break from any birth family or community ties. Through transnational adoptions, adopting parents could completely avoid any interaction with or connection to their adopted child’s birth mother or, even more disturbingly, the truth behind the relinquishment of the child”.  Furthermore, “today’s multimillionaire-dollar transnational adoption industry still depends on both commodification of children and the dehumanization of birth mothers and birth communities.”

Nonetheless, whiff of a money grab aside, it may well be some Russian families were interested for the UN publication Child Adoption: Trends and Policies (https://www.un.org/en/development/desa/population/publications/pdf/policy/child-adoption.pdf) provides a graph showing 75% of adoptions were domestic in the early 2000s, and somewhere I cannot locate at this writing, I saw the same breakdown for the year 1997. As noted above, Russians, for all the writing about their antipathy to domestic adoption because they do not want a child not of family blood, did process far more domestic adoptions than international at that time.

Yasik was moved to the orphanage before his second birthday the translator told us. We were given to understand the orphanage did not know when he was taken to the hospital. For many years I told Yasik and myself that a small window was opened onto the care Yasik’s mother had for him for as the translator told us, his mother came to visit him at the hospital a number of times. At the time I told Yasik that this signified her love for him but that she may have felt it was in his best interest that he be put in an orphanage.  The response of a young girl in the book, You Should Be Grateful: stories of race, identity, and transracial adoption (Angela Tucker, Beacon Press, 2022, 41) (the title alone is telling) was hardly grateful when she was told that she was placed for adoption because “her birth mom loved her so much”. This 12 year-old girl “notes with sincerity“, “‘I was placed for adoption when I was a baby. My parents never even met my birth mom,” … “so how do they know that she loved me?“‘ Connecting with Yasik’s older sister also disabused me of that sentimental notion.  Yasik’s bio mother apparently came only to see if she could get a hold of the money the state provided for Yasik’s care. Even at the time, the translator’s mention that Yasik had rickets in those first two years should have ignited some reflection either on the care his mother gave him or the care and attention he got during his time at the hospital. He had rickets and he could not walk until the orphanage took over his care.  Now we have to assume that his parents were responsible for his rickets.  Did she not care? Did she feel too cowed by authority and her own inability to care for him? What about the father’s responsibility?  The six-year-old brother did not want to return to the home because of Yasik’s father’s brutal abuse.  I will add here another thought.  In Act Natural: a cultural history of misadventure in parenting, Jennifer Traig tucks in this note when discussing crawling and walking: “You have to reach a certain brain mass before you can [walk]“(116).  Given his parents lack of care, we can assume that Yasik’s development was delayed.  Yasik caught up physically in the orphanage to the extent that when our doctor gave him a medical just after we brought him to Canada, he surmised Yasik had built up a strong immune system in the orphanage and he was then meeting the developmental markers for his age.  We adopted a child who simply weathered every illness common to kids with barely a sneeze. Even when it was his turn to get chicken pox, he and his little buddies spent their “sick” week playing in the park across from their school.

Entry #4   How a Child May End Up in an Orphanage

Google tells us that orphanages were phased out by the 1930s in Canada. Google also showed me that in Russia orphanages are very much still to be found.   For the city and region/oblast of Yaroslavl with a population of a million plus in the 1990s, I found a fairly current online list of 26 orphanages. The site is copyright from 2006 but as of 2024 is not available (http://adoptionknowhow.com/russia/orphanages/).  Many were simply called “Baby House No.–”   which is a “state residential institution for orphans and children without parental care, age 4 and under”.  But others got specific. There were a couple of ‘Music and Artistic Education Baby’ houses. Then there were a couple of ‘Social and Rehabilitation Center for Minors’ orphanages.  One was for children 3 to 18. There were a couple of ‘Sanatory [sic] Orphanages for Tuberculosis Children’. Others were for hard-of-hearing or deaf children.  One was labelled ‘Agrarian Special Orphanage’.  Other orphanages were labelled according the word ‘Type’. There is no explanation for the ones labelled ‘of the Type 7’ but those labelled ‘of the Type 8’ come with this piece, ‘for Mentally Defective Children’. Ten of the 26 orphanages in Yaroslavl carried the ‘of type 8’ with the ‘for Mentally Defective Children’ designation.  If, as several articles I have found suggest, a high percentage of children in Russian orphanages are considered, at birth, or after time in an orphanage setting, to be ‘mentally defective’, what does the label refer to?  Chapter Three (45-71) of Born For Love written by Maia Szalavitz and Dr. Bruce Perry offers a general picture of what to expect when a child spends his or her early childhood in an orphanage, for reasons generational, prenatal, environmental.  There are always exceptions and progress is always being made but what I have read from a variety of sources would corroborate this chapter.  Most children relegated/directed to orphanages will be diagnosed/deemed to have developmental delays mentally, physically, emotionally and socially. I Love Russia: reporting from a lost country by Elena Kostyuchenko published in 2023 weaves stories through the book of “internats’, institutions for the mentally disabled, pretty much in the same condition and for children given the same designations.

OK, but do adoptors note this when starting a family unless consciously deciding to adopt a ‘special needs’ child? Parents cannot shut down at least a little bit of magical thinking.  How many times have parents wondered at the evident genius in their child, all the while wondering how it was possible for “he or she certainly didn’t get it from me?”   So maybe there is a way to hope that the disability label doesn’t actually apply to our child. And when adopting in countries such as Russia that magical thinking teases out slivers of hope that we have sidestepped developmental problems.

Several articles and policy papers (see Orphanage Risk Factors) talk of the attitude among more traditional Russian doctors that a baby with a birth ‘defect’ is going to be a problem for the mother so she is advised to turn her baby over to the state just after birth and sometimes without even seeing or holding the newborn.  A Human Rights Watch paper noted, “Many parents face pressure from healthcare workers to relinquish children with disabilities to state care, including at birth. Human Rights Watch documented a number of cases in which medical staff claimed, falsely, that children with certain types of disabilities had no potential to develop intellectually or emotionally and would pose a burden with which parents will be unable to cope”.   Maybe this is true, for Will Englund wrote a piece in the Washington Post called “Russia’s orphans: government takes custody of children when parents can’t cope”.  His report on the issue of children in Russian orphanages:

The children are almost certain to have at least one disability. The disabilities can be congenital or related to alcohol consumption by the mother during pregnancy — or they have arisen because of the loss of emotional contact that comes with life in a state orphanage. “Every month in an institutional setting has a physical impact on the brain,” said Chuck Johnson, head of the National Council for Adoption, in an interview in Alexandria. “Every child will come with some developmental delays”.

But then, in a Human Rights Watch paper,

The experts reported that Russian psychological norms are based on very strict criteria. Apart from these norms, however, factors that in the West are considered as being simple medical risks, will, in Russia, be labelled as illnesses:

*Babies born to alcoholic parents or whose mothers suffered depression during pregnancy will be labelled encephalopathic and remain so until they come of age.  

*Orphans will be classed as being mentally deficient.

*Children with a single physical malformation (a harelip or speech defect…) become subnormal in the eyes of Russian doctors.

Human Rights Watch also found that these early diagnostic practices interfere with a child’s right to full development and in certain cases, to life itself. Moreover, abundant information gathered in Russia indicated several crucial incentives behind ‘over-diagnosing’ that suggest violations of basic medical ethics.

According to a former charity worker who distributed assistance to impoverished baby houses and has traveled widely in Russia since 1991, one legacy of the Soviet medical bureaucracy encourages hospital staff to avoid any risk of sanctions for errors detected under their care.

For example, she recalled the case of a child she knew well who had a medical chart with a catalogue of conditions including oligophrenia and encephalopathy.

A doctor told me that they have to cover their butts. They could lose their job, so they write many diagnoses. And you know the penal system here. It’s a “better safe than sorry” system.

A second factor that encourages exaggerated diagnoses is the Russian law which, until recently, prohibited international adoption of “healthy” children. “The doctors in the system wanted the kids adopted, so they’d say that this child has a tumor and then “wink” at you”.

Reading NeuroTribes: the legacy of autism and the future of neurodiversity by Steve Silberman I could not help but see parallels between the labeling of disability in Russian orphanages with Silberman’s chapter on the disabled in Hitler’s Germany, “What Sister Viktorine Knew“(82 – 139).  It is a nightmarish chapter.

Finally, a widely cited incentive for over-diagnosing is the extra financial subsidy and salary increment that the state grants to institutions that care for children with disabilities. The entitlement to these subsidies was confirmed by children’s rights activists as well as by staff of state institutions.

One volunteer who worked in a Moscow baby house for a year and a half recalled to Human Rights Watch,

Once, in a rare honest moment with the acting director, she told me, “We are considered as a medical facility because more than half our children are considered to have medical defects”.  So they could finagle more money for the place.

Another baby house director told Human Rights Watch, however, that the subsidy does represent the greater burden shouldered by the staff in dealing with disabled children, even though the salary levels remain very low and do not attract specially trained personnel:

A pedagogue in a baby house who works here, for the Ministry of Health, will get a 20 percent higher salary than from another ministry. Yet what should we be talking about if the salary of a doctor is only $100 a month? Of course, all these places with “problematic kids” get higher pay because we have to deal with all the kids…. The name on the byline is Kathleen Hunt, who I assume was the reporter. The chapter is “The “Gilded Cage” of the Dom Rebenka: infancy to four years”, ( p.116 ) taken from Abandoned to the State: Cruelty and Neglect in Russian Orphanage (1998) written by Human Rights Watch.

These kids will enter adulthood, work their ways through life with a host of papers labelling them mentally defective like a life long albatross around their necks.  And we come back to the question, aside from globally respected diagnoses, what do the labels really mean?  And even with an appropriate diagnosis, what concrete prognosis does the label offer?

With no verification to the contrary, we assume that Yasik remained in a baby house though he had turned four because, I think it was Julia who told us, Yasik was held at a home he was aging out of for the powers that were felt he was still adoptable.   The largest number of children adopted out is from the baby houses.  I guess there is no surprise there – it seems to me, we humans deeply believe in the wonder of having a baby as the picture-perfect way to establish a family and we just as deeply believe that we have the best chance of molding the little bitty baby into our likeness if the little bit comes to us ‘tabula rasa’.  This belief system resists challenges to other options in ways that may be well below our conscious level of dealing with our lives.

In any case, when I look at what paper work we have, the orphanage name is Yaroslavl Orphanage.  There is no such plain name on the listing I found so this was merely a sufficient name for the paperwork.  We do not know what ‘Type’ it was.  We do know there wasn’t enough land surrounding the building for it to be an ‘Agrarian Special’ orphanage; with ‘scruffy grass and bare spots, not far from lots of other buildings’, it was hardly worthy of the stimulation a playground should offer children.  It put me in mind of how Tony describes the playground at his orphanage in 1930s Saskatchewan (A Canadian story of Adoption from the 1930s, Becoming Family).

Inside, the orphanage looked quite small from what we could see in our very limited guided tour.  We were taken via the straightest route to a receiving room. We did pass through a play room with a child-size piano which he must have played, so ….. maybe this was a ‘Music and Artistic’ Baby house.  Yet, from the picture we have of the children assembled to wave good-bye to Yasik when we came to collect him into our family, there is at least one child with the markers for Down’s Syndrome so perhaps it was a “Type 8 ” home.

We were taken to the head person’s office, a sweet looking, grandmotherly woman who was a doctor.  There was another woman at a desk who never once looked up at us, at least when I noticed.  Was she now immune to these emotional tableaus about to unfold once again, or ?  Yes, hindsight could suggest a wide range of possibilities; in the journal I was simply struck by her disinterest but so caught up in the emotions I was enjoying that I could not ask questions.  Maybe she had a stiff neck.

Entry #5   We Meet Our Soon-to-be Son

There were two small couches in a corner of the receiving room, across from the woman at the desk.  I sat on the one by the door; I think Dave was left with no option but to stand. The doctor sat on the other one. The translator too was in the room but must have operated simply as a disembodied voice to me for while I can remember exactly where the doctor, Dave and I were, I only know that the translator said stuff to us, but from where I do not remember. And the woman sitting at the desk was still concentrating on her work, not looking up.  A woman brought Yasik to the door. I turned, and not a foot from me stood a little boy, looking a bit pale and scruffy.  Then for some reason the woman whisked him back out- a sneak preview? Dave said out loud, but probably to himself – “That’s it?”  It says in my journal our translator cooled his enthusiasm; “He’s not yours yet.”   Why did she say that?  We had been following her all day, asking few questions, and getting few answers, as much because we had little idea what to ask as the facilitators reluctance or inability to provide answers.  We had only a bare outline of the process.  Now each of us in that tiny room was part of a profound emotional moment.  This disembodied translator handled it with a tamp down. Cautioning us that there is more to the process than just, “Here is your son, you can take him now”? Looking at this journal note today, I can only say, I think she may have been trying to maintain some control as her role demanded, unable to sense all the role’s expectations in this very human exchange.  It is one of those things I notice flit across my mind in the years since when I have been a player in other moments of tense emotion.  The awkward, the mundane, the irrelevant all interact with the profound.

OK so we needed a warning not to grab the kid and run.  There were protocols yet to complete.  Relax.  He will be yours entirely in barely 24 more hours. We tucked our necks back in and mutely nodded, “Oh, OK.” And in truth, we wrapped the adoption all up in under two weeks, a plus for our budget and emotions in the moment.  We do not fully know what it was doing to the caregivers, the facilitators, the child. And it can be said it seems the process, perhaps because of tensions like in that moment, still not understood, led in the decades since to reflection, which in turn, led to a process for foreign adoptions showing more regard for the child, possibly for the bio-parents as well, than the adoptors and the facilitators.  Now, even if foreigners do get to adopt from Russia, I have read they come for a ‘meet and greet’ of three weeks and then return at a later date to remain again for weeks before the child is theirs and can return with them to their home country, at a cost double our expenses.

However, just as international adoptions were about to expand in the ’90s and criticism of adoption would, of course, follow, Elizabeth Bartholet’s Family Bond: adoption and the politics of parenting(152), steps into the debate with the observation that one thing international adoptions do is make it harder for the countries with a burden of parent-less children to hide their lack of care or options for domestic adoptions as would have been the case after the collapse of the Soviet Union (The Sunday Times, 28 December 1997, 20).

With this insert: Google sites in 2021 suggest it may currently not be possible for Canadians to adopt a child from Russia.  See the Government of Canada site:  https://www.canada.ca/en/immigration-refugees-citizenship/news/notices/important-notice-regarding-adoptions-russia.html.  In 2012 the U.S.A. passed the Magnitsky Act in response to the imprisonment and death of a whistle blower in Russia.  By 2017 Canada had passed a similar act, Justice for Victims of Corrupt Foreign Officials Act (quite specific) which Putin warned was participation in “very nonconstructive political games”, nice touch, but couched in anti-same sex righteousness: https://www.cbc.ca/radio/thecurrent/the-current-for-november-2-2017-1.4382427/how-russian-law-affects-canadians-trying-to-adopt-orphans-1.4382469.

Not all Russian accepted the government explanation of the stop on American/Canadian adoptions. ‘Tens of thousands ‘ protested in a ‘March Against Scoundrels’, calling President Vladimir Putin a ‘child-killer’ for the trumped-up ban, using orphans as pawns who would be the ones to suffer (24 news, January 14, 2013 and Harper’s Magazine, October 2013).

Adopting less than 10 years before these changes, some for the good of the adoptee, and some to suit the political moves of a dictator, we were in a room with a disembodied translator trying to manage our emotions.  Whatever our translator was saying to us, her message was floating on by somewhere just above us.  In our hearts, where for us in those 20 minutes, reality was grounded, Yasik became our son. Dave said later Yasik became his son the moment he picked him up and that has never changed.  Yasik has since August 18, 1997 always been his son. I am certain of this because a few minutes later Yasik was again brought in.  He was led to stand in the middle of us – the doctor, the translator and Dave and I.  We just stared at him at first which must have set him on edge a bit. He stood there with fine, sandy blond hair, hazel eyes, scratches on his nose, a band-aid on a finger, dressed in pink leotards, a faded pink sweat shirt and a pair of little girl’s leather shoes too small for him.  And a bit of a smudge under his eyes.  Yasik had just woken up.  Dave went to him with a gift, and I held back, starting to cry – my default response to emotional moments, right.  Yasik liked the plane Dave gave him, grabbed it and held on.  My next memory is of him in Dave’s arms with Yasik turned into Dave’s shoulder,  and me seeing, not him, but Dave’s face. Dave’s face sealed the deal for me.  Just like that I saw stamped on his face his love for his son of two or three minutes.  Yasik had become his son.  And my heart received our son then as well.  Later Dave told me he had never felt anything like what came over him in that first moment holding Yasik.  This is our becoming a family moment, however unconnected it might be to blood.

There is a story, “These foreign places we call home” in a compilation called Somebody’s Child: stories about adoption (Torchwood, 2011, 37-42), written by an adopting mother about her uncertainty of her right to be her adopted child’s mother.

She wrote that as she watched her about-to-be son being born: “I can feel it in my bones. I know I will not let this child go”. Yet when it is time for the birth mother to relinquish the child to her, she was fearful, even as she and her husband drove away from the hospital with their new born son, that someone may stop them, demanding she return the child.  And then she says: “I did not give birth to my son, Jack, but it does not change the way I love him”.  Just over a year later the writer gave birth to a girl and says this: “my children are two equal sides of my beating heart — seamless, without division”.

When we returned to the hotel later, I recorded the day. I marveled at the immediate and complete arrival of such a love, but I did not doubt it.   For a while, just as euphoria floods the brain when we fall in love, we were apparently awash in oxytocin, because …adoptive parents also form lifelong attachments to children. Some evidence suggests that the presence of an infant releases oxytocin in adults, “persuading” its caretakers to love it. Oxytocin therefore might help to assure that parents and others will engage with and care for infants, to stabilize loving relationships (https://imperialbiosciencereview.com/2021/02/19/love-a-cocktail-of-chemicals/).  For myself and my husband, Yasik was our child that day. We loved him; ergo, he was our son.  A Russian woman had given birth to this child.  He had been taken from her home to a hospital and then to an orphanage.  He stood in the middle of the room parent-less and we had come to Russia to claim him.

But what does it mean to say, “Wow, he is our son.”?  Because we fell in love with him and would the next day hear a gavel affirm our legal parentage?  Was that really all there was to it: love and claim?   In both her books, Betty Jean Lifton comes down quite hard on the adopters’ narrative of ‘The Chosen Baby’, the story adoptors construct to tell the adoptee he or she is the lucky little devil given by God or carefully searched for and found by his or her new parents. The search-and-choosing-of-the-‘right’-child-for-a-couple story works for the new parents but is seldom ultimately satisfying to a child, especially when the new parents are uncomfortable recognizing the identity given to this child from the bio parents.  Actually, with time the ‘Chosen Baby’ story is likely not all that deeply satisfying to the new parents either.

What about the mother who gave birth to him? The father? Or those who cared for him in the hospital and at the orphanage for several years?  Who we are, the love we feel and offer, the environment we provide does not allow us to assume we are the totality of our child’s attachment or whatever it is that comes wrapped in the concept of the adoptee’s family narrative.

The little blond boy, the third part of the triangle that was this new family, what was happening within him?  We, in those 20 or so minutes, believed we were bonded or the other word ‘attached’ to the little fellow.  But the neuro-transmitters flooding our brain with love … or oxytocin or vasopressin or dopamine or serotonin, were they flooding his in the same way or degree?

Here I provide another voice to address Betty Jean Lifton.  Elizabeth Bartholet, in Family Bond: adoption and the politics of parenting suggests the narrative of the importance of blood over legal attachment is soaked in myth and biased language.  Opening adoption records and searching for the adoptee’s family of origin is the stuff of stories, movies and news pieces. “But who are her real parents?” or “How wonderful that you have rescued this little one from a difficult life by taking her into your home”.  It is assumed that “[Some] aberrational and perhaps altruistic motive must be involved” (167).   Bartholet does not disparage this movement but does note how it can ‘throw shade’ on a family made by adoption.  Later in the book Bartholet provides empirical studies to show that adoption for the most part works well, shocking news articles aside, certainly better than alternatives such as leaving children in places with inadequate parenting options. (174-5).

We understand we are not the norm: we have to redefine ‘family’ to accommodate all the people assembled into the adoptive configuration as Marion Crook advocates.  The adopted child has not only one set of undisputed parents, but two or more.  In Thicker Than Blood: adoptive parenting in the modern world, Marion Crook caught my attention immediately for she starts out by saying, “We work hard at finding ways to support membership in their first family while firmly establishing them in our adoptive family” (27). I think the more we understand our child is a person whose Hero’s or Heroine’s Journey must always straddle two families, the more we ease the child’s burden, and likely our own. Accepting this reality, we massage the definition and then go on to the wonders of being family.  Elizabeth Bartholet ends a chapter on “Adoption and Stigma” in Family Bond: adoption and the politics of parenting with “Adoption creates a family that in important ways is not “nuclear”.  It creates a family that is connected to another family, the birth family, and often to different cultures and to different racial, ethnic and national groups as well.  Adoptive families might teach us something about the value for families of connection with the larger community” (186).  Begona Gomez Urzaiz in writing in The Abandoners: on mothers and monsters (2022,88) about Ingrid Bergman and her familial relationships used the word “reconstituted” families: Evidence that children and their parents can choose how to love one another, too, just as couples do.

Entry #6   Orphanage Risks

I regularly ask myself why I am writing in such detail about a ten-day adoption process from as far away as the ’90s.  The adoption process in Russia and many other countries has improved.  John Brooks (The Girl Behind the Door 204) notes this as well about Poland’s treatment of orphans, “transitioning from institutional orphanages to foster homes“.  A shout out to organizations like LUMOS cannot go amiss here.

So why rake over long dead coals?  I keep saying it is for personal insight.  Is it relevant to a wider audience?  Out of curiosity I googled current (at the time I wrote this post) adoption processes to see if any remain that process in a manner similar to our process and found the site, International Adoption.org, which points to several countries that continue to process adoptions almost as quickly and at roughly the same cost as our process in the 90s: Malawi, South Korea and India among the list. There is still some relevancy, beyond the personal, to my pursuit.  And now, as noted in Entry#3, crises around the world are leaving daily numbers of orphans. How will they be cared for?

Back to the journal where we are still in this tiny receiving room meeting Yasik.  I know most parents meet their child in the midst of hovering professionals; adoptive parents experience no more privacy. Nurses or doulas may be bending over a new mother learning to breast feed.  In the case of adoptive parents, orphanage staff are hovering around as these new parents are taking in their introduction to their about-to-be child. Taking him from Dave’s arms, I held him too.  But I could see he was becoming overwhelmed and then he cried.  My first real mommy moment and I scared the kid.  Good start.  Thicker Than Blood by Marion Crook, tucks in a healthy bit on page 65 to ease a new parent’s fear of bonding/attachment– sometimes it happens instantly, sometimes it takes a while, but either way it is going to happen she affirms.  However, … toward the end of the same page she does temporize with “Bonding can occur despite …”.  I who may have been in thrall to the wonder of my emotions for this child surrendered Yasik wordlessly to the sweet-faced doctor he knew was his protector, to someone who had far more well-honed mothering instincts.  She took Yasik from me and folded him into her lap. Now all the women were crying, maybe even the one who never looked up from her work.  Dave though appeared thrilled, beaming face and expanding chest.

Yasik consoled, we moved from this room to the doctor’s office and she elaborated on information we had earlier been given by the translator about Yasik’s time for the first two years in the hospital.  I am using the word ‘elaborated’ loosely. The questions I was encouraged to note as we drove to the orphanage, as I mentioned in Entry #3, were mostly met with blank stares and dodges back into safer territory, translator or no translator, it seemed to me. When I think back on what we gleaned in that first meeting, the sum message was positive.  They were telling us Yasik was their little assistant with the younger children. I guess in an older brotherly sort of way.  He helped a two-year-old Down’s syndrome girl learn to walk.  They said he was their favourite; watching him, we nodded happily.  On a kindergarten outing a few months later another kid was left behind because the staff were focused on taking pictures of Yasik.  But maybe a sales pitch is given to all adoptors.  Who knows? We had no trouble believing it.  They also said he was an intelligent, beautiful and loving person.  We just kept saying ahh … ahh … ahh.

Here’s a heads-up: I hope that parents are now more informed.  The Origins of You, by Vienna Pharaon, looks at William Wordsworth’s observation: the child is the father of the man.   Learning as much as possible about this child about to become your child may be helpful in guiding the child into adulthood. We would have been well served if this orphanage had been prepared to provide more of the kind of awareness now available through research and experience. Case-in-point: the father’s contribution to the make-up of a child to be born to a couple has been given research attention in recent years, research that suggests the father too needs be more responsible to provide healthy sperm, even to being aware of his diet in the months leading up to the conception and birth of the child. What kind of diet did Yasik’s father have in the months before Yasik’s birth, this father who was being paid in ceramic dishes for his work at the factory and who had issues around alcohol? (https://www.ctvnews.ca/health/your-father-s-diet-before-you-were-born-could-have-affected-your-health-a-new-study-suggests-1.6927409)

There is now much information for adoptors to draw on as they begin the adoption process. What can you find out about the parents’ lives? What can you find out about the way the orphanage is managed? How much hugging has your potential adoptee been offered?   These questions are not suggested to dissuade adoptors from adopting but rather to help them be better prepared to ignite the child’s potential. As the excerpts and articles in Orphanage Risk Factors present and perhaps nearly every adoption book I have read reiterates, adoptors are well-advised to be as prepared as current information offers both about the adoptee’s needs arising from the child’s pre-orphanage life and life in the orphanage and about the adoption process the adoptors will be dealing with.  This will hopefully keep their expectations more grounded.

Yasik did not walk until he was moved to the orphanage.  Some of the orphanages in Russia have what is termed ‘lying down’ rooms. Was Yasik in a ‘lying down’ ward in the hospital?    In other words, did he not walk because he was not given opportunities to get out of bed to walk?  Was he left to lie in bed for much of the time he spent in the hospital?   Did he have rickets because of the lack of proper diet and exposure to sunshine while he stayed in the hospital?  Or did he come into the hospital with rickets due to the lack of care he received from his biological parents? No appropriate judgment can be made.  And concerns about rickets? Childhood rickets do not have lifetime impact if treatment catches the problem before disabling deformities develop (lots of downer ‘D’ words there which did not come to pass for Yasik).  To be fair, I actually could not at the time have fathomed asking why he had rickets or why he could not walk until the age of two.  My questions were more mundane: “What does he like to eat?”  Not mundane enough though.  I received no answer to that one either.  And maybe it was pointless from their perspective to waste time answering that sort of question, given they may have assumed if we could come all this way to adopt a child, we would be providing a different diet than orphanage fare. (I say this, aware of a potential stereotyping profile and the gossip monger’s love of scratching around in the dirt). At any rate, Yasik took over responsibility for teaching us his likes and dislikes the moment the van left the orphanage the next day.

The negatives brushed over, the conversation skipped on to positive notes.  Perhaps even allowing us to know about the rickets and slow start to walking was to suggest that though the parents and/or hospital provided poor care we could be assured the orphanage rescued Yasik and gave him the vitamin D he needed to deal with rickets and the stimuli to encourage him to walk.  And we have never doubted that his bones and coordination were not hampered by the lack of care previous to his move to the orphanage.  As I write this, I have to conclude this sweet looking doctor was doing what she had likely done over and over, focusing on the positives unless it was necessary for the future of the child to bring up the negative.  Yasik learned to walk.   Notching the positives up, the doctor went on to say Yasik had musical interests and liked to draw and within a split second, Dave whipped out his ever-present sketch book and crayons.  He drew a circle on the page and Yasik got right into it, drawing lines to connect the circle.  Then he carefully returned the crayons to their right place.

We saw no males in our brief time in the orphanage but I didn’t question why when Yasik needed to go to the toilet, he chose Dave to take him, a male he knew only as a hugger, circle-drawer and gift-giver.  He said to Dave, “Kakas” (I doubt I need to offer translation), and taking Dave’s hand, led him to the toilet.  Dave helped him do his job and pull up, Yasik stopping first to point out his deposit.

Before this one opportunity to learn about the first four years of Yasik’s life was brought to a close, we measured his feet and took him with us in the van to buy a pair of shoes and get his passport picture taken.  Can you imagine that? This four-year-old child had barely known us for one hour, yet my notes say he went with no hesitation, allowing Dave to carry him out to the van in the company of four strangers: Dave, me, the driver and the translator.  In the van, he held my hand, and as Dave talked to him, he started to talk back with shy little words.  When we arrived at the store, all shyness slammed to a halt as Yasik and Dave spied a motorcycle. Yasik squealed out the Russian word for motorcycle, мотоцикл, as something that sounded like ‘matikli’ to us. We have three pictures of the thing; it could have been a fly caught in a scraggly bush to me but to the two of them, it was awe-inspiring.

The store we went to was a set piece for an early twentieth century western movie, the shoes were a little boy’s oxfords from the middle of the century but the clerk was the first retail person who smiled and treated us with genuine friendliness – likely responding to Yasik’s charm.  Faded pink runners dumped in favour of new black ones, little shoes I later tucked into a memory box like so many mothers reluctant to give up the first set of booties, and we moved on to the passport office.

I was 47 in ’97 and had dreamed of being a mother to an adoptee for more than half my life, yet until that afternoon I merely stood to the side looking on at mothering.  That was lots of time to develop either a sense that like any other job I had handled to that point, hopefully I would learn sufficient competence, or as in my case, a deep insecurity about how to do it right.  In Thicker Than Blood (70,71), Marion Crook writes, “…[M]otherhood wasn’t a professional job or a test for which you got a grade.  It was a living situation that changed constantly, and I was expected to simply do as well as possible”. She concludes when she came to terms with how her mothering was going to play out that she was “happier with myself when I accepted that I wouldn’t be perfect”.   So far, I had managed to make Yasik cry when I first held him and when we needed to make Yasik a bit more presentable for his passport picture, I was at a loss taming his hair.  Three other women in the passport office, more maternal than I perhaps, jumped in to help me out or at least to comb his hair in what looked right to them as Russian mothers of the 90s.

I tripped over a new label recently though apparently it has been identified since the late 70s: ‘Imposter Mother Syndrome’: feeling you really aren’t the best mother for the child who is yours. It could be massaged to include adoptor parents for I am unlikely the only new adoptor who has felt “a fear that at any moment you might be exposed as a fraud“(https://theeverymom.com/imposter-syndrome-as-a-mom-how-to-overcome-it/.

Returning Yasik to the orphanage, we hugged and kissed him – was it a natural or expected response?  He followed us out of the room and then the journal says “I was last to leave and when I turned back for one more look, he was peeking through the banister to smile and wave.  The image I was left with at the end of the day – a happy smile”.

In the evening, writing in the journal, I concluded, “He was beautiful in every way.  His ears are big! He looks directly and openly, and intelligently and he has such a sweet smile”.  (And now as I read this, I wonder what the big deal was with noting – both by the staff and myself- that he showed intelligence. I mean he was cute as a bug’s ear and certainly seemed happy and comfortable with us.  What more was needed?)

Our first day with our child-to-be before he became legally our child less than 24 hours later.

Entry #7   Bonding/Attachment

We left the last entry hugging and kissing a child after knowing him three hours, aware tomorrow he would be our child. Whether the words ‘bonding’ or ‘attachment’ were in wide use at the time, or whether the pre-adoption seminars at the time used these words, I do not remember.  Scanning my journal again, I don’t see the words on any of the pages I am now writing from (I later found we had been given information).  Yet as we left, Yasik peeked through the banister to smile and wave.  And we floated away into the evening on a happy cloud.  I remember Dave and I going for a walk along the Volga in the evening still wrapped in this happy cloud. The journal says we felt Yasik was so much more than we could ever have hoped for.

This is why I ask:  do people ‘bond’ or ‘attach’ in three hours? ‘Bonding’ is the word most people use rather than ‘attachment’ to describe the feeling they have as they fall in love with their children.  Few would be surprised at my use of it as well.  However, and yes here comes a big ‘But’, asking this question I have begun to discover stuff that may exclude Dave and me from the circle encompassing those who fit the scientific definition of the word.  And whether it sounds like fluffy semantic nonsense or not, I want to respect the work of science because I want an explanation built on empirically accessed information to know if my understanding is as concrete as possible.  To choose to use the word simply because of a feeling is not a stable explanation.  Thus far my readings no longer allow me to use the word ‘bonding’, drawing a distinct line between it and ‘attachment’ which is where researchers want to go to explain those feelings, even though ‘attachment’ has a more clinical sound than the more passionate ‘bonding’ to explain the feelings Dave and I were sure were ours, and were just as certain cemented a love within us.

So what is ‘bonding’? Why am I directed to use the word ‘attachment’ rather than ‘bonding’? Are the feelings we had that day merely the squirt of emotion needed to encourage the growth of attachment? Were they really sufficient to leave us with sense of commitment to Yasik as our son that has refused to wane right to the present? We have never questioned Yasik took his rightful place in our hearts then and there and has never been ousted.

With a question like this, I looked a several different articles to parse out a distinction between these two words. A variety of sources from work by John Bowlby and on into more current study suggests that ‘bonding’ is a parent’s positive and protective feelings for a child, beginning in the womb. So far, other than the infant aspect, we can be included in the behaviour and irreversible shift in our emotional lives.

But ‘bonding’, suggests Jean Mercer in Understanding Attachment: parenting, child care, and emotional development (6), became a bit of a loosy-goosy term, referring to whatever sweet emotional moment one person shared with usually another person, animal, or even, thing.  The science world was forced to abandon it, though it was supposed to be a word specific to what began to develop in utero via hormone changes and the head start the biological mother gets while her child is in the womb. Yet Mercer returns to the word on pages 70 to 75 as a needed identifier, including fathers and parents of adopted infants who have no hormonal changes, nonetheless, “show bonding to the same degree as biological mothers”.  Not even the belief about breast-feeding being essential to bonding holds weight for Mercer.    She relegates that idea to persistent myth.  In Thinking Critically About CHILD DEVELOPMENT: Examining Myths & Misunderstandings (82), Jean Mercer talks about research looking at levels of oxytocin when asking if adoptive mothers bond with their adoptee.  The research found mothers who produced more oxytocin when cuddling with their children showed more delight in their children but then concludes it is not easy to measure how bonding or loving occurs for it is still not clear how important early contact is.  But there is no denial here that ‘bonding’ can be acknowledged for adoptive mothers (and fathers?) of infants.  Julie Holland, MD, wrote Good Chemistry: the science of connection from soul to psychedelics in 2020 (Harper Collins Publishers). On page 120 she writes: “Yes, oxytocin works on father; however, these benefits don’t extend to fathers who don’t get involved.”

There is, however, denial in Inside Transracial Adoption: strength-based, culture-sensitizing parenting strategies for inter-country or domestic adoptive families that don’t “Match”? (128) by Gail Steinberg & Beth Hall for they write,

By strict definition, adoptive parents can’t bond with their children. Bonding is a one-way process that begins in the birth mother during pregnancy and continues through the first few days of life. It is her instinctive desire to protect her baby.

Offering a tempered rebuttal, on page 75 of Understanding Attachment: parenting, child care, and emotional development, Mercer adds this: “Adoptive mothers…ordinarily experience bonding…if [their children] … have been adopted early in their lives.” And with that seven-word caveat, Dave and I presumably were pushed outside the realm of the word “bonding”.  

But Yasik looked me directly in the eyes and smiled.  Connection of some sort was made and emotions were exploding like a fireworks display within.

Entry #8   Court Proceedings

Of course, fireworks were exploding, just not in celebration of a birthing bathed in mothering hormones.  It was becoming a family by adoption, exploding with happiness hormones.   I end Entry #7 suggesting that while writers I have read may use the words ‘bonding’ and ‘attachment’ somewhat interchangeably, I may as well stick with the one that sounds like a boat anchor rather than fireworks and happiness. Clunky or not, ‘attachment’ is the broad term that covers becoming a family whether via a birthing or by adoption. And both modes of becoming family can be celebrations. Bits of twigs, moss, plant fluff, lichen and spider silk caught and carried by a little hummingbird to build a nest must be a joy to find.  Children no longer in the care of biological parents may be a joy to find for adoptors’nest building.

Attachment as a concept is most often associated with John Bowlby.  His findings focus on a “child’s tendency ‘to seek proximity to and contact with a specific figure’ when afraid, sick, or tired….” an inborn desire to seek closeness to protective adults.  That takes care of what the child sees attachment to be.  And adults? What does the term mean for them?   More broadly speaking, attachment may be defined as ‘lasting psychological connectedness between human beings’” (Fostering Changes: myth, meaning and magic bullets in attachment theory 5).  Understanding Attachment: parenting, child care, and emotional development by Jean Mercer settles on defining attachment as “emotional ties” and “beliefs and ways of thinking about relationships” to form an “internal working model of emotion and social relationships” (2,3).

We had signed a file full of documents and in less than 24 hours would stand before a judge and upon the drop of her gavel, we would be a family.  Yasik had been told after we left that first afternoon that he now had a mama and papa.  What meaning did he attach to those words?

That evening he gave away the toys we brought for him. In celebration or because he had been nurtured in the orphanage setting to share? Had Yasik already been learning empathic social relationships in a place not usually known to encourage healthy social relationships?  Was the orphanage actually a caring, vibrant social network, a good environment for the nurturing of empathy (The Boy Who Was Raised As A Dog 268)?

After that sweet little smile through the banister, we returned to the hotel to have supper with Alexi, the driver, Tanya the facilitator and the translator, Elvira, realizing that while they were shy about speaking English and therefore appeared to ignore us, they were actually very kind, thoughtful and helpful. Putting all the parts of completing an adoption: the paperwork, arranging our flights, housing and Moscow interpreters, as well as organizing the court appearance, made us realize what a large operation one adoption is.

At the meal Elvira gave us a heads up that Dave would be expected to give a little speech about how we felt about this opportunity to adopt Yasik and to request that our paper work be expedited.   We also learned we would likely be in Moscow longer than we had initially understood to complete Yasik’s paper work. More time to play tourist and shed dollars.  The three sharing this meal with us also noted that Yasik looked a fair bit like Dave and shared his interests in vehicles, music and art. Nice.  I was later assured Yasik had eyes the same colour as mine.  It is worth wondering about: this interest we have in family looking like us or fitting the proverbial ‘like father, like son’. I have wondered about the need to find resemblance to family as a kind of reassurance of our personal identity.  Yet it took only a picture emailed to us of Yasik’s biological siblings to determine they were indeed his siblings.  For those who do not share similarities with their adoptive families this is often a primary issue in their search for personal identity. “As Swedish as Anybody Else’ or ‘Swedish, but Also Something Else’?”  speaks to this issue for the non-white adoptee, nicely encapsulated in the title alone (https://doi.org/10.1177/030857591203600309).

After a stroll alongside the Volga, we went to bed.  Well, actually after Dave prepared what he understood he was expected to say in court.  That done, we flopped onto our separate single beds, maybe a bit high and free to daydream. Yasik was almost ours and he was more than we had hoped for.  The journal also notes that we each took a Sudafed tablet.  Did the Sudafed stimulate that daydreamy feeling?  Or was this a peek at what the early days of attachment/honeymoon period feels like?  A kind of falling in love.

Adoption day was a beautiful early fall day, August 19, 1997.  We were driven directly to the court for the region of Yaroslavl.  The marble steps up to the court were worn to uneven dips.  A very old building. Dave was still muttering the phrases he needed to say; Elvira, the translator, was building up to a nervousness I wondered at but did not understand.  This may have been a building that spoke power to Elvira but it lacked the power to gain a fearful respect from naïve tourists.  We would more likely have picked up Elvira’s vibe had it been a Canadian court.  A traffic jam had delayed proceedings, the prosecutor looked bored, most in the room were women. When the judge was heralded and appeared, she was hardly more substantial than the wizard of Oz behind the curtain. Still… she managed to feed Elvira’s fears and spook Dave and I somewhat when Elvira relayed to us that the she had been admonished to tell the truth or be prosecuted.

Dave was called first.  He was asked how long we had been married, what our jobs were, after which he recited his memorized speech to request an early dispatch of paperwork.  The judge smiled at his earnest tension.  I stood next to give my name and affirm I was a Canadian.  I sat back down and Dave was asked to rise again.  “If you both work,” the judge asked, “how do you plan to care for Yasik?”  Dave told her we had a plan to reorganize his classes and that between our schedules, Yasik would never be left alone.  And other than one afternoon when we left him at the after-school care which did not please him, he was always with one or the other of us, or with extended family or friends.  Although I am sure the question is part of the suggested adoption interview questions, there is a bit of irony in this young judge’s question.  It was being asked by someone whose cultural attitude to adoption leans toward dropping off children at an orphanage while parents deal with other life stresses, a trend particularly encouraged in the Soviet period.

Dave sat down and I was asked to pop up again. The judge asked what we thought of Yasik. I choked and only managed to respond with “Wonderful”. Elvira misted over and Dave caught a smile on the judge’s face. There may be vitriol at the highest political levels over adoptions but person to person, however much suspicion has been whispered in our ears, we found Russian people are as human as any Canadian — a little ‘duh’ here. Too often, unquestioningly we do drink the Kool-Aid because somewhere in our psyche we have the impression that Russians are not too be trusted nor respected as we might our own good people, something to be further tested by current political tensions.

The judge turned from us, giving the floor to the prosecution and defense who each offered their conclusion that all appeared in order to them. Writing this now I wonder who procured the defense. I remember no discussion about the need for a lawyer, again a nod to the detail involved in a single adoption. The judge rose just as he or she would do in a Canadian court, telling all that she would consider and left for a few minutes. My journal says that Tanya was passing out chocolates and flowers while we waited on the judge’s deliberations. The judge returned and declared that we were Yasik’s parents. The first seal on our adoption. Tanya and Elvira hugged and kissed us, wishing us “Good Luck”.

There were still details, details, details.  One detail that was given absolutely no thought by either Dave or I in our naïve happiness concerned the question of the legal status of parental rights belonging to Yasik’s bio parents.  No one denied that Yasik’s bio parents were still among the living.   Yasik was in the orphanage under the designation ‘social orphan’, someone who has at least one living bio parent.  Had his bio parents actually given up their rights as I wonder in Entry #3?

We were told, at the time, that Yasik’s mom didn’t come back to the hospital after a visit or two so the government took over guardianship.  For many years I tried to assure Yasik that her visits suggested she did care for him and placed him in government care because it was best for him, a narrative that works for adoptors.  In his teens, Yasik he let me know he didn’t buy that story.  Only two years ago did we learn that Yasik’s bio mother, Gurina, went to the hospital to try to get social services money for Yasik which she was denied so she quit on him.  We adopted Yasik in August 1997.  Our legal standing in adoption was based solely on the Family Code of the Russian Federation, signed by Boris Yelstsin in 1995.  All that applied to Yasik was one line, the final point in Article 130 of the Family Code, “for reason recognized by a court as not live with the child and shirk duties involved in his/her upbringing and maintenance, for over six months”.

At least this verifies that the adoption was legal, small comfort, but that is as good as the surrender of parental rights were in his case.  Yasik, that young judge proclaimed, was our son from now on.

As I mentioned above, we found out two years ago why Gurina actually came to visit Yasik at the hospital to seek money designated for his care. She stopped coming to visit her youngest son when she was denied this money. A year after we adopted Yasik, the Gurins made an attempt to gain access to money for her children’s care through the court.  Following is a summary of a copy of the actual court documents of this couple’s complaint before the court, given to the adoptive parents of Yasik’s sister at her adoption:

March 11, 1998 re: the case brought by Gurina L V (age 28) and Gurin NG (age 36) for depriving them of parental rights and exacting alimony for the children’s maintenance.

The court findings:

Gurina is a single mother of the two older children.  She married and has two children with Gurin.  At the time of this court hearing the girl born in 1991 was still living with the Gurins.  The other three had been placed in care. The report says, “The son Yaroslav was adopted without his parents consent due to Article 130 of the Family Code of the Russian Federation.”  The response to the Gurins’ complaint was to detail “the parent’s neglect their children, do not care for their lives, do not support them”.   Yasik had been taken to the town hospital “due to social reasons”.  The Gurins “have deprived themselves of the parental rights”.   “The son Gurin Yaroslav was adopted without the parents consent as they [Gurins] refused to take him home from the hospital”. Yet Gurina continued to ask for financial support after which she said she would care for her children.  Their argument was lack of money though a court investigation found that the Gurins worked at a factory which paid them in food and china to sell for money. To sell the china they needed to travel past the care homes three of their children were in.  Not once did they stop to check in on their children.

A sister of Gurina’s testified to the Gurins lack of care for their children.  Because the couple could give “no good reason’ for their lack of care the court hearing recommended that the parents be deprived of their parental rights and be ordered to hand over a portion of their wages to the children’s care until the children came of age…. According to articles 69, 81, 84 of the Family Code of Russia, articles 191 – 197 HAS DECIDED: satisfy the claim by the Education and Youth Affairs Department. Deprive Gurina LV of the parental rights to [both her and their] minor children…. the children should be placed under the care of Guardianship and Care body”.  The Gurins were given the option to appeal in 10 days.

In the short time that Yasik was in the care of his parents, that he was found alone in bed un-cared for, suggests he had to the point that social services got involved, experienced little of what Julie Holland, MD, brings forward as the way to building resilience in a child: being engaged in loving response to the child’s physical and emotional needs and desires. Without loving interaction with a caregiver, a child turns to unguided self-soothing that may become the child’s way even into adulthood (Good Chemistry: the science of connection from soul to psychedelics, Harper Collins Publishers, 2020, 122-124).

Recently Dave and Yasik, now an adult, were talking about his adoption. He understands that at the time he was four years old and in government care. He knows his bio-parents had left him in care, yet he said, “I wish I’d had a chance to have a say in the adoption.” I don’t yet know what input he might have wanted in the proceedings, but I sensed his lack of control over his own life. Yes, in a real sense that is the nature of becoming part of any family, but there is a difference between being born into a family and having adults in a court proceeding making the choice for the child. The book, Adoption Unfiltered: revelations from adoptees, birth parents, adoptive parents, and allies by Sara Easterly, Kelsey Vander Vliet Ranyard, Lori Holden (60,61) speaks to this: “It can be alarming knowing that we have little to no control over our lives. After all, from the moment of relinquishment, others have been “playing God”, making decisions over which family we’re placed in, and determining our futures in ways that differ from those who aren’t adopted”.

The book, I Love Russia: reporting from a lost country (2) by Elena Kostyuchenko speaks to why the Gurins may have been working at a factory which paid them in food and china to sell for money.

In the 1990s, during the era of privatization and economic reforms, enterprises stopped paying employees their salaries, systematically, on a massive scale. In 1996, 49.3 percent of workers in Central Russia weren’t paid – elsewhere, this number went up to 69 percent. At the same time, there was catastrophic inflation. Just in 1992, prices increased by a factor of twenty-six.   Yasik was born in 1992 and entered the orphanage about two years later.

Adoption Unfiltered: revelations from adoptees, birth parents, adoptive parents, and allies (40) also reminds adoptors that when the world at large slaps us adoptors on the back, telling us how amazing we are for adopting a little waif, we need remember that resume building for sainthood is also a rap sheet for the sins of the first parents, as “flawed and unworthy“.  The child becomes a “lucky-adoptee” and the parents with whom the child will always carry some connection, are endlessly brought to mind with a whiff of lessness. “This causes a split in the [adoptees] hearts and minds that’s very painful.”

We must, therefore, temper judgement of Gurina’s asking for financial support to care for Yasik as a condition for taking him home; she may have been in the same difficulty many Russians were in at the time, a mother overwhelmed.  Everywhere in the world there are stories of mothers relinquishing their children when they cannot support them.  In Russia, however, putting a child in care during a time of difficulty is not regarded with quite the degree of negativity that it carries in many other cultures.

As we exited the court house after our hearing, a radio interviewer waiting outside approached us to ask, via Elvira, what we thought of our experience, what we planned to do and why had we chosen to adopt in Russia. She asked us if Yasik would know about Russia.  Since reading about how to help a transnational adoption go more smoothly for the child and about the Magnitsky Law and the Canadian counterpart, Justice for Victims of Corrupt Foreign Officials Act, the question about retaining ties to Russia carries more weight.   At the time we probably responded with only vague assurances and little understanding of our new child’s need for support as he began to discard one concept of himself, his language and culture, to build a new one.

We drove with our team or should I say darted about ‘as the crow flies’ on dirt back roads to stand by as Tanya saw to the signing out of Yasik’s life in Russia: the passport office, adoption center, and …? Sometimes we were asked for our signature, more often Dave’s, because it was written on everything that ‘the boy is traveling with his father’.  Between stops and while waiting for business to be completed, we talked with Elvira; her English was very strong. We compared teaching experiences, the biggest difference being that she was not merely the teacher but also her classroom’s maintenance person.  She fixed her own roof. At noon we returned to the hotel for lunch.  We talked Perestroika and President Yeltsin’s attempted coup, the dissolution of the USSR, the gulag and the New Russia.  No, we didn’t really talk these things for Dave and I could only listen and become increasingly aware of how little we knew of the world our son had been part of for almost 5 years, five potent years as far as his own development was concerned.  How Russian was/is he? And how deeply will all these components that make him Yasik impact all that he is and will be throughout his life?

There were more destinations after lunch for even more signatures and paper wrap–ups. Sort of wish I now knew what all these stops were for.  Finally, around 6 pm Alexis and Tanya were done and returned for us.  We were about to step from bystanders to parents. OK, let’s see how we do.

The orphanage was down a back drive off an alley, fenced in and fronted by unkempt flower beds.  Inside though everything was tidy and warm, if institutional. We were not invited to view any rooms.  We do not know where Yasik slept.  Did he share a bed? Was he in an army barracks-like room of cots? This would have been helpful as we had a bedroom waiting at home just for him.  It is notable to me that when Julia inspected our home before giving the OK for us to proceed with adoption, the one concern she had was if the bedroom we had prepared for Yasik was big enough.  It was the master bedroom in our 1950s era suburban home.  The document we presented as an application to adopt Yasik started with his full Russian name and birth date, and then records both Dave and my full names, and affirms that our birth dates have not changed.  We promised to provide semi-annual reports on Yasik for a three-year period. Then we declared that we own a three bedroom home and promised “Our child will be living in Love and Care.  His room will be: 5 meters x 4 meters”.  The dimensions are underlined.  This we declared before the City of Vancouver and had witnessed by a notary.  It seemed, at the time, an over-the-top expectation.  How would Yasik handle waking in the night completely alone in a very big room?  It wasn’t long after we returned home that he would wake in the night to crawl into our bed.

Again, Yasik was brought into the doctor’s office, this time carrying what little remained of the gifts we had given him at our first meeting the day before.  The rather expensive drawing book Dave had given him was now filled with scribbles, the crayon set bedraggled.  Dave wanting the best for his son and this new little son happily accepting.  We dressed Yasik in the new clothes we had brought for him.  I think they mostly fit.  He liked the shoes we purchased the day before.  We still have them in a memory basket, very proper, sensible little things. I might put the word NOTHING in caps to stress that Yasik took not one personal item from his first five years of life with him as he left to become a little Canadian in the Vincent family.  John Brooks in his memoir of his and his wife’s adoption memoir, The Girl Behind the Door, wonders if it might not have been a comfort to their newly adopted baby had they thought to ask for some item the baby had to comfort herself.   Yasik was shy and quiet during this initiation.  And then came the good-byes. The doctor kissed and hugged us.  I would love to have the opportunity to talk with her now.

A pretty young nurse had tears in her eyes.  Had she been a staff member who had a special relationship with Yasik? Bruce Perry in The Boy Who Was Raised As A Dog, along with other more recent writers, points to research that acknowledges a childhood in the care of more than one caregiver does not have to be disastrous to a child’s emotional development but does assert that the number of caregivers needs to be small, and above all, consistent.  From the time Yasik was taken to the hospital at around the age of one, how many caregivers did he encounter with shift changes in the hospital? Would there have been the remotest validity in asking whether or not the option for ‘baby-led or demand breast or bottle feeding’ had been part of the care-giving he had experienced, among other considerations that contrast nurturing a baby in an institution to a family home?  How many were part of his daily experience for the approximately two years he lived in the orphanage? What was the impact of the severing of these relationships?

Yasik had two big, crystal-clear tears holding on the edge of his eyes but he was smiling all the same. Dave and I came into the adoption with months of preparation. Yasik was expected to un-attach from all he knew as family and willingly embrace a whole new attachment within a 24-hour span.  Lost & Found (41) asks about the impact no opportunity to mourn the lost life has on the adoptee. In fact, you the reader cannot help but note that everything written thus far is about Yasik joining our dream, nothing about this process from his perspective, leaving behind a biological family with a mama and papa, a brother and two sisters, and then those he engaged with in the hospital and those he had human bonds with in the orphanage.

About five children, one being the little Down’s Syndrome girl Yasik had big brothered, were on the front porch to see him off, calling “Das Vadanya”.  Wasn’t it the protagonist in Cider House Rules who watched child after child leave the orphanage, each time wondering why not him this time?  Did any of these children left behind wonder if they too had a waiting mama or papa coming for them?

We climbed into the back of our get-away van.  Alexi had sad music playing on the car radio. Just a little over 24 hours from a couple to a family.

Yet, as good ole’ Arnie says, “We’ll be baaaack…” for as adopting older children (140) reminds adoptors in the centre of the book, “adoption is a process and not an event”.  Stating the obvious of course but a centering reminder all the same.

Entry# 9   Parenting as Tourists

At first Yasik sat quietly in Dave’s arms. Dave bent to my ear to encourage me not to be shy while he and Yasik played это и то — This and That.  Must have seemed odd to the two in front that I was holding back. The staff at the orphanage told us not to feed him for he would vomit and I am not sure I had even thought yet about bringing food along to feed Yasik: here too, it was Alexi and Tatiana who gave him 3 bananas and a candy. Tatiana later played a hand slapping game with him and he warmed, losing his shyness, and surprising us by laughing out loud, talking and teasing; in a bit, we were too.  Soon he lost enough shyness to playfully hit me; quickly we moved to overly rambunctious.  .Added to that, at one point on the trip, Alexi stopped for a cigarette break and Yasik needed to pee.  With Dave’s help.  Pants pulled up, we climbed back into the van and Yasik yelled to the driver to get going again.  The driver shrugged, laughed and returned to the van and off we went again. Dave worried that in mere hours we were undoing all the orphanage niceness and order. Yasik never settled to sleep and we were learning more Russian than we planned – don’t get excited, we are talking more than 2 or 3 words.

The drive back to Moscow, as return trips often seem to do, passed much more quickly, pulling out all the sweet memory stops: a beautiful prairie sunset and a harvest moon. We got back to the apartment and Yasik ate only an apple and had some water, all the while talking and poking around, exploring the little apartment.  We showered him, got him pee-ed and into bed in a room adjacent to ours after covering the bed sheet with a ripped-open plastic bag. Parenting instinctively perhaps was kicking in. We read to him but that was pointless for every few minutes Dave was flipping through the dictionary for words we couldn’t figure out how to pronounce right anyway.  Yasik just looked at us.  The barrier was bigger than we thought I wrote in the journal.

I gave him a flashlight with low batteries.  It began to waver so Dave put a new battery in and Yasik was off and playing shadow animals and faces and NOT slowing down.  He said something to Dave and Dave said, “Nyet”.  We left. Moments later we thought we heard him cry and both leapt up.  He had us on a marionette string. I went through the living room and into his room to turn the flashlight off and only succeeded in showing him how to turn it on, which he did, and I started laughing and left.   Later we turned it off and I stayed and held his hand. When I checked on him in the middle of the night, he appeared to sleep well.  6:30 am and Dave couldn’t wait so brought him in with us.

Dave’s expression of waking to our first day with our son:

And I knew that we were not alone

when I put my arms around your waist

My heart, I felt would burst

As we kissed

In that cold room in Moscow

I felt we were more than two

And as the tears fall now

Running down my face

I hear his voice

and I can feel your

Body so close to mine

In that cold room in Moscow

And I love you.

We had breakfast only after he got his shoes on, with his PJs.  Was he, as John Brooks suggests in The Girl Behind the Door, our new pet (182)?  Maybe.  There must be some of that for every parent, biological or adoptive, in the honeymoon period, is there not?  So why not enjoy the happy surprises that come with this new venture?  I say that because those days were a honeymoon for us, but I also recognize that Brooks is making the point that in doing so we may have been detrimentally oblivious to other, less obvious needs our child had. Brooks goes on to say that later on their first night with their baby, they wanted to sleep so parked the infant in front of a TV which likely was not her orphanage night time routine.  They might have more deeply met their child’s needs by simply holding her until she fell asleep (183).

It also strikes me here how much I mention him talking when later we will deal with questions of the use of language for communication.

Larissa, the landlady, was inundating us with food.  When we couldn’t eat it all (the bread was amazing) I threw it down the toilet, the only way no one would know we didn’t eat it because the garbage would be gone through.  Not wanting to offend can lead to questionable actions. She did see some food in the garbage one day and left a note asking us to let her know if it was too much.  Turns out the simple solution for our culture would have also worked in her culture.  So, we did tell her and that was the end of the wonderful bread.

We spent the days waiting for the adoption process to be completed mostly playing tourist.  On the Metro, people gave up their seats to me and even to Dave when he was holding Yasik.  One woman gave Yasik a 2-inch-long chocolate and he popped the whole thing in his mouth.  She thought that was fine and went on to tell us that she had 7 children. We visited both of the largest art galleries – the Tretyakov and the Pushkin- and were quite simply blown away.  The Pushkin had 5 soul-satisfying Van Goghs.  All of this demanded over 4 hours of walking with a 4-and-a-half-year-old boy who had known us only a day or two.  The paintings didn’t do much for him but the big pieces of sculpture caught his attention, and being 4 1/2, he managed to put us in apology mode with security more than once.  Next stop: MacDonald’s where probably for the first (and last) time, Yasik was more interested in feeding the chips to the pigeons than tasting the wonders of a kid’s pack himself.  And this will sound obviously naive, but Yasik took us by surprise with his speed at darting away from us to chase a pigeon and try, like Dave, to get them to feed out of his hand.  We quickly began to tighten our grip on his tiny hand.  True to tourist protocol, we ended this fairly long day with Red Square pictures.  When we returned to the apartment Yasik conked out and slept about 12 hours though to this point the only solid meal he had was at breakfast.

We were picked up early the following day by the driver, Alexis, Tatiana, the facilitator and a new translator, Anna.  Anna was young, well-educated and full of hope for the future of Russia.  She had moved from Yaroslavl for the prospects Moscow offered, what they referred to at the time as the ‘new Russians’. She was a sharp contrast to the translator who helped us in Yaroslavl, someone with the same education, yet who wanted to emigrate, seeing little hope for a better future in Russia.

We were taken to the Canadian embassy for Yasik’s visa.  Here because of whatever contacts or methods Tatiana had at her disposal, she and Dave moved directly to the front of the line in a crowded office.  It reminded me of other times I have experienced preferential treatment as a foreigner.  Yet, tidily enough it yielded another stamp of certainty that Yasik was now our son.

About two days in we could already see or were groomed by our own upbringings to see that Yasik had led us or we had led Yasik to assign us roles.  Very quickly Yasik took ‘Nyet’ well from Dave and played with him; he cuddled up to me.  I wrote in the journal two days into our family experience, “So I’ll nurture, Dave will lead – whether we want to argue roles or not or try to bend the roles or whatever – they are still there; by instinct he or we have placed us so his life is complete and secure”.  Yes, it is not a Duggar family message of a wife with Nancy Reagan’s smile pasted on her face and obedient, modestly dressed children under the stern but wise and responsible husband’s umbrella, but for traditional or psychological makeup, cultural, societal, whatever, it is what it is.

Bouncing, giggling, chattering in Russian and making sure he had those shoes on, Yasik started each of these days.  One of those last days in Moscow, in the midst of these happy little family moments, Larissa came over for the rent, bearing gifts of food and a book of Pushkin for Yasik.  While we settled the payment, she talked with Yasik in Russian. Yasik, who moments before had been giggling, broke into fairly hysterical sobs. We were shocked for a moment and then I picked him up and took him into the bedroom.  He continued to cry for quite a while, hanging on to me.  He quieted and said, “Poppa”, so I took him to where Dave was giving the rent money to the landlady.  She talked to him again, and again he started to cry.  Dave took him and I ushered the landlady out.  Had she suggested to him that as an adoptee he was a lucky little fellow who better not screw up for then he would be sent back to the orphanage, losing his mama and poppa?

When I joined Dave and Yasik in the bedroom again, Yasik began to quiet, though we too were by now emotionally swamped.  To divert him, we walked to a nearby park.  Yasik didn’t try the swings but then I don’t remember seeing a playground at the orphanage so perhaps he was not about to attempt the unfamiliar.  Instead, he chased the birds and when some Russian kids approached, he and Dave played ball with them and flew the paper airplanes we had brought.  We left the planes with the kids and they responded with a polite thank you.  When Yasik piped up with ‘Ka Kas’ we took off for the apartment.  The landlady stopped by once more with an art book and candies and this time Yasik warmed to her but we never received an explanation for the outburst.  We were only left with an awareness that for Yasik this was a much more emotional time than we had comprehended.

Yasik also managed to give us a further scare one afternoon by hanging over the little balcony before we caught him.  That night my body tightened with the memory of a time a child in my care was almost blown off the roof of an old church in the Philippines.   Dave, too, already asleep, began to twitch and heave short, panicky breathing.  He’d had a night mare of falling while trying to catch Yasik who was about to fall.  We were rushing head long into parental fears.

One or two more days playing tourist, and though we didn’t realize at the time, enjoying the larger portion of our maternal/parental leave, we were coming to know our son as bouncy and curious about everything that had a switch or button or handle.  Turning on light switches remained a fascination for several days.  An article in Harper’s Magazine, October 2013, titled “Cold War Kids” is about the ranch in Montana for adoptees who have difficulty adjusting in their adoptive families.  The article points to the need for accountability and self-reliance that comes with doing chores. As the ranch owner, Joyce Sterkel, sees it, “‘ These kids have not had a good upbringing, …. They’ve never really seen people work.“‘  I am not sure how she came to this conclusion but it is likely institutions run more smoothly for staff if kids are kept out of the chore loop.

As we packed to return to Canada, we were surprised to find a couple of Yasik’s new toys missing, none which had been taken out of the apartment.  We found the toys stuffed behind the old piano in the living room.  This was our introduction to what I have since read over and over again as a side effect of orphanage living, the habit of hoarding or simply claiming something and knowing the only way to hold on to it would be to hide it from the other kids. Here’s an odd bit on the problem with ‘hoarding’: a Scottish contestant on America’s Got Talent (June 2, 2015) gave a performance as a ‘regurgitation artist’.  He had learned to swallow things to hide them from other kids at the orphanage. Apparently it has led him to a “busy touring schedule” Wikipedia says. Yet, I wonder if there are any set of siblings who don’t try some level of hoarding with toys not clearly designated.

And then it was time to take one last trip through Moscow in the middle of the night, arriving at the airport when a full moon was filling the waiting room.  The airplane offered even more technical curiosities for Yasik.  We caught the wonder of earphones in the picture included here.

While waiting for our next leg of the trip in Frankfurt, we met an American couple who had just adopted two kids and a woman who came across as a self–appointed authority on orphanages.  She was part of a church mission to help orphanages by setting up children’s camps.  At that time Russia was quite open to foreign help, religious or otherwise. One last leg of the flight and we were back home in Canada. Well, two of the members of this new nuclear family were returning home.  The third member was only about to be introduced to a new home.

So let me jump off that word ‘introduce’ and take a moment to do just that. I have shared fairly liberally what we knew/came to know over time of Yasik’s background. I will round out what has been shared with some of the physical data of the child Dave carried off the airplane: Yasik was 35 inches tall and weighed 35 pounds, roughly the weight of our one-year-old niece and shorter than our three-year-old nephew.  He had convergent strabismus in his left eye.  He had soft, very light blond hair, a perfect nose and a tad over blown ears.  His eyes remain hazel brown even though his passport has them marked down as green.  Like I said, he was beautiful.

And the other two in this family?  As I have exposed Yasik, it is only democratic to provide a basic sketch of Dave and me.  Dave first.

Dave was 40, five foot 11 inches, not overweight but not skinny either as he had given up smoking the year before.  Our adoption home study says he has “blue eyes and glasses, balding short reddish blond hair”.  He was born in Calgary, Alberta to a couple whose marriage barely made it past his birth, their second child together.  At the time of the home study, we understood his mother’s heritage was Metis and his father was of Scottish heritage.  He remained with his mother who moved on to various uncles, two more marriages and 3 more children, half siblings to Dave and his brother.  His relationship with his biological father was not much more than a single letter.  The first step-father was simply criminally abusive.  The second step-father, who legally adopted Dave and his siblings, was anyone’s definition of a dedicated, working-class father, although it is possible to say that a man Dave met later in life offered the kind of mentoring that qualified as the most impactful fathering of all.  His mother, coming into a loaded adulthood poorly prepared, was, at times, supportive and, at times, unable or unwilling to be the mother she needed to be. In his late teens he sustained a serious car accident which left him with visible facial scars and two years of intensive rehabilitation mentally, emotionally and physically, but as he healed, he was imbued with a strong desire to get back into life. He went on to train in welding and motorcycle technology even while still paying for the impact of his childhood and accident by going into a marriage ill-prepared and rather quickly abandoned.  He also had many years training and working with challenged people which is where we met.

For a year or so we were little more than passing acquaintances. One fine morning I mentioned I was soon leaving the group home where I worked.  He came back with an offer of a ‘farewell’ coffee on a Friday evening; we went for a drive that led to some house hunting, marriage, and moving into a house together a little over 3 months later.  And whew …., this mad dash worked for us.  A year after we married, Dave was accepted into Emily Carr University of Art and Design (ECUAD); he was going to school full time, working a weekend shift with a challenged client and practicing his interests in art and motorcycles in his spare time at home.

He was about to start the second year of study and part-time employment when we flew off to Russia.

And me?  The other day I wrote some preliminary notes and went off on a rampage about the religious world I was born into.  I will spare the reader.  In August 1997 I was 47, 5 foot, 6 inches tall and respectable weight-wise.  Our adoption study says I had, “long brown hair with bangs, green eyes”.  I was born in Chilliwack, BC, to a couple who remained married their entire lives but were not well-equipped to maintain a healthy marriage.  Both my parents had a few generations to deepen their Canadian roots but as was common in the 50s held on to their origins: mother’s family were British and Scottish; Dad’s family were German and Polish.  Guess which one in post-war Canada was a source of pride and which one was best whispered?  Both came from families somewhere between fundamentalist and evangelical Protestantism.  Whenever an issue arose that needed a Biblical response, the tilt was toward the fundamentalist explanation of God’s truth.   Was bowling a sin? Most definitely, until, of course, someone thought it was possible to skirt around the sinful dangers.  But we were a family and each of us, myself, my brother and two sisters, knew that our parents loved us and wanted us to be happy.  Maybe they were too unsophisticated to be able to guide us into what would have ensured solid doors would be held open to a conventionally successful future, but they would have resisted little of our inclinations, other than what was ‘evidently’ evil.  Mini skirts made Dad squirm; drugs freaked him out.  I use the plural for this part of my life because we siblings were each a year apart.  We all finished high school more or less and moved on to likely Canada’s largest fundamentalist Bible School.  We each graduated and went into missionary service.  I was in Northern Canada with my youngest sister and then we two joined my brother and other sister in the Philippines.  I only then began to shake free of the compliant, insecure, hunch-shouldered stand-to-the-side-rather-than-engage manner I have already mentioned in relationship to becoming Yasik’s mother.  Even if I worried that God was holding a flaming lightening bolt over me, I had had enough.  I returned to Canada and enrolled in SFU along with my brother and one sister.  We each found jobs caring for the challenged and settled into completing our studies until two years before Dave and I married.  In those two years, although I continued working in a group home, I also began teaching in adult education in Vancouver.  I lucked out, finding a career I had only dreamed of in the days when I was certain God would not hear of me leaving what He considered the highest calling.

I was about to return to a full-time position as a high school English teacher when we flew off to Russia.

Ahhh ….. and a Canadian government site for prospective adopters offered a summary of the average adoptors: over 30, generally financially stable and with no parenting experience.  Sounds like we were pretty normal and ready to go.

But maybe the African proverb “Tell me who you love and I’ll tell you who you are” is enough info.

Entry #10   Emigre to Immigrant

Taking Yasik through immigration, Dave was asked, “Is your wife landed?”  Dave assured him, “Yes, yes, she is just over there, waiting by the luggage”.  The customs officer tried again, “No, is she landed?” And Dave proudly repeated, “Yes, we both went to get our son and she is waiting by the window.”  Did the officer’s training finally kick in?  He clarified, “No. Is she a citizen?”

And we were back in Canada.  My parents, brother and his family, sister and her husband were there to pick us up and hustle our son into his new family, taking pictures, hugging and talking.  We felt so full at this moment, with love, family, satisfying occupations and interests, sufficient money coming in to keep the roof over our head and the bills paid.  We drove home to find my sister, Barb, had streamers, balloons, welcome signs, new toys, clothes, a car seat, and a big meal ready ……  Book after expert advice book on adoption cautions against overstimulating a new adoptee with people, parties and presents, just so you know.

After eating we gave the wrapped toys to Yasik to open.  He picked up a gift but the wrapping stumped him.  Goggle told me only recently that generally Russian gift giving etiquette says that cheaper gifts are not expected to be wrapped in paper, only expensive ones. It is safe to say that any gift he may have received up to that point came unwrapped.

For most of my twenties and thirties I lived in other cultures.  At work I often talked with our foreign-born students about their experiences and the impact of culture shock on their hearts, minds and bodies.  Nor was I personally a stranger to culture shock.  Yet it did not occur to me or any of the other adults in the room, half of whom had dealt with as much culture shock as I, that Yasik, now in Canada for roughly three hours might be dealing with this phenomenon as well. It was merely cute that he needed his 3-year-old cousin, Kyle, to show him what to do with gift wrapping. Were Dave and I given any heads up about an international adoptee’s perspective on a new culture?  Not likely as our adoption prep seminars focused on adopting locally.  And remember, we had little time to prepare for an international adoption.  Does that hold up as an excuse?  Adoptors today appear to have much more information to prepare them.    Try a quick Google search for sites dealing with international adoptees and culture shock. You will find advice giving adoption sites and journals providing research of the issue.

Happily in this case, a little culture shock didn’t slow Yasik. He studiously set about practicing the gift unwrapping lesson Kyle offered. Any diffidence at being the center of attention in an unfamiliar social setting disappeared. The little gift-wrapping hiccup turned out so positively for him, he moved on to giving his new Aunt Rena Russian language lessons, laughing at her pronunciation.  Some of our family’s first observations were that the orphanage must have taught him manners for he was polite.

After the meal as everyone prepared to leave, Dave scooped Yasik up, thinking he might have fun helping Dave move our vehicle out of the way.  Yasik burst into tears.  Given the lack of sleep and jet lag it shouldn’t have been a surprise but I noted the outburst in the journal because the tears stopped as soon as Dave returned from the driveway.  This was one party he did not want to leave. Or could we dare to imagine it was an attachment hook we could put hopes on?

My mom and dad gave Yasik a teddy bear almost as big as him.  Dave found him at 4:30 a.m. the next morning hugging and talking away to it.  Studies in Attachment began early in the twentieth century.  Dr. Rene Spitz a psychoanalyst studying hospitalized infants

[observed that] these babies [abandoned infants who received little individual attention in group care] developed odd reactions to strangers, .… the usual behaviour was replaced by something that could vary from extreme friendliness to any human partner combined with anxious avoidance of inanimate objects to a generalized anxiety expressed in blood-curdling screams which could go on indefinitely” ¹.

But he liked his teddy….

Having only a few days left of ‘parental leave’, we slipped quickly into what most families in our neighbourhood seemed to do; we took him to the playground.  Other than a bit of experimenting with a play water pump on the periphery, he simply stood to the side holding our hands, watching other kids playing.  Getting him to actively engage took commandeering Kyle and climbing ourselves up the no-thrills slide the length of our own bodies.

A visit to the doctor was next.  The Hague Convention requires countries, of which Russia is one, to provide a translated medical report but adoption handbooks warn that this could be incomplete or possibly even inaccurate ².   Our pre-adoption medical report listed convergent strabismus (fixable), adenoids enlarged, dermatitis, speech delay (normal), short for age.  Our doctor agreed that other than being small for his age, a common side effect of orphanage life, he was quite healthy.  It was the doctor’s opinion that he may have built up a strong immunity by more exposure to bacteria and whatever else did not have to battle Purell.  And that seemed a good conclusion for he was never sick with any of the childhood plagues others battled with each year.  His motor skills were in line with his age as were his eating and sleeping habits. The one concern that is also fairly common but would involve specific correction, was convergent strabismus.  Initially it seemed surgery would be involved but glasses became enough.

Odd, isn’t it?  Impervious to bacteria yet not getting enough nourishment to meet standard growth charts.  And it isn’t merely a matter of a lack of veggies and salmon as the experiment conducted by the German king, Frederick II, demonstrated in the 13^th century when his curiosity about the development of language led to his forbidding care-givers in an orphanage to speak to or hold the infants in their care.  The babies all died. ‘Toughened Attachment’.

Born for Love gives Chapter Three to an examination of the repercussions of early life in an orphanage.  The focus in this chapter is a girl adopted from a Russian orphanage but some of the research behind her story is taken from studies of Romanian children who spent their early years in orphanages during the time and under the experiments of President Nicolae and Deputy Prime Minister Elena Ceausescu. One of the charges for which they were ‘summarily executed’ as the saying goes, was the claim of their ‘research’ “that children will develop just fine without individualized attention and affection” (53).

The 25-year study at SFU on the Romanian orphans provided a paper which says this under a heading titled Physical Growth:

While the malnutrition of institutionalized children contributes to their growth deficiency, another contributing factor may be the poor quality of interaction and stimulation offered by the low caretaker-to-child ratio in these institutions.  This type of growth deficit, known as psycho-social dwarfism, can be very serious.  However, upon removal from stressful or neglectful conditions, children suffering from psycho-social dwarfism tend to make tremendous gains in both height and weight…. Nevertheless, at three years postadoption, length of institutionalization was correlated with physical size, and of those children who had spent eight months or more in an orphanage, 31% remained below the 10^th percentile in height…. ³.

I found current definition and study on psycho-social dwarfism, now called psycho-social short stature, at Front. Endocrinol., 07 October 2020 Sec. Pediatric Endocrinology https://doi.org/10.3389/fendo.2020.5961443.

The article above is no longer coming up but googling ‘Psycho Social Dwarfism’ (https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/6741153/) or going to the Orphanage Risk Factors page will provide other articles.

These articles and others in this search make the point that lack of nurture in infancy and early childhood compromise physical growth.  This can be mitigated once a child is placed in nurturing care.  At our first post–adoption interview it was noted that Yasik “appears to need much cuddling” but that over the course of the three years of post-adoption interviews he went from 39.5 inches to 47 inches.  Okay, so still not the class giraffe but also not the only one in the front row of the class photo.

The ‘Heads Up’ suggested by most adoption authorities or anyone really who might see themselves as authorities on adoption is on a separate page, Orphanage Risk Factors.  That list includes the Adverse Childhood Experience (ACE) checklist.  Yasik’s ACE score was likely 6 or 7 when he came to us although the ACE was not published until 1998. Yasik had definitely experienced physical and emotional neglect, likely physical and emotional abuse, and had definitely been exposed to domestic violence and household substance abuse.

And those shoes Yasik wanted to put on the moment he awoke in Moscow. We bought him new runners and tried to make the shoes disappear for they were already cramping his toes.  That evening we got the shoes off him and set them by the door. He wailed.  He seemed to have the idea that taking off his shoes meant bed time, probably an orphanage routine. The wailing stopped when no one headed him off to bed. Taking his shoes off at the door like a good Canadian became a new routine he comfortably settled into.  Like a proud mother, I also note in the journal that he was happy to help with household chores.  And like a proud mother who believed in education I have noted that in those first few days we taught him A and B.

Yasik had now moved from émigré to immigrant in less than a week.  He had moved from an orphanage setting to a residential home, no one but him in a large bedroom.  Routines had been dismantled and recreated; cultural changes had been made with absolutely no orientation; no one speaks the only language he knows other than about 10 words to cover the necessities of life; he is interacting with two strangers whom he has been told are his mama and poppa; little of the food is familiar other than macaroni and sausages, and what about jet lag? All this newness at every hand and he was handling it entirely alone.

Yasik was being given more stuff to call his than he had ever had access to.   Remember he left the orphanage with nothing. This stuff apparently comes with having a mama and poppa of your own. I have read here and there that for children in institutional care, the hope of having parents is the Holy Grail. We don’t know how much Yasik understood of his situation as a ‘social orphan’, for about those years, Yasik continues to say he remembers nothing before the jet ride to Canada. Did stress or even trauma from the first four years shrink his hippocampus, or put him in a dissociative state in order to cope with the lack of consistent nurture? ⁴.  Is it not possible to think that becoming a member of a family in a strange new world has added a further level of stress, however delightful the stress, to a young and still developing mind.  Stress, which separation from a caregiver and accustomed living conditions, abusive or otherwise, now heaped with the transition to an entirely new life may stymie memory.  These two strangers are what he perhaps came to understand he was to hope for.  All of these strangers’ attention is solely on him and any desire he manages to communicate, but everything is new and mostly impossible to explain when these two strangers have neither language or culture awareness to reach out to him.  Attaching in Adoption (149) cautions: “The comfort and competence that children feel in their own culture is lost as they enter a new surrounding”.

What was that doing to this young heart, mind and body?

Google presented research into the effects of trauma on early childhood development as well as articles written by therapists.  One article offered a good balance by suggesting while a child sometimes dissociates from memories of trauma, it is just as possible and much more common that, as emotions which re-enforce memories are still developing in a young brain, the memories are not retained ⁵.

As the first post-adoption report notes, initially Yasik “appeared reluctant to let [his parents] out of his sight“. Yet Yasik was quickly overcoming shyness around others.  One relationship that particularly warmed our hearts was with Tony who himself was raised in Canada’s early adoption and foster system, one that was very difficult for him (See ‘A Canadian Story of Adoption in the 1930s’, Becoming Family). Tony showed Yasik his bee hives and he went home with a jar of fresh honey.

We also found a night time routine that worked for us: play, watch a video, bathe, read a bit ⁶, kiss a lot to which Born for Love (135) says for someone who has lacked such attention is, “Like an addict with a tolerance, it takes a higher “dose” to get the same effect”. Yasik initiated the kisses as easily as we did, taking our faces in his hands or blowing a kiss at us and beaming.

We did put together a photo album of the orphanage and the kids there.  He looked at it often in the early days.  I would end the evening with a little prayer to ‘Dear God’ with him and he was out.  We were not inclined to incorporate church-going into our life style but I wanted Yasik to have some awareness of a god. Praying was what I did and passed on to him.

Daily Routine at Ashley Down Orphanage 06:00 Rise, finish washing and dressing, older children helping the younger 07:00 Girls knitting, boys reading 08:00 Breakfast 08:30 Morning service` 09:00 School (some older children first help to make beds etc. to 09:30) 12:30 Playtime 13:00 Dinner 14:00 School 16:00 Playtime 17:30 Evening service 18:00 Tea 18:30 “useful work” – girls “at their needle”, boys in the garden 20:00 Younger children to bed 21:00 Older children to bedhttps://www.mullers.org/downloads/Teachers%20resources/Daily%20routine%20at%20Ashley%20Down%20Orphanage%20Poster.pdfhttps://www.facebook.com/watch/?v=367933023629309

Institutions dress themselves in routines, but was the one at Yasik’s orphanage as airtight as the George Muller Orphanages begun in the middle of the 1800s and reaching into the middle of the 20^th century? Human Rights articles acknowledge that Russian orphanages do offer education as well as meeting the physical need of the children.   Nonetheless, a study of two St. Petersburg orphanages reported a 2 care-giver to 4 child ratio. Staff at these orphanages worked 40-hour weeks.  Routine is implied, even if possibly weighted in favour of staff over children ⁷.

Update: I am currently doing some ‘gentle art of Swedish death cleansing’.  In cleaning out the ‘important papers’ box, I came across some notes that appear to be notes I took in the one meeting we had with staff before Yasik became ours. His schedule may have been: 7:30 up, wash, dress, exercise -it says he likes to swim in the pool; 8 to 8:30 breakfast, then lessons- it says in the notes that he likes to do the following which suggests these activities were offered: to draw or work with clay modelling, construct houses, play with cars, learn poems by heart, and likes having stories read to him, walks, entertainment; 12:00 dinner; 1:30 to 3:10  toilet and nap; 3:30 snacks of cookies, buns, yogurt, fruit; 4:30 to 6:00 walk; 7:00 supper, games, cartoons, toilet; 8:30 bed. One note says he pees the bed sometimes – heavy sleeper or limited toileting options? Not so different from how George Muller managed the lives of the children in his care. And not so different from the way responsible parents manage the lives of their children.   There is no ‘Breaking News’ to the place of routine particularly in the early days transitioning from an orphanage environment to a family home.  Google will offer advise like

STICK TO A ROUTINE

Children crave structure and routines. It helps give them a sense of control and allows them to develop trust. Having set bedtime rituals for a younger child, or a weekly family movie night for an older child, are great ways to establish a connection. Routines establish a solid foundation to grow from. In turn, your child will bond with you more easily!  ⁸

The Adoptive Parents’ Handbook (85-86) quotes a researcher:

Routines and rituals help children create expectations about the predictability of their external environment.  Young children rely on their primary caregiver to help them organize their experiences and to guide them in exploration and mastery of new skills through practice and repetition.  Children who have experienced complex trauma frequently have lived in an environment void of structure and routines.  They form a perception that the world is an unpredictable and dangerous place, and their capacity for developing competencies though self-exploration and mastery become inhibited by fear.  One of the key principles for restoring a sense of safety for a child is implementing predictable daily routines that establish safety, help children organize experience, and develop mastery.

The first post-adoption report put our early days with Yasik in social workese,”[Yasik] likes to have structure”.

Yet here an index finger might stab the air. This was his first week with us and kindergarten had not yet become a consideration. As noted above, we were (or I was) managing to tuck in some educational moments, working with Yasik on the alphabet. Well, we had bought this cute little easel to hold big paper.  Really ?!?  So OK, begin to establish routines as soon as needed, but the whole perfect-parent-molding-the-perfect-child plan might need to be spaced out a bit. 

The journal has reminded me that we also had another 10-day wait period before Yasik was truly, truly, truly our son.  The journal records that four days after we returned to Canada was the end of the ‘wait period’, perhaps part of the wait period begun in Russia.  But that was not the end of uncertainty. Yasik became our son in 1997 but not until September 2000, having completed 5 interviews, at a cost for the interviews with a social worker and the cost for translation to Russian, were we assured there would be no more post-placement interviews.  The BC Adoption Act and Financial Administration Act: Adoption Regulation, last amended March 30,2022, appears to request only one report.  Our first interview/report in November 1997 concluded with this statement: “I recommend that this placement continue to proceed.  It appears to be an excellent match and all are enjoying forming a new family together”.   What if it had not been recommended to proceed three months after Yasik came into our lives?  Little caveat here: actually release from yearly interviews came after Dave wrote to the adoption agency that we thought we had made sufficiently plain that Russia need no longer worry about Yasik’s rearing.  The BC adoption agency wrote back to say that the number of post-adoption reports came at the request of Russia which has experienced a few ‘rehomings’ or returning the adoptee to Russia.

Added to the interviews, in this two-week parental leave, we began to get Yasik’s Canadian paper work together when we ran into one of the hiccups I had noticed at work particularly with Sri Lankan students.  At the top of his landing papers, the government had written Yasik’s name using the Cyrillic alphabet.  At the bottom of the paper his name was written in the letters we call the right ones.    The government was going to use the letters at the top on his citizenship card and his care card.  The person on the other end of the telephone would not budge, telling us that it would require a change by an office in Victoria and would cost $225.00.  Immigrants with limited financial resources and hesitancy to make waves regularly found themselves with names that were too long for computers to cope with for they included the tribal name as well, the part of their name these prospective new Canadians did not use even in their former countries.  But we were people much more secure in our rights as Canadians.  Dave called Victoria and told them quite firmly that there was no sense to using the Cyrillic alphabet in Canada.  The preferred spelling at the bottom of the page was as clearly written as the Cyrillic.  The voice on the other end of the phone acquiesced. I have not discovered if this remains a problem for the newly arrived.

The journal goes on to admit that both Dave and I did have an ‘adjustment’ moment wondering if we could really do this, even did we want to!?!  Yes, it warrants an exclamation mark accompanied by a question mark.  Note though it was a ‘feeling’, not anything we acted on for the next line goes on to reassure that the feeling petered out.  Yasik had the resolution “weighted unfairly in his favour”.  He beamed at us and it was game over.  Bruce Perry tells us our brain reward system sinks us.

What could prompt parents to give up sleep, sex, friends, personal time, and virtually every other pleasure in life to meet the demands of a small, often irritatingly noisy, incontinent, needy being?  The secret is that caring for children is, in many ways, indescribably pleasurable.  Our brains reward us for interacting with our children, especially infants: their scent, the cooing sounds they make when they are calm, their smooth skin, and especially, their faces are designed to fill us with joy.  What we call “cuteness” is actually an evolutionary adaptation that helps ensure that parents will care for their children, that babies will get their needs met, and parents will take on this seemingly thankless task with pleasure…. In the case of responsive parenting, pleasure and human interactions become inextricably woven together.  This interconnection, the association of pleasure with human interaction, this is the important neurobiological “glue” that bonds and creates healthy relationships ⁹.

And now it was the first week of September, 1997, the September week that Mother Theresa died, and even more absorbing for the globe, Princess Diana died. Over a decade later, we would share another eventful week with the royal family. School for Dave and me was days away.  We tucked in some picnics with family and Yasik’s first dental appointment.  He seemed to take lying in the dental chair in stride but he looked to me so defenseless that I found the experience more emotional that I had expected.  He did not have the language needed to understand what was happening or to express his thoughts about what was happening.  Heart strings were pulled and then snapped back a bit.

There were two disconcerting pieces to this otherwise week of honeymoon.  I noticed at the park how quickly other children pointed out how small Yasik was, his inability to speak English and that he had one lazy eye.  With this, and too readily for Dave, Yasik would at times hit or try to bite at me in unacceptable excitement.  Where did the biting and hitting come from?  Gordon Neufeld and Gabor Mate in Hold On To Your Kids lead me to wonder if this was a learned behaviour in the orphanage environment where children would of necessity be more peer-oriented than parent-oriented in learning social behaviours. Attaching in Adoption (81-2) says, “Children who lived with busy orphanage workers or with depressed or drug-affected birth parents learned to get louder, more persistent, more irritating, or more charming, to get basic needs met”.  Attaching in Adoption (24): “The rule of thumb is that, when first placed, children will relate to new parents in much the same way that they related to former parents or orphanage workers”.

1. W. Winnicott addresses how parents put up with an infant biting the mother’s nipples when breastfeeding: Echoes of this ruthlessness return in excited horseplay; mother and father get hurt, but succeed in protecting themselves. Parents can now begin to show when they have had enough, while also allowing their child an opportunity to repair the damage he fantasies having done in his excited states…The innate aggressiveness … derives from an expression of the baby’s need to ‘meet up’ against something, and so feel its own power of movement against that object… Anger means that the child has got as far as believing in something or someone to be angry with … When such anger has not been received or allowed to be mended, it may result in the child fearing his own anger and becoming compliant rather than spontaneous, generating a false self.

WINNICOTT AND PARENTING Ingrid Masterson  HOME / INSIDE OUT / ISSUE 24: SPRING 1996 /https://library.parenthelp.eu/wp-content/uploads/2021/03/iahip.org_.pdf

Or it came from the trauma of the first four years.  “The aggression and impulsivity that the fight or flight response provokes can … appear as defiance or opposition, when in fact it is the remnants of a response to some prior traumatic situation ….” ¹⁰.  Our minds default to choices based on associations to memories.

This is important because all of our previously stored experience has laid down the neural networks, the memory “template”, that we now use to make sense out of any new incoming information. These templates are formed throughout the brain at many different levels, and because information comes in first to the lower, more primitive areas, many are not even accessible to conscious awareness …. This happens because our brain’s stress response systems carry information about potential threats and are primed to respond to them as quickly as possible, which often means before the cortex can consider what action to take …. What this also means is that early experience will necessarily have a far greater impact than later ones.  The brain tries to make sense of the world by looking for patterns.  When it links coherent, consistently connected patterns together again, it tags them as “normal” or “expected” and stops paying conscious attention ¹¹.

Or was this anti-social behaviour a child’s way to express the separation/the strangeness of all the newness jumping up in front of him like goofy characters on a subterranean canal ride at a theme park, an inappropriate response but perhaps the only one he knew.

Or as Attaching in Adoption (173) offers, maybe hitting or biting were simply overload reactions to not having enough language to cope.

And about Yasik’s inappropriate response when things upset him?  At first when he hit out, kicked, spit, slapped or punched, we held him down, put him in bed and even spanked him once.  He would cry but then calm down and all would be fine again for our little newcomer with little language living in a world still very strange to him.  By the end of the first week, we hit on the ‘novel’ idea to put a chair in a corner and have him sit there to cool down.  Again, Born for Love (135) reminds parents, when your attachment is still insecure then

 … social punishments like a “Time-Out” [can be] less effective.  Being less loved – or having repeated early experience of loss … can also make loving itself harder and less satisfying.  Like an addict with a tolerance, it takes a higher “dose” to get the same effect…. neglected children or those with other attachment disruptions are much harder to soothe or to teach…. each little dose of affection has a smaller, less lasting effect….

Were we just plain lucky that one or two opportunities to explore a time out and a nod toward the chair led Yasik to cool it?

The Adoptive Parents Handbook (78) suggests that instead of ‘Time out’, parents have ‘Time In’ where a calm adult rather than putting the child away alone, removes a child from a situation but sits with the child, talking a bit about the problem perhaps but moving to re-directing.  This is not about the adult seeking revenge to calm him or herself.

Bruce Perry learned from a woman he called Mama P. the need for calming a child who chronologically should be more self – regulating but because of a disruptive or traumatic early life experience, needed cuddling rather than punishment, even if this seemed to be rewarding the misbehavior.  Perry came to understand that Mama P.’s cuddling worked because she was now nurturing a child’s development in areas neglected earlier, in hopes that the little person would then be able to catch up on the stimulation missed earlier. Perry explains:

These systems respond to rhythm and touch: the brain stem’s regulatory centers control heartbeat, the rise and fall of neurochemicals and hormones in the cycle of day and night, the beat of one’s walk and other patterns that must maintain a rhythmic order to function properly.  Physical affection is needed to spur some of the region’s chemical activity. ¹²

As I mentioned in Entry #9, John Brooks reflected on his and his wife’s first night with their daughter. They were tired after all the detail of the day of adoption and wanted some rest.  Their infant daughter was upset, trying to rock herself to sleep in this strange bed in a strange room with two strangers.  Brooks looks back at the night:

“… we should have taken her into bed with us, held her and soothed her.  If it were possible, we should have held her for our whole first month together without putting her down.  Maybe we would have had a different result.  What she needed then was lots of human touch” ¹³.

Attaching in Adoption (231) says “If children throw tantrums, hold them close…. to … comfort them”.  Bear in mind talking about hugging as comfort is NOT talking about what is called Attachment Therapy, Holding Therapy or Re-Birthing Therapy which is ignorant at best but essentially abusive. A child is held down and forced to make eye contact with the idea that fear of attachment will be reset.  The most such ‘therapists’ can hope for with this would be an obedience based on fear.  Such treatment still surfaces in 2022 as “breaking down a child’s defenses” ¹⁴. A quick google marks the therapy as controversial and even banned in some regions.

The other explanation often provided was the Reactive Attachment Disorder (RAD).  Adoptive parents are warned against jumping on this bandwagon too quickly as it is now considered by many researchers to be rarer than first thought.  Initially, as adoptors sought to understand their adopted children who were not acting particularly perfectly, RAD was a handy blanket explanation. For us having to deal with a couple of tantrums would have made rushing to a diagnosis of RAD ridiculous.  As Dr. Perry’s Mama P. would see it, Yasik was still an emotional baby and needed to be treated as such to allow catch up for those areas of his psyche still underdeveloped ¹⁵.

Or as Attaching in Adoption (275) explains:

 Children who have experienced deprivation early in life tend to have brains that do not regulate emotions well.  They over-react and under-react in a way that is adaptive to their old environment.  When they are nurturing, comforting, and positively stimulating, parents give children experiences that form a new perceptual map. 

For as a mother adopting from China found

It had been so cold in the winter that the babies had quilts tied across their lined up cribs so that they stayed warm.  They were only picked up on a schedule, due to the demands of so many babies and the difficulty of keeping the quilts in place…. [the] anxiety and frustration [which] were supposed to have beginning development in ages three through six months [continued long after, not having been cared for at the appropriate developmental stage] (273).

Our two-week parental leave never really accessed my union’s allowed three days.  We had the last two weeks of August and then it was time for school.  Luckily I guess, that particular year I had evening classes so the first days of September gave me a schedule that allowed me to be at home with Yasik in the morning.  Dave dropped some of his course load, taking only morning classes three days a week.  Yasik’s needs were directing his art education. I stuffed Yasik into his car seat and worked against afternoon homeward bound traffic to Emily Carr University, picking Dave up. He took the driver’s seat and headed further into Vancouver to my school after which Dave and Yasik caught the bus home while I taught.  Two weeks into the school year with this schedule and we furrowed our brows. Perhaps we ought to just see about a possible kindergarten for Yasik.

We called the school to make an appointment, and Yasik was a new kindergarten student by the end of the day.

The journal says “And childhood is over – the staff at the community school down the street urge starting kindergarten as best for him for socializing, school prep, and ESL (the kindergarten teacher spoke some Russian).  And he has been watching the kids at the park – we feel he is ready”.  We would be keeping our promise to the Russian judge for this was not (God forbid) abandoning him to day care.

And what do the experts say about that:

“The key problem is the lack of consideration we give attachment in making our child-care arrangements.  Perhaps the most obvious task of attachment is to keep the child close” ¹⁶.  The title, Hold On To Your Kids: why parents need to matter more than peers, lays out Gordon Neufeld’s focus on parents’ need to ensure strong orientation first to themselves as the child’s parents before encouraging a peer orientation.  Being raised in an orphanage, Yasik would be regarded as more peer-oriented in his choices than parent or responsible adult oriented.

Adopting Older Children (67) bluntly states:

“As a new adoptive parent you should take time off from work after your child comes home. You will need time to get to know your child and your constant presence in the early days of her placement may help her adjust better…. In all cases, building trust is a process that cannot be rushed”.

Attaching in Adoption (22):

…[S]ometimes the building of attachment takes much more time than anticipated because children are younger emotionally than their chronological age.  When children are adopted at an older age, parents need ample time for bonding activities. A social dilemma already exists about the balance of career versus adequate time for infant attachment.  When older children are adopted, there is even less appreciation for the generous amount of time needed for parents and children to form attachment.

For us more specifically, the ‘social dilemma’ seems to have come down to bowing to the dollar over the hopes of the heart strings much the same as when we chose to adopt Yasik for we had to find a way to pay off the adoption debt and the mortgage and Dave’s education, and the life we promised to provide this child, but we did also believe we would be meeting Yasik’s language needs and the social needs we understood a child of his chronological age needed.  And once again we were working with our lack of awareness of the emotional impact of his past.

Bruce Perry says, “But it’s important to know that young children are extraordinarily susceptible to the spiraling consequences of the choices we – later they – make, for good and for ill”^17.

Adopting Older Children shrugs a bit (222), “You also need to give yourself permission to not be a perfect person or a perfect parent.  Sometimes you will just be a “good enough’ parent and that’s okay”.

We chose to send him to kindergarten.

Endnotes for Post 10

1. Mercer, Jean.  Understanding Attachment: parenting, child care, and emotional development.  Praeger, 2006, 33-34.
2. Bosco-Ruggiero, Stephanie,MA, Gloria Russo WassellMs, LMHC, and Victor Groza, PhD.  Adopting Older Children:a practical guide to adopting and parenting children over age four. New Horizon Press, 2014, 162.
3. Le Mare, Lucy, PhD, and Karyn Audet, MA. “A longitudinal study of the physical growth and health of postinstitutionalized Romanian adoptees”  Paediatrics & Child Health,Volume 11, Issue 2, February 2006, 85–9.      https://academic.oup.com/pch/article/11/2/85/2648239
4. Szalavitz, Maia, and Bruce D. Perry, M.D., Ph.D. Born for Love: why empathy is essential and endangered. William Morrow, 2010, 66-70, 255.
5. https://www.healthline.com/health/why-cant-i-remember-my-childhood
6. Szalavitz, Maia, and Bruce D. Perry, M.D., Ph.D.  Born for Love: why empathy is essential and endangered. William Morrow, 2010, 312.
7. Structural characteristics of the institutional environment for young children. Developmental Psychology, Volume #9, 2016.
8. https://www.adoptionchoices.org/bonding-with-your-adopted-child/
9. Bruce D. Perry, MD, PhD, and Maia Szalavitz  The Boy Who Was Raised As A Dog: and other stories from a child psychiatrist’s notebook.  Basic Books, 2017,90-91.
10.  Bruce D. Perry, 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, 52.
11. #11 is not noted here and I am tired of dealing with the footnotes. It is another Perry and Szalavitz whose work I obviously value.
12. Bruce D. Perry, 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, 26.
13. Bruce D. Perry, 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, 152, 153.
14. Brooks, John. The Girl Behind The Door: a father’s quest to understand his daughter’s suicide.  Scribner,2016, 183.
15. Tantrum, Barbara Cummins. The Adoptive Parent’s Handbook: a guide to healing trauma and thriving with your foster or adopted child. North Atlantic Books, 2020, 61.
16. Bruce D. Perry, MD, PhD, and Maia Szalavitz  The Boy Who Was Raised As A Dog: and other stories from a child psychiatrist’s notebook.  Basic Books, 2017,101-102.
17. Neufeld, Gordon, PH.D. and Gabor Maté , M.D.  Hold On To Your Kids: why parents need to matter more than peers.  Vintage Canada, 2005, 33 & 65.
18. Bruce D. Perry, 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, 132.

Entry # 11  Our Son is a Person

I know we tend to pickle memories in a brine that renders them more rosy shaded than blood-red.   Nonetheless my journal is a record of how I viewed my world at the time, a primary source with hopefully less cherry-picking than my mind might remember now.  Still, reading those journal pages 25 years later, it seems they might have been wrapped in pink cellophane, oh yes, the ‘honeymoon period’.  And we were not alone, at least as far as we could tell from the one or two books we came across in those early years.  Well actually I only remember one book, written by a woman a year or two after adopting her ‘forever child’. The book was rosy from cover to cover.  We would have written the same and if Kisses from Katie[i] is anything to go by, people still are.

Recently I heard the Avett Brothers on Jimmy Kimmel singing a song that asks, “How long is now?”. The song, full of hope and happiness, answers with the word, “Forever”.  It brought this time to mind, singing of the wonderful days in a lifetime.

No grey clouds looming. We got a phone call one night from a fellow in the eastern US who was wondering if we too were experiencing serious acting out with our child, our response was “No, our child is a sweetheart.”  Offering words of sympathy, we shrugged and hung up, privately questioning his parenting skills.

This post and the next several to come will offer vignettes of that good time from the perspective of getting to know our child to try to understand his perception of himself and our place in his life via the journal and other information I have garnered.  I hope to come to some understanding of how his perception was developed.  But let me first establish something that may seem obvious but at perhaps a less than conscious level is not always firmly embedded. Yasik is person, not merely a set piece or accessory in the arrangement called family.

This declaration is not as straight forward as it would usually be in a bio-family. The Origins of You: how childhood shapes later life looks at the maxim, ‘The child is the father of the man’, with caveats noting that research cannot support that this thought is an absolute for all children given that the blessings and vagaries of life must also be factored in.[ii]  In the particular environment of the orphanage it has become expected that

…the majority of institutionalized children miss a number of critical milestones in development…. In addition, adopted from abroad/post-institutionalized children have to go through a tremendous set of changes, beginning with leaving their home country, leaving the familiar surrounding of the orphanage…. and facing completely unfamiliar surroundings, learning a different language, and getting accustomed to a new culture, a new family, and a new school.

However, a study

… found that approximately one third of the families reported no significant problems; one third mentioned one to three kinds of problems, such as eating problems, medical problems, and stereotypical behavior problems; and years after the adoption roughly one third reported serious and sometimes worsening cognitive and behavioral/emotional problems such as physical, emotional, developmental and cognitive delays, self-stimulation and self-soothing behaviors, and extreme fears of separation and abandonment. A general theme is that the longer the child spends in an orphanage, the more severe the subsequent problem.[iii]

But hey, you can hear that mumbled meme, ‘Data is Not Destiny’, right? Perhaps but nor can it be ignored in seeking to know the person who is now our child.

Back to Google.  I was wondering how to approach understanding what the journal entries were telling me about who Yasik was showing himself to be in his first year as our son and how that might help to reveal his perception of himself and his new world.  I searched with the words that came to mind: personality traits, that sort of thing.  Google led me to philosophical sites of all things: the idea of personhood.[iv]

It appears we as persons are physical and mental beings who develop networks of beliefs that impact how we calculate and think about our environment and social relationships, using reflection and language to make autonomous choices and engage in actions, with the right to be accountable for our choices. My journal entries allow me to work backwards from Yasik’s actions to uncover the person he was/is.

But why examine such abstract philosophical and psychological concepts?  I had been considering sharing some bits from the journal that I later recognized were best kept private to the family. Yet I am also currently reading a book, the CHILD CATCHERS: rescue, trafficking, and the new gospel of adoption[v] by Kathryn Joyce.  The book deals with a variety of movements that have led to bartering in orphans for their souls, for money, for prestige, or to fill some personal hole in their lives.  Christians rescuing heathen, governments looking for financial gain or political pawns, couples looking to place a family portrait on the mantle.  John Brooks in The Girl Behind the Door[vi] says, “We treated Casey as if she were our new pet”. Dave, when reading this post, observed much the same, saying we put as much effort into life with our pets as we do our children.  Are we seeing our child as a distinct and individual person or as another piece to finish a look we imagine completes our image of ourselves and our lifestyle?

Does the personhood of the orphan factor in?  Perhaps we can hone an awareness of the orphan as a person in his or her or their own right by thinking very specifically about what makes each of them a person. Perhaps then we will recognize each child caught in the liminal (a word new to me but I like its eeriness) state of orphan as an individual whose personhood must be valued.

Numbers-wise there was not much of the ‘physical being’ about Yasik: essentially 40 inches by 40 lbs.  But whatever little there was, it was packed into a well-proportioned body, capped with soft blond hair.    We had a cherry tree in the front yard with branches like big arms about four feet off the ground.  Dave tucked into the arms one evening to hide in a game of Hide and Seek but those 40 inches of bursting energy were just not up to the hunt. Dave sat right in front of Yasik in the cherry tree, but 20 inches short of the tree’s arms, he could not see Dave.

Where it mattered, of course, and especially with the adjustment a pair of glasses made, Yasik could see just fine.  We watched a video with Yasik one evening about where kids come from. It made the observation that a woman has breasts, showing a cartoon woman with straight out breasts and nipples.  Later I said to Yasik, “See, I have breast too”.  He said, “No, your’s don’t stand up.”  He could see. Yasik could hear (he loved listening to music with earphones) which was later confirmed as hearing issues are usually checked as part of an assessment of learning difficulties; Yasik could smell (well we assume so for I have no concrete examples recorded); Yasik could taste (at first only familiar foods – which shows discrimination, right?); Yasik knew the message of touch (holding our hands and cuddling); and that sixth one, proprioception, appeared to be working just fine as his very effective fine and gross motor skills demonstrated despite Orphanage Risk Factors’ mention that often institutionalized kids are clumsy.  From leaping around on the park dragon to hitting the T-ball to biking, he showed skill and prowess.  Even the over-sized baseball helmet merely got a nonchalant flick when it slipped into his face.  Of course, there was that one time just after Yasik got comfortable on his bike, we biked around the block. On Braid St. he biked into a telephone/ lamp post. He got a bit disgusted and said, “Tomorrow they have to move it over there” – meaning across the street. But clumsiness or awkwardness of movement have never been evident.  He knows where his arms and legs are and where they are headed – exactly where he wants them to go.

And as for that one bug-a-boo, size, the material on Orphanage Risk Factors notes that institutionalized kids make size gains within months of adoption. I noted sometime after Christmas of that first year that “he keeps growing.   He wants to be measured a lot to check if he’s grown and usually he has – he is growing steadily but he is still the littlest kid in the school”.   Attaching in Adoption: practical tools for today’s parents takes concern for size seriously, saying children can feel embarrassed about being short.  They may see it as mocking their drive for independence from being needy[vii].  Getting glasses centered his right eye but being little was an on-going concern.

Notes from our short ‘getting to know Yasik’ meeting with orphanage staff say Yasik had dealt with rickets, poor nutrition and a lack of Vitamin D due to little exposure to a world beyond his crib. He also had an infant allergy or intolerance to sweets.  The staff assured us the rickets and allergy and their after effects were now gone, as is most often the case once diet and exercise needs are met.

He did have a secret power though – when chicken pox banged at the door, the doctor thinks the resistance to infection spawned in the orphanage made him quite invincible to many childhood illnesses. Other than a mild diarrhea, he was free to play in the park for the week he was quarantined from school. His body was also well adjusted to the rhythms of life for he slept well, ate well, especially sausages, piroshkies and fruit in the early months. The fruit kept things humming so well that we would occasionally ban apples. Loving fruit, Yasik would have us check to see if his poop was firm enough to lift the apple ban.

And the ‘mental being’?  A Google definition says it is about perception, pain experience, belief, desire, intention, emotion, and memory. I would like to add as a separate concept, the gift of curiosity we are given.

For whatever emotional, psychological or neurological reason, Yasik says he has no memory of his life before the flight to Canada. Yet…..while we waited for our pre-dawn flight home in the Moscow airport, facing out into flat river valley, a harvest moon arose.  It was huge.  One evening, a few months into his first year with us, he and Dave were on the computer.  Dave was making supper and Yasik was playing on the computer. A large moon came up on the screen.  Yasik called Dave over and pointed to it, “Papa that is where Yasik is from”.  He explained that “They pulled the string” (like maybe a bus stop string?) and he came down on an airplane.  His memory system was doing what memories are to do – providing him with a narrative. He came from the moon.

It is the only memory he shared other than recognizing the little kids pictured waving good bye to him from the orphanage front porch.  Sadly, or simply the by-product of embracing a new life, there came a day when he no longer wanted to look at their pictures before bed.  John Brooks talks of the same with his daughter, Casey.   John and his wife Erika had created a “scripted fantasy story” about Casey’s bio mom loving her but wanting her to have a better life and so the Brooks “went all the way to Poland to find” Casey. (I bet they dragged that word ‘all’ out).  But Casey showed little curiosity about her bio family or the orphanage, or Poland [viii].  And yes, more could be said re: the fantasy story and magical thinking as per the Child Catchers: rescue, trafficking, and the new gospel of adoption [ix].

We could not deny he had emotions either, from robust anger to sweeping happiness.  Angry that he must obey, laughing so freely when happy, yelling, “Yee Haw” while biking, excited and giggling playing Hide and Seek. He had us outside, having one of us hiding while he had the other counting and helping him hunt, but it was all his when the hunted one was spotted as he broke into a determined run to kick the can; he burst with pride at handling bumper cars with Kyle; he entered into T-ball games wholeheartedly – no standing on the sides, no matter who played. Yet come the evening, he slipped into cuddly mode.

Yasik fell from a stand at his last T-ball game and he was leaning against the fence trying not to cry. Dave went over and picked him up from behind. He turned into Dave’s neck and cried his heart out. But again, all in the same day, he might punch your bum and leap on you. He would leap on my back while I was crouched at the fridge and get me in a strangle hold.

Erik H. Erikson, student of life, according to Daniel Levinson[x], and person who never knew his bio father and never felt fully accepted by his step-father, designed a theory of human life rather like a train on a railway line with 8 stations along the way.  Yasik should have, at this point, passed the stop of Trust vs. Mistrust (infant) and Autonomy/Independence vs Shame and Doubt (toddler) and if all was going well, was in the stage of Initiative vs Guilt (pre-school).  Orphanage Risk Factors suggest that often children who begin life in an orphanage are emotionally delayed.  So, was the train of life carrying Yasik getting to each stop on time and leaving on time?  Can adoptive parents even tell this early in an adoption? Were we going to see Yasik trusting us as his parents? Was he confident enough to take up challenges?  Was he becoming more and more skillful and able to make decisions that show a growing control of his impulses?[xi]

Maybe the mental being marker of intention will provide some answers. Dave’s birthday came along in March.  Yasik and I went shopping for a gift for him.  He got Dave a plastic foldable set of swords – for lots of sword fights with himself. On another day, Dave suggested Yasik pick flowers for me.  The next day Yasik was mad at Dave for a reprimand.   On the way to school I told Yasik that Dad did so because he loves him.  Yasik goes “Oh”, stopped and picked a buttercup, saying, “This is for my daddy”.  As an afterthought, he picked one for me so I picked one for him and again he said. “Ooh” – both ‘Ohs’ in awe. (I kept that little flower in the journal for many, many years).

Any organism, if it is alive, demonstrates desire, so it can be no surprise that desire burbled in Yasik’s breast.   Right from the start we could tell he was into long-haired girls.

We were visiting friends in Chilliwack whose only child was a beautiful, long-haired girl. Yasik fell in love with her, not reciprocated of course, for she was several years old than him, but she played with him and that was good enough.

I have read here and there that curiosity is a special gift tucked into the bundle of personality traits of the lucky. I am not so sure; it seems to me that whether it is slipping into a shop to see an item we are dreaming of or questions we have about the connection between nature and nurture which leads us to Nobel prize honours, we likely each have some measure of curiosity.  Even our dog shows curiosity most days, sticking his nose in here and there on our walks.  Yasik too, has always poked his nose into things around him: how to drive the car, checking out what might be hidden in dense bush, even if it meant getting dirty to find out, figuring out how to help some fish get upstream.

It is harder to pin point his experience of pain for he rarely seemed bothered by confrontations with pain. Much of what would have others cry out seemed to bounce off him. Or maybe his physical dexterity came to his aid, allowing to him slip past most potential accidents.

Not to gloss over the Orphanage Risk Factors I have noted here and there, I might add that we did watch Yasik self-soothe by rocking on the couch while watching TV or listening to music and when in the car.  I’d also say there was some self-parenting when he could get a bit bossy, telling us to stop doing something that irritated him or becoming indignant when disciplined.  But he was not having obvious problems with impulse control other than making sure we knew his negative opinions as clearly as his positive opinions.  He did not come to us cowed by orphanage punishment though he would show initial hesitancy when encouraged to try new things like testing out the slide at the playground or learning to ride his bike. Nonetheless, there was no evidence of a ‘learned helplessness’ for with encouragement, he tried whatever challenge was offered.   Was he indiscriminately friendly? I don’t think so for it took little for him to be willing to make friends.  When visiting in the home of his buddy, the buddy’s mom found him to be more cuddly than her son. But there was no going off with strangers or seeking a stranger’s attention.  And if you watched him watching ‘Forrest, Forrest Gunk’ you could rest assured he was able to hold a concentration or focus. He was acting like a happy little boy. He seemed to have enough trust and independence to beetle on into anything.

Perception it seems is the expression of the physical and genetic attributes as they entwine with the mental attributes which together lead to a way of regarding, understanding or interpreting something.  Or better yet, we as persons are physical and mental beings who develop networks of beliefs that impact how we calculate and think about our environment and social relationships, using reflection and language to make autonomous choices and engage in actions, with the right to be accountable for our choices.

I think Belief, in a narrow definition (except in such specifics as religion perhaps) is imperceptibly different from perception so will check it off the list as essentially being dealt with as perception.

I hope to discover Yasik’s attribute of perception as I work through the next few posts.  Other than that the bases are covered.

So yeah, he is a person.

To look at personality another way, I suggest you check out  ‘The Big-Five Personality Traits”: openness, conscientiousness, extraversion/extroversion, agreeableness, and neuroticism at this address,  https://www.verywellmind.com/the-big-five-personality-dimensions-2795422.   Researchers have found this set of traits to be “remarkably universal”, that “both nature and nurture play a role” and that the traits of the individual “tend to be relatively stable over the course of adulthood”, even factoring in “adverse life events” though “maturation may have an impact”.[xii]  I add this way to look at a person because of some questions I came across in Heartbreak: a personal and scientific journey by Florence Williams, 2022. She asks “So why are some of us more resilient in the face of something like a breakup? Do personality traits matter? Early life trauma? The short answer is yes and yes”.[xiii]

Footnotes

[i] Davis, Katie with Beth Clark   Kisses For Katie: a story of relentless love and redemption
Gale Cengage Learning, 2011.

[ii] Belsky, Jay et al  The Origins of You: how childhood shapes later life  Harvard UP, June 2020, 40-54.

[iii] Jankowska, Anna   The Transition of Adopted From Abroad/ Postinstitutionalized Children to Life in the United States   McGill University, 28 October, 2015.

[iv] Camilleri, Adrian. “What are the Characteristics of Personhood?”  Philosphymt.  https://philosophymt.com/what-are-the-characteristics-of-personhood/.  January 7, 2022.

[v]Joyce, Kathryn.    the Child Catchers: rescue, trafficking, and the new gospel of adoption.   Public Affairs,2013, 67

[vi] Brooks, John   The Girl Behind The Door: a father’s quest to understand his daughter’s suicide.  Scribner, 2016.

[vii]Gray, Deborah D.  Attaching in Adoption: practical tools for today’s parents. Perspectives Press, Inc.,2002,  37-39.

[viii] Brooks, John.   The Girl Behind The Door: a father’s quest to understand his daughter’s suicide.  Scribner, 2016, 55-56.

[ix] Joyce, Kathryn    the Child Catchers: rescue, trafficking, and the new gospel of adoption.   Public Affairs, 2013, 75 – 127.

[x] Levinson, Daniel J.  The Seasons of a Man’s Life. Harper & Row, 1979.

[xi] Wade, Carol et al.  Psychology: custom edition for Thompson Rivers University.  Pearson, 2007.

[xii] Cherry, Kendra   “What Are the Big 5 Personality Traits?”  Very well Mind   March 11,2023 https://www.verywellmind.com/the-big-five-personality-dimensions-2795422

[xiii] Williams, Florence.   Heartbreak: a personal and scientific journey.   W.W. Norton & Co.,2022, 51. 

Entry #12   Set and Setting Introduction

Yasik was now a Canadian Vincent.  It was time to move from his Russian nurture to his nurture in our family, not ignoring that he would be bringing his Russian-transferring-to-Canadian nature/nurture along.

Even though Dr. Spock said parents know more than they think they do[i], let me begin this group of posts about parenting by straight up saying Dave and I had the awareness of Donald Rumsfeld when we took on parenting; there were “known knowns” and “known unknowns“, but then there also are those “unknown unknowns”.[ii] The “known knowns” would be similar to what SNL suggested Kevin Federline might have known: 1. Always feed your children. 2. Children are ‘babe magnets’.  3. For the rest, Federline suggested parents should call him to babysit.[iii]

We didn’t have Federline’s phone number so that was a non-starter.  But like Federline, Dave quickly picked up on how much of a babe magnet Yasik was for women gave him their seats on the bus and fawned over Yasik.  So that was good. And we did know to feed our kid. But maybe for that one we were simply following the Golden Rule of ‘do unto others as you would have done for yourself’.

But from where did we know to do the other things we so quickly fell into doing? I ‘conducted’, or less pompously, ‘asked around’ about the assumption that we parent like our parents which perhaps more pompously is called the ‘intergenerational transmission of parenting’.[iv] The responses I got ranged from vehemently ‘Never’ to ‘Yes, my parents’ way worked for me’, but most also added on reflection, that ‘the times are different’. In the everyday details of life which have been part of our society for a century or two, Dave and I did things as our parents did:  maybe hugging was not yet a comfortable expression of love for our parents but feeding, clothing and sending us off to school was held as a daily routine; vacations were pilgrimages to visit the relatives with some relaxation.

Whether I was comfortable with it or not, I know for a time Yasik carried my little Bible around and sat with it on the couch watching TV.  He prayed with me at night – “Dear God”, named all his cousins and aunts and uncles, “Amen” and made us laugh.  It seems to me that was a holdover from my childhood and my own religious upbringing although, of course, perhaps Yasik went so willingly along with prayers and carried the little kid size Bible like a toy or icon because of some religious activities encouraged in the orphanage.[v]  Dave has always found a tool box to be a special kind of candy box, so whether he worried about his tools or not, he may have passed the toolbox’s wonders on to Yasik.  Or did Yasik come from a long line of mechanics?  It is hard to be definitive about where our inclinations have come from, but for both Dave and I some childhood experiences were valued and continued: eating the evening meal together (when work schedules allowed) was important for it was the time of togetherness and laughter.  Going to the lake or going for drives up the mountains were also important as were weekend get-togethers with family and friends.  Having parents equally involved in our home care was also respected.  If my Mom was working, then my Dad burnt the pancakes. Dave’s dad cooked with the salt and pepper shaker. In both families, gender did not dictate chore assignment; each kid was expected to wash dishes or mow the lawn.  Wearing hand-me-downs was a given; no noses got stuck in the air when we were offered hand-me-downs for Yasik. Interests were encouraged as far as the dollar could reach. Pets and bicycles were musts, even if it meant an opportunity to encourage sharing.  In my family, all four of us truly tried to ride our lone two-wheeler together. Dave’s dad bought a bike for each of his kids. Dave’s mom bought art supplies for him and even sent one of his cartoons into a drawing contest.  I still hear the Hallelujah chorus when I remember the day my Mom took me to the library.

Like it or not, consciously or not, we fall back on neuronal pathways well-trod unless the experiences associated are too negative or rendered useless by the march of time.  Gabor Mate in The Myth of Normal: trauma, illness & healing in a toxic culture, in a tone that sounds quite confident, says, “It turns out that our innate parenting instinct is perfectly calibrated to ensure the provision of the thing many “experts” would have us ignore: the child’s developmental needs”.[vi]  And Mate is backed up by Bruce D. Perry who says

The brain is an historical organ…. Our life experiences shape who we become by creating our brain’s catalog of template memories, which guide our behavior, sometimes in ways we can consciously recognize, more often via processes beyond our awareness…. Since much of the brain develops early in life, the way we are parented has a dramatic influence on brain development. And so, since we tend to care for our children the way we were cared for ourselves during our own childhoods, a good “brain” history of a child begins with a history of the caregiver’s childhood and early experience.[vii]

Cecile David-Weill, in Parents Under the Influence: words of wisdom from a former bad mother, will agree: “Our childhood continues to manifest and affect us as we get older, shaping our choices in every facet of our lives (24).

According to the Pew Research Center if we see categories of parenting, we would more easily recognize that we do indeed parent like our parents at times.[viii]

Dave and I were middle-aged parents who had lived in a variety of environments.  We had whatever our parents had taught us, and we had ample time to observe ways that other parents parent; as well, we must have had some trending input from reading or other media.  We had also taken the 9-week adoption prep required by BC’s social services: about all I remember from that seminar was information on the adoption process for domestic adoption and struggles adoptors may experience with special needs children.  I recently found notes Dave made at the orientation meetings.  Turns out we were given a basic overview of Attachment Theory. Perhaps though, abstract notes could not secure solid ground in our hearts and minds amidst the case histories of families with special needs adoptees or the boggling but potentially exciting procedural information for the adoption process. In the flurry of such an experience and despite the advice of adoption experts, “The adoptors who were most successful were prepared, had educated themselves, and had ties to support services”[ix], parenting as a life challenge I was about to engage in and more specifically, Attachment Theory, sounded like ‘news to me’ when I began reading in adoption years later. I also now know we were not the only not-so-super parents out there for Scott Simon in Baby We Were Meant For Each Other: in praise of adoption takes pains to note that some otherwise excellent parents showed neither interest nor made the time for books or support groups while raising their very happy child.[x]

But now I am taking a look backwards.  Recently I was taxiing the neighbour kids to the Dollar Store, a trip the neighbour, in the house between us and the kids, said they made sound like a trip to Disneyland. They range from 2 years old to 15.  On the way I asked them what they thought a parent was. The 11-year-old without hesitation listed off pretty much everything a Google search would offer: protect and provide.  The 15-year-old topped the list up with “and have fun”.

Google offers up numbers, letters and alliterated titles like 1,2,3 Magic Parenting, the 3 As of parenting: Authoritative, Attachment, and Acceptance or the 3 Fs of Positive Parenting: Firm, Fair and Friendly or the 3 Ts Parenting: Tune In, Talk more, Take Turns.   Actually 3 seems the favourite as it often is in many realms, for here is yet another 3, 3 Principles: Love, Limits and Latitude. The # 4 offers some competition with 4 Cs: Choices, Consequences, Consistency, Compassion or the 4 Rs of Parenting: Respect, Responsibility, Reciprocity, and Restraint in the process of raising children. Gentle parenting is built on 4 Basic Pillars: Empathy, Respect, Understanding, and Boundaries.  The 5Cs of Neurodiverse Parenting are Self-Control, Compassion, Collaboration, Consistency and Celebration.  And then there are the 6 Parenting Dimensions: Warmth, Rejection, Autonomy support, Coercion, Structure, and Chaos. And so it goes until at least 10 unless you consider Jordan Peterson’s 12 Rules for Life but only one of those rules is directly related to parenting: #5 – Do not let your children do anything that makes you dislike them.  No, that is not true. # 11 also applies – Do not bother children while they are skateboarding.[xi] Is it all summed up in the Parenting Golden Rule: “Treat your child as you would like to be treated if you were in the same position”, which is apparently simple, straightforward, and effective? Ok, like the neigbour kids said, protect, provide, and have fun.

I heard Dr. Phil once say, in a context I may be misconstruing, that it (life/relationships) is all about perspective or perception.  It seems to me that life’s experiences have another and equal dimension. More specifically for this post, adoption has another and equal dimension. And let me say right here that this could get a bit messy as I worked this out in the middle of the night, but at the time it sounded sane to me so here goes.  Set, as in ‘mindset’, and setting are terms for a theory that refers to the psychological, social and cultural parameters which shape the response to psychedelic experience.[xii]  I would like to apply that thought to adoption as family with ‘mindset’ being both the genetics and the perspective or perceptions the adoptee brings to family and ‘setting’ as all that influences the development of the adoptee’s ‘mindset’: social, cultural, historical, political, physical, economic and spiritual environment that impact the relationship (even with a list like that I probably missed something). Or as I put it in Entry #11 (with help from Google) we as persons are physical and mental beings who develop networks of beliefs that sway how we calculate and think about our environment and social relationships, using reflection and language to make autonomous choices and engage in actions, with the right to be accountable for our choices.

To have a good psychedelic trip both mindset and setting must be taken into account. To have a good understanding of the way each individual handles his or her life journey again mindset and setting must be examined. Jerome Kagan, a developmental psychologist at Harvard, put the idea this way: “Genes and family may determine the foundation of a house, but time and place determine its form” for as Dr. Nicole Letourneau says on the preceding page, “Genetics may determine how easy it is to push a person’s buttons, but the finger that actually pushes them belongs to the early caregiving environment – how a person was parented.”  ” … regardless of who raised them“.[xiii]

Dr. Nicole Letourneau and Justin Joschko explain it as entwined in this way:

To divide traits into genetically determined and environmentally determined compartments is to misunderstand how genes work.  Consider hair colour, a trait that, on the surface, seems to be determined solely by a person’s genes.  A child’s hair is seldom a colour that does not have some familial precedent.  By contrast, the influence of the environment on one’s hair seems nonexistent.  Blonde Nordic children adopted by Chinese families do not spontaneously develop black hair.  However, this does not mean genes alone are responsible for a person/hair colour.  After all, genes can really only do one thing: instruct cells, by way of an interpreter called RNA, to create a series of amino acids, which then link together to form proteins.  Now, this one function is extremely, unbelievably important. Proteins are the body’s proletariat, the workers who carry out the myriad tasks which allow us, the society in which they dwell, to function.  But genes cannot on their own, dictate, the colour of a person’s hair.  Hair colour is determined by melanin, which is the end product of the amino acid tyrosine.  Now, genes do code for tyrosine, hence the genetic influence.  However, in hair the degree of melanin accumulation is decided in part by the concentration of copper to the cells producing that hair.  When that cell has more copper, the hair is darker.  Should the intake of copper be reduced to below a certain threshold, hair generated by the same follicle will be lighter than it was previously, when copper supplies were plentiful…. Such is the case with thousands of environmental factors we take for granted.  It isn’t until a radical change in the environment depletes once-plentiful resources that we realize how much those resources contributed to our development…

I guess all of this allows me to continue to use the set and setting metaphor. We have considered the world Yasik came from and how that was impacting his mindset, who he is as a person with his unique perceptions, and now we will begin to consider the world Yasik moved into with adoption, our family, with Dave and I as parents, the setting.  As we strove to parent in a way that we thought offered love and care to Yasik, what perception was he forming of family? When we took this person, Yasik, to the park to ride the teeter totter, he was a tidy little package of 40 inches by 40 pounds and whichever one of us got on the opposite side of the teeter totter that stood a mere 2 feet above ground was north of 3 times 40 by 40. Sometimes Yasik was in danger of being tossed into the air; other times he could be stuck on the ground as we and all that pertained to his new world of family strove to find a good experience on life’s teeter-totter. The parent-child relationship works for a balance with those dynamics. Riding together with tiny on one side and extra-large on the other can still be wonderful fun if extra-large is caring and responsible and the mechanism that holds the teeter totter together and the playground it has been set in are copacetic (a weird word Dave used to love).

I will look at our set and setting in the next posts by laying out our setting of family via adoption with the hopes of culling some awareness of the perceptions Yasik was developing.

Maybe the only gift is a chance to inquire,

to know nothing for certain.

An inheritance of wonder and nothing more.

― William Least Heat Moon[xiv]

Footnotes at the end of Entry# 12C

Entry #12A   Set and Setting

Most parents start out with a child with no words but we started out with a child whose words we couldn’t find in the dictionary, and even if we found them, we couldn’t figure out how to use the dictionary’s definition to our advantage. When we said ‘Nyet’ to Yasik we had little idea what that communicated.

What books might we have read at the time or what concepts might we have picked up from other parents or from the media of the nineties to guide us? That was a time of concern over ‘helicopter’ parenting.  And I, back in my religious years, had read James Dobson’s Dare to Discipline (1977) and some other book about a couple who followed his ideas and ‘transformed’ their lives which may have held some residue neuronal territory in my brain. (I will bet that sentence could knit some eyebrows into a furrow or raise them heavenward.) But for the most part we neither thought we needed to bother to read in this area or were too busy to try.

But now as I seek to understand the ‘setting’ for Yasik’s mindset, some obsessive-compulsive habit of mine exerts itself for I have long felt like a subject was not adequately addressed until I have checked off the 7Ws or as many states of human experience as Yasik might have had interactions with which could possibly offer insight.  If I, however, need backing for my obsession I will generalize from a point being made by Siddhartha Mukherjee in The Gene: an intimate history which makes roughly the same point, while making a point of the interconnectedness of genes and environment.

Identity, we are told now, is determined by nature and nurture, genes and environment, intrinsic and extrinsic inputs. But this too is nonsense – an armistice between fools …. whether nature predominates or nurture is not absolute, but depends quite acutely on the level of organization one chooses to examine.… in the estuarine plains of crisscrossing information, history, society, and culture collide and intersect with genetics, like tides.  Some waves cancel each other, while others reinforce each other.  No force is particularly strong – but their combined effect produces the unique and rippled landscape that we call an individual’s identity.[xv]

Mukherjee comes back at the end of the book to “recall the scientific, philosophical, and moral lesson of [the] history [of the gene]” in 13 points. In point #6, he offers a good example of how Nature and Nurture are seen as working together.

#6. It is nonsense to speak about “nature” or “nurture” in absolutes or abstracts.  Whether nature – i.e., the gene- or nurture – i.e., the environment – dominates in the development of a feature or function depends, acutely, on the individual feature and the context.  The SRY gene determines sexual anatomy and physiology in a strikingly autonomous manner; it is all nature.  Gender identity, sexual preference, and the choice of sexual roles are determined by intersections of genes and environments – i.e., nature plus nurture. The manner in which “masculinity” versus “femininity” is enacted or perceived in a society, in contrast, is largely determined by an environment, social memory, history, and culture; this is all nurture.[xvi]

I happened to read both The Gene and The Myth of Normal at the same time.  The Gene gave me some understanding of Nature and The Myth of Normal focused on Nurture. In The Myth of Normal, Gabor Maté, warns against diagnosis for those elements of our humanity that are not “all nature” as Mukherjee says above.

Diagnoses are abstractions, or summaries: sometimes helpful, always incomplete. They are professional shorthand for describing constellations of symptoms a person may report, or of other people’s observations of someone’s behavior patterns, thoughts, and emotions…. [D]iagnoses reveal nothing about the underlying events and dynamics that animate the perceptions and experiences in question …. [A]study looked at the prescription records of almost one million B.C. schoolchildren over an eleven-year period and found that kids born in December were 39 percent more likely to be diagnosed with ADHD than classmates born the previous January. The reason? December kids entered the same grade nearly a year younger than their January counterparts – they were eleven months behind in brain development. They were being medicated not for a “genetic brain disorder” but for naturally delayed maturation of the brain circuits of attention and self-regulation.[xvii]

Caveat here: Of course, I will not be covering everything related to Nature and Nurture, but hopefully will cover aspects I see as related to Yasik.

Historical/Political/ Economic Setting:

Parenting an Adopted Child reminds us “that children’s lives do not begin the day they are adopted.  Regardless of the type of adoption, children have biological relatives and genetic histories of their own”.[xviii]

History is the narrative of human experience in time and place.  I think you would have to read historical examinations of human experience like Steven Pinker’s The Better Angels of Our Nature or Hans Rosling’s Factfulness or Jennifer Traig’s Act Natural to appreciate what Dave and my human experience was/is in relation to our forebears’ human experience.  We lived on the edge of a metropolis both in New Westminster and then in Maple Ridge which meant job, mortgage, commute, local schooling, weekend social events like family picnics and soccer games within the context of a government that legislated in respect of BCers’ vote, tipping a bit to the left of center. Canada, or BC for that matter, were not turning toward an authoritarian regime that was Russia during Yeltsin’s time, the place of Yasik’s first four years.

We have, as I have mentioned often, only a bare history of his life in Russia, things adoptors are now heartily encouraged to check out, but we do know that his Russian environment was like that experienced by many of the worlds’ poorer, less developed countries. Russia’s reputation as a poor country is such a given assumption in the pool of common knowledge that even Jennifer Traig, in her book on hypochondria, Well Enough Alone, uses Russia as an example of somewhere you might expect to find people with bad teeth. She is writing of her own gray coloured tooth, and wonders how the tooth turned on her. “I’d known other people with discolored teeth, but they’d always had a story. They’d fallen face-first into a tree, or grown up in Russia”.[xix]

But on balance, this note from Marion Crook in Thicker Than Blood: adoptive parenting in the modern world:

Once I was dealing with quite a stupid prank one of my sons had managed to engineer, and my neighbour sympathized, “Well, it’s not your fault; he’s adopted.” 

I snapped, “And all four parents are thoroughly ashamed of him at the moment!”  How dare he imply my son’s heritage was inferior!“[xx]

While not denying the rich culture of Russia, a quickie googling will corroborate that ‘growing up in Russia’ is growing up in a country that slipped from super power in the early 90s, just as Yasik was being born, to the designation ‘developing country’ which by a Google definition means ‘low living standards, low per capita income, widespread poverty, and having underdeveloped industry and outdated infrastructure’. I will add a comment from Born For Love which is focusing on the conditions in Russia as they impact children raised in orphanages in Russia. Examining the period of Russian history from the fifteenth to the seventeenth centuries, Richard Hellie, a professor of history, ties that period of darkness to the present day as having “replicated itself as each generation continued to traumatize the next and build brains for reaction, not thought”.[xxi] Offering us some cultural preparation for our trip to Russia, our adoption facilitator, shrugged while warning us against smiling in public for “We [Russians] have unsolvable problems”.  Then again, Susan Wheeler says the non-smiling face is a mask, a street face.[xxii]

Coming into the world with a ‘traumatized brain’ is an existential concern for an orphanage-nurtured child and his or her adoptive parents. If a sense of hopelessness in the face of difficulty saturates a society, that hopelessness like smoke from a fire will find its way through the cracks in a child’s life, covering the child’s outlook on life in soot-black.  If the perception of life is based on insecurity and fear rather than love and hope, care-givers are not equipped to nurture in love, leaving the child with emotions regulated by fear, which continues the cycle begun so many centuries before.[xxiii]  We know that one care-giver at the orphanage shed tears as staff and children stood on the porch waving good-bye to Yasik.  Perhaps she gave him some consistent loving nurture. But was there enough consistent love to produce the oxytocin needed to develop a strong sense of safety and security in Yasik’s being?  Was he able to know a sense of calm when in a stressful situation? Time, with consistent care, is needed to build a strong awareness that is all is well in his world.  Studies have shown that even after three years in the adoptive home, children do not always show sufficient calmness via oxytocin and vasopressin to give them an adequate sense of security, even though the need for a consistent caregiver is by then being met.  And to repeat, the need is for consistent nurture, not, as studies have shown, necessarily only from the bio-mom. The infant only asks for consistency in nurture. When a baby cries and then cries some more but does not get a helpful response, the child the baby becomes, simply shuts down.[xxiv]

Referencing Bruce Perry in What Happened to You: “… early in life, the brain needs consistent, patterned experience to develop some key systems.”  Perry uses the example of exposing an infant to a language for 6 weeks, then changing the exposure to another language for six weeks and then on to another.  Then he says

This poor child will not speak any language at all…. [for] there were never sufficient repetitions with anyone language to properly organize the child’s full speech and language capability…. It’s the same with relationships.  [If the infant’s caregivers change often the] infant brain hasn’t sufficient repetitions with any single person to create the architecture that allows [the infant] to develop healthy relational neurobiology.

The key to having many healthy relationships [in a person’s] life is having only a few safe, stable, and nurturing relationships in [the person’s] first year.[xxv]

Perry also makes the following point: Even if it’s a really nice, respectful person entering the child’s life, it takes a long time for the child to make sense of the shift and get back to a calm, regulated state.[xxvi]

Considering that Yasik was given over to us with not one item he might have called his own, we can assume that he was living below the poverty line.  His parents had left him nothing; the orphanage would not let him take anything.  He was comfortable with that for he gave the toys we brought to the other children the night before, they said.  It is possible to wonder if Yasik was heartily encouraged to share the toys as others have noted that toys were well-monitored.  Again we also know that Yasik was a kind of ‘oldest child’, helping to dress and care for other children, particularly the little Down’s girl.

Adopting older children: a practical guide to adopting and parenting children over age four reminds adoptors: “Remember your child has gone through many losses; the loss of their biological family, the loss of caretakers and friends, the loss of culture, foods, familiar smells, sights etc. They are sometimes overwhelmed when they come to their new family and home…”[xxvii]

We flew back to Canada, and within two weeks, Yasik began life as a member of a family in the nineties whom economists define as “…families who had at least one-third of their income left after paying for necessities such as shelter, food, and clothing. This money is called discretionary income, or money that families can choose how to spend”.[xxviii]  So we were somewhere on the middle-class spectrum. Whether we actually had appreciable ‘discretionary income’ or not, we had enough to be free to choose to enjoy many of life’s good things.

But did that necessarily mean that Yasik had a sense of deprivation in the orphanage? Perhaps with nothing to compare and three squares a day, he was unconcerned about his economic state.  Yet as we packed for the return trip to Canada, we found he had been hiding his toys, a kind of hoarding common among institutionalized children, and it is safe to assume that he was not the only ‘social orphan’ (children placed in orphanages who are not orphans) in his orphanage. From time to time, Yasik may have witnessed children with material goods or some connection to money he may have understood was outside his hopes.  Could this also be some of why he was so willing to join himself to two strangers after less than 24 hours acquaintance? We do know this. As Daniel Gilbert reminds his readers in Stumbling On Happiness that while moving farther up the money scale doesn’t make a lot of happiness difference, coming out of desperate poverty increases a sense of happiness.[xxix]

Yasik defined his economic state this way: he said he got all he wanted one Christmas and then wished we were rich so he could get everything he wanted. What was that about I thought at the time.

And yeah, yeah, I know, all the adoption guides say don’t swamp him with stuff.

*End Notes at the bottom of Entry 12C

Entry #12B   Set and Setting

The Physical Setting: Yasik began life in an apartment in a small village, moving to a hospital around his first birthday.

By the time he was two he was living in an orphanage for young children.  Yaroslavl is an ancient town with a beautiful river running through, paved streets, and wonderful old buildings though the shops looked a bit like they were part of the scenery for an old time Western.  The orphanage seemed to be off a dirt road, back a bit of beyond. There was a piece at the side of the house that looked worn enough to likely have been a playground, reminding me of how Tony describes the playground of his orphanage in 1930s Saskatoon (A Canadian Story of Adoption in the 1930s).

A plane ride and he entered our 50s era home with a small backyard and not yet particularly kid enticing given that neither Dave nor I had yet given much thought to the yard.  But now we had Yasik: we had a yard; we needed to see what we could do.  Or Yasik very quickly, very naturally rearranged our thinking and awareness of what might please him.  Or we fell back on what our parents did with us. Whatever… the environment our house and yard offered became kid oriented.  We attempted some gardening, built igloos the odd year we had sufficient snowfall and played itsy-bitsy soccer on the front lawn. The house was tucked in among a string of streets trying to be a suburb but so infused with businesses and institutions that there was little point in denying it was part of a much larger urban setting, with cars everywhere. Nonetheless Yasik learned to ride a bike in the alley between our house and the Chevron station and biked on sidewalks running alongside a street that boasted 40,000 cars a day.

At the bottom of our little tree-lined street, on the other side of the river of traffic, the elementary school had the word ‘Community’ in its title and across from the school was a park with baseball diamonds, a swimming pool and even a creek bordered by trees and picnic tables. An hour or two out of town our bodies and minds could ‘heed the call of the wild’ with hiking or swimming in rain-forested provincial parks.

When the city began to feel just that, a city, we moved ‘out to the country’, the bedroom city of Maple Ridge, settling into a half-acre piece bordered by muskeg, bush, trees that fringed the coastal range circling the Fraser Valley.

The physical body Yasik inhabited: This is where it gets tricky between mindset and setting.  Yasik‘s genes are part of his mindset. They also contribute to his setting. Unfortunately we know very little about his genes. We have never seen a picture of Yasik’s bio parents though Facebook and his sister offer some awareness of his bio family.

As our doctor surmised, Yasik came into our family physically fit, perhaps, the doctor suggested, because he’d built up a strong immunity to childhood diseases in his orphanage. Yasik was growing, pink cheeked and fortunately or unfortunately, depending on which member of the family you asked, unable to miss much school time due to illness.  Yasik, with his button nose and soft blond hair, also came into the family with personal cuteness and physical and spatial skills – prowess in sports.

Both Yasik’s cuteness and physical skill are shared by his sister, giving us some sense of the genetic offering of his Slavic parents and grandparents.  Whatever the combination is for cuteness, it can come in handy.

Cuteness is the signal nature sends to us that says that a creature is young, vulnerable and needs nurturing.  Seeing cuteness is usually pleasurable and cues us to interact positively with children and young animals.  Because cuteness can be such a great source of pleasure – hence the popularity of internet kittens and puppies – it can be used to help children (and adults) manage stress and soothe themselves.[xxx]

Yasik was cute enough that on a pumpkin patch trip he so mesmerized the staff they end up leaving another child in the field, but they certainly had lots of pictures of Yasik and the pumpkins which in this case did not ‘manage stress’ or ‘soothe’ the other child’s mother.

Maurice Mierau and his wife were told something similar by one of the women at the boys’ Ukrainian nursery: “Your boys are so good-looking, and that’s an asset in life, you know”.[xxxi] Mierau felt encouraged by the comment.  It seems we adoptors also feel some comfort when it is suggested that our adopted child bears some resemblance to us.  John Brooks and his wife wanted their girl to think she looked like Brook’s mother as a young girl.[xxxii] Dave and I preened a bit too when our adoption facilitator noted that Yasik looked him and that Yasik had my eyes.  Did she really see resemblance or was that a tool in an adoption facilitator’s kit?  One of the tools to help normalize adoption as family.

But put bluntly, for Yasik, cuteness was not enough to draw his biological father and mother to dote on him. Nor was the fact that he had been put together with genes from their parents’ and themselves.  Much of the recipe that produced his genes will likely never be known, but from the bit of report we have had access to and the way his face is mirrored in his siblings, there can be no doubt he was their biological child. Yet we know that he was found in a bed, unattended as an infant. Our child carried their genes and experienced their lack of nurture. The early, caring nurture that helps a child develop resistance to stress and encouragement of the growth hormone was lacking for Yasik. We would be parenting a child bearing the expression of genes that were developed over generations of oppression and whose infancy was soaking in that atmosphere.

I see no reason to do other than leave this section with the following two paragraphs.

…[I]f stressful events occurred during certain trigger periods in a child’s life, they would leave an epigenetic imprint on that child’s genes.  These trigger periods, though consistent, were not cut and dried across the entire population of the study.  Rather, they were highly dependent on the gender of both the affected child and his or her parent.  The parent’s gender determined the time at which their stressful experience had the most bearing on the methylation patterns present in their children.  For mothers, the period was during their child’ infancy.  Mothers who reported experiencing a great deal of stress when their children were just babies – be it from losing a job, relationship trouble, or grieving the loss of a loved one – had children who displayed a distinct and unconventional pattern of methylation in certain target genes.  Fathers produced a different but no less distinct methylation pattern, but only when stress during their children’s preschool years, and only in their daughters. Sons showed no abnormal patterns of methylation regardless of their father’s stress patterns.  Mothers, on the other hand, impacted the methyl patterns of their sons and daughter equally.[xxxiii]

…For instance, early brain growth depends in part on diet, with the consumption of high-quality proteins having a significant effect.  Brain growth slows and complexity advances less if an infant or toddler is deprived of protein. The poorly nourished child’s head circumference is abnormally small, compared with other, better-fed children of the same chronological age. During the first three years or so, the problematic development of the malnourished child can be corrected to some extent if the child is given a better diet, with milk, meat, eggs, or other good protein sources included. Catch-up growth can then help bring the brain closer to normal size, although the child’s stature may always be short. However, delaying the improved diet until the child is 6 years old will not have the same effect.  Although formerly malnourished child will have better general health with more protein in the diet, brain size will remain small, and poor intellectual functions will be apparent.[xxxiv]

Cultural Setting: Culture is about social organization: our language, symbols or codes and behaviours and institutions, values, ideas or beliefs and artifacts demonstrated by religion, food, clothing, marriage arrangements, music, literature and art, customs, ceremonies or rituals we choose to incorporate into our lives for cohesion in a group.

We never gave it any conscious thought, but we were going to be actively turning Yasik into a little Canadian.  If you had asked us point blank, we would have assured you that we were going to honour Yasik’s Russian culture, I guess by going to Russian meet-ups and by eating piroshkies, but in reality – likely again because we gave no conscious thought to what retaining Russian culture might mean – we were going to be turning Yasik into a Canadian with little pretense of retaining his Russian culture.

Language: adopting older children: a practical guide to adopting and parenting children over age four may be practical in its advice on many issues relating to adopting older children, but slipping in a little suggestion like “Also, perhaps learn his native language before you bring him home…”[xxxv] might be a bit over the top. To learn the child’s native language requires some serious investment preparatory to getting an invitation that may only arrive 6 weeks before the adoptors are expected to fly over to another country to adopt a child. Yasik, thanks to Forest Gump (and yes, other sources), was operating in English within months as is often noted in adoption advice books, assuring adoptors that most adoptees quickly slip into their new language. Hidden Potential: the science of achieving greater things by Adam Grant suggests that “kids tend to absorb foreign languages faster than adults.” Their brains enjoy more plasticity, less prior knowledge to convolute and little to no fear of making mistakes (55). Dave and I, with at best 10 Russian words between us, only remember having fun with his renditions of words, like “sillyphone” for telephone.  We saw no bother on his face when we giggled at his chatter.  We did not look for a school offering weekend lessons in Russian.   And yes, long term and for that matter even short term, that was/is a loss for Yasik.  If at some point in his life he has the opportunity to spend time with his half-brother and half-sister in Russia, any connection of depth will be hampered by the need for a translator.

Much adoption literature, perhaps more ‘practical’ in this regard, notes that most adoptees will become comfortable with the language of their adoption within months of arrival. The time also came when he was quite certain he did not remember any Russian, although my brother-in-law maintains a fantasy that he heard teenage Yasik talking up some visiting, and very pretty, Russian girls at a hockey game.

Religion:  Yasik may have had some experience with the Russian Orthodox church. Dave and I, like many Canadians of our generation, had moved away from organized religion into a less belief in God.  Some of this generation move back into religion for a stable social world for their children but we could not see any viable reason to make such a choice.  We played together on Sundays.

Food and Clothing: We did try here for a while, at least until macaroni and wieners and MacDonald’s got a hold of his tummy.  Our friend, Tony, directed us to some sausage shops and a store that made great piroshkies.  Clothing was pretty much jeans, T-shirts and hoodies across the globe so that was never an issue.

Music, Art, Literature: Dave worked on art with a motorcycle focus; I read where ever my current interests took me.  Neither Dave nor I have the sense of holiness that Europeans seem to have for art and literature. It should also be noted that we had no idea what stories, fairy tales had been told or read to Yasik in the orphanage though my orphanage interview notes say he liked to be read to and learned poems by heart.  Someone was taking time with him.  Yasik was given a Pushkin story before we left Russia; we were scarcely aware of who Pushkin was to Russia.  Because we had little idea of these aspects of Russian culture, beyond a beginner’s understanding of art and literature, and did not sign Yasik up for weekend classes, he had almost no exposure to things Russian. Acknowledging this, we may be coming off as intransigent boors with our lack of engagement in Yasik’s culture. Still with maybe a slight shrug, I can comfortably note that soon Yasik was collecting Pokemon cards, not more Pushkin.  Besides which Attaching in Adoption: practical tools for today’s parents[xxxvi] notes that Russian children have been told things like: “Close your eyes at night or the witches will come to peck them out“.  Not so different from our “The boogie man will get you“.

We were told he was attuned to music, but the orphanage staff did not elaborate other than to encourage us to put him in music classes.  We did that.  As these classes advanced, they were more and more directed to classical piano.  By the age of 12, Yasik was pleading to be freed of them although it could be argued that he started to give strong hints almost from the start as he flopped his head down on the piano keys and moaned.  He wanted music but whatever the radio gave him of top 40 to bounce and chant along with in sounds perhaps between Russian and English. Maurice Mierau’s youngest did the same, making “tuneless word-sounds that were neither English nor Ukrainian”.[xxxvii] Be that as it may, Dave and Yasik were listening to a CD while driving somewhere one day.  Dave noticed Yasik in tears and parked, pulling Yasik into his arms.  Yasik broke into serious sobs even though Dave assured him it was only a song.  That was the power of music for him.

Traditions, Customs, Ceremonies, Rituals: adopting older children: a practical guide to adopting and parenting children over age four[xxxviii] provides a list of suggestions for how adoptive parents might encourage a child’s cultural heritage.  I am including the list as different strokes for different folks. I know I would have loved to have been able to take Yasik to visit Russia.  And we always encouraged friendships with people from Russia whenever we encountered them.  Russian food was just fine with us but that was about the extent of our encouragement of a maintenance of Yasik’s origin culture.

The suggestions:

• Send your child to a culture camp where he can meet other children adopted from his birth country
• Participate in a homeland tour arranged by some adoption agencies or visit your child’s home country
• Spend time in a part of your city where there is a large population of people who share your child’s cultural background
• Connect your child with a friend or friend or mentor who shares his cultural heritage
• Reserve one night of the week for cooking and ordering ethnic food your child enjoys
• Learn your child’s language while he learns yours
• Decorate your room child’s room with items, designs and pictures from his native country
• Do cultural arts and crafts projects
• Go to museums that feature art or artifacts from your child’s native country or that focus on your child’s ethnic or cultural history
• Attend cultural parades or events
• Listen to culturally relevant music
• Celebrate holidays native to your child’s culture or that focus on a historical event important to his community of origin
• Buy him culturally relevant toys, story books, music, cookbooks, clothes, literature and other age-appropriate items
• Attend salons or barbershops that cater to your child’s race or culture of origin
• Expose your child to different faiths or attend religious services at a house of worship with which your child is comfortable
• Speak frankly about historical and present discrimination and prejudice
• Create a cultural life book with your child that explores his cultural and family history

We celebrated Christmas on December 25, not January 7, the Russian Christmas, and had fun or slept in on most of the rest of Canada’s statutory holidays. We did not at the time go out of our way to learn about the cultural world we had taken Yasik from.  The organization we adopted with offered continued Russian connection, but other than one or two visits, we did not maintain this connection.  Yasik showed little interest and Dave and I are not extroverted enough to seek out those kinds of social events.

And we were not particularly unusual in our casual attitude to Yasik’s heritage.  John Brooks in The Girl Behind the Door:

Casey never showed much curiosity during [conversations about her origin story].  She never asked about her birth mother, whether she had siblings or who her birth father could have -been.  Much to [her Polish-origin adoptive mother’s] dismay, she had little interest in Polish culture, never watched the hours of video [her adoptive parents] shot during [their] trip [to adopt her in Poland], and when asked if she wanted to meet her birth mother someday waved [them] off, annoyed…. As time passed, the orphanage became a distant memory.  [The adoptive father] hoped it had been completely erased from Casey’s consciousness.  She was a member of [their] family now – no different from a biological child in [their] minds …. [They] even tried to convince her she looked just like [the adoptive father’s] mother as a young girl…. But in truth, [they] had no idea how [their] words resonated in her sharp little mind.[xxxix]

We cannot be certain we are making the best long-term decisions when we don’t offer more access to our child’s first culture. Maurice Mierau, in Detachment: an adoption memoir writes that he and his wife enrolled their children in a Ukrainian language nursery school for a few of months and took them to a Ukrainian store for goodies.[xl] But quickly the couple were introducing birthday parties, celebrated with their Ukrainian speaking babysitter and several Ukrainian friends and buying goofy outfits for Halloween.[xli]   “The only religion in [their] house since the boys arrived was Star Wars”.[xlii]  Within a year of their adoption, the younger son thought of Ukraine as part of a long distant babyhood and the older son said he wanted to be a Canadian.[xliii]

Nonetheless Mierau’s older son, who was adopted at 5, had no memories from before his life in an orphanage yet “he’d told [his adoptive parents] about a dream that seemed to go further back”.[xliv] In the dream an image approaches the child whom he believes is his mother but this image vanishes when the child tries to come closer to it. Would more connection to the culture of origin have helped the boy gain a sense of contact with the past?

End Notes at the bottom of Entry #12C

Entry #12C   Set and Setting

Social Setting: If this refers to our community or relationships with others, Yasik as a school-aged child, led us into most of our social engagement outside of family. We three were Caucasian, each with at least some eastern European genes; Dave and Yasik are males and I am a female; Dave and I are Canadian born and Yasik is naturalized.  Yasik and I have a large age difference but Dave and Yasik are fairly appropriately spaced.   Dave and I, with some post-secondary education, were working to hold on to a yet tenuous grasp of the middle class. These parts of each of us fit us into certain societal slots. We would want to find a social setting that would accommodate our comfort levels. Or so you would think.  Yet we were almost irrevocably part of a community based mostly on the decision to buy a house within our means found for us by a realtor who was the son of a friend of our friend. He showed us two houses: this one looked cuter than the other. Decision made.  Let the impacts of social interaction begin.

Yasik’s community school was a block away and most of his classmates lived within walking distance of the school.  Day upon day, walking him to school we came to know the other mothers, fathers and caregivers walking his classmates to school.  First a tentative nod, then a ‘Hi.” And then “Hey, can Yasik come over to play?” and the doors were swung wide open to our little community. We signed him up for the T-ball and soccer clubs.  Some of his classmates were on his team. Quite naturally, these kids became his playmates and standing on the sidelines or waiting for the kids after school, the kids’ parents became our playmates.  The thing about these social relationships is that they are most often ad hoc.  There is little to no opportunity to review resumes, ensure that we are leaving our child in the best of hands, filtering out characters or the impacts of characters who may not share all of our values.

Relationships: Dave and I thought of ourselves as partners, rather than in a hierarchical relationship, forming a nuclear family which Google calls ‘a group of people who are united by ties of partnership and parenthood and consisting of a pair of adults and their socially (sounds like a loaded adverb) recognized children’.  Yasik chinked into that assumption when almost from Day 2, he assigned us the traditional roles, taking ‘Nyet’ from Dave, cuddling into me.  We wondered if such a role assignment was wise – but for whatever reason, in the journal – as a 3^rd day parent- I write “we want to argue roles but they are still there; why did he assign roles that way? We may believe we have a more liberal or sophisticated view of Ma and Pa in parenting but it would appear we are building on ancient structures that remain part of our thinking”. Did Yasik want us to maintain some image he had of a papa and mama? Or maybe it is simply some personality vibe we gave off and he responded to for, though I cannot be certain, from two years old to life with us, his caregivers were likely all female, allowing for little opportunity to see how the male role played out.  What does this mean for single parents or same sex parents? Do they too have to work through some pre-conceived image the child has of parental roles? (I have just begun to read Lesbian and Gay Foster Care and Adoption 2nd ed. by Stephen Hicks and Janet McDermott which almost from the start begins to consider this question).

Via school and neighbourhood, Yasik made buddies. For parents this can be a two-edged sword.   Yasik loved to play with the kids, free time for us. I suppose a ‘Yipppee!’ and ‘Goodie!’ might have erupted from time to time in our thoughts as friends begin to tip the scale in their favour over time with parents. One year in a DIY bid, Dave bought a pair of clippers and gave Yasik a buzz cut – I think the one and only, but visions of dollars saved were dancing in Dave’s head. Yasik looked like a miniature Dave, but big whoop.  After the cut, Dave told Yasik to go look in the mirror.  Yasik looked and let out a mighty wail.  “Dad, nobody will know my name”. Sooner than an adoptor of an older child might want, attachments were expanding and shifting.

Meaning there are negotiations to be made.  It could be said interacting in your community is learning to swim in life’s community pool.  Mostly it was fun to be with the kids, but it meant struggles too.  Each of us parents benefit by the de facto babysitting but we are uncomfortable with our child being watched over in play over by another parent who may have no problem with yelling at the kid or smoking around them, or with seeing our child bested by another.  We may want to helicopter parent when letting well enough alone leads to growth in confidence.  It is a gamble between stepping in to fight our children’s battles or holding our breath and allowing them to work it out on their own.   For the most part we let Yasik work it out, checking on him after the fact.

At Yasik’s eighth birthday I noticed him laughing that covering, defensive, too loud laugh he used when his two main buddies bugged him and he got upset and rightly so.  One of the two would needle just to get a rise (in fairness the little needler was dealing with family issues too). I asked Yasik how he felt about it and he said it got him, so I said, “Just laugh.” (Duh, that is what he was doing) and he said, “It gets in my head” – meaning it made him angry before he could stop it.  I was impressed with his self-awareness.

And while these encounters may have started a learning process in relationships, I do think for Yasik,already aware as an adoptee that he perceived himself and was perceived by those around him as different, a kind of lessness was also being developed.  (I am currently reading Hidden Daughter-Secret Sister by Kim Mooney (23), Bitterroot: a Salish memoir of transracial adoption by Susan Devan Harness and Monstrous: a transracial adoption story by Sarah Myer, all of which speak to the sense of differentness and lessness.  Adoption Unfiltered: revelations from adoptees, birth parents, adoptive parents, and allies by Sara Easterly, Kelsey Vander Vliet Ranyard, Lori Holden call it a “sense of separateness” (60). (If these suggestions are not enough, then my page on ‘Books I have read’ will offer a good number more books with this message).

I took Yasik and his buddies to Lazer Tag one evening and Yasik – though no one expected it when they should have as he often did so – got the highest scores. He shot people well. In a group including adults he came in second and the young braggarts in his group came quite last.  He was that way in baseball too – consistently doing well – not in fits and spurts of glory. At the end of one season in soccer Yasik got carried off the field like a somewhat shocked but very happy hero.   Yet the myth of his lessness persisted.

While playing lacrosse after school with The Two, Yasik’s primary buddies, the ‘who-gets-to-be-on-which-team’, a learning hurdle so many children have to face, became the lesson of the day. Number One as usual took the lead in choosing whom he saw as the better players, first inserting himself in the important position. Yasik would not contend the setup, slipping immediately into second place but mentally focusing on his anger or hurt or revenge and seeking to get even.  In this case, checking in frustration, not Number One, but Number Two in an unfair way. I made Yasik stop immediately and took them all home. Number One ran to tell his dad with Number Two following.  I assured the father I was dealing with it but before I had begun meting out punishment, Yasik stepped forward to apologize to Number Two of his own volition. Number Two, always a peace maker, returned the apology, maybe realizing that because Number One had to head to hockey practice now, they would only have each other to play with.

The ‘who-gets-to-be-on-which-team’ lesson surfaced again for Yasik the next week at school.  Yasik was faced with the ignominy of once again not being chosen for the favoured team.  Whatever revenge Yasik sought to enact, when Dave came to pick him up at school, he was told Yasik had been made to ‘stay after school’.  We all know what that phrase means. Dave went to the classroom to get Yasik. Upon seeing him, Yasik started crying hysterically. The school authorities figured he had been punished enough. Talking it over later that evening, Dave and I decided he had too much competitive tension and wanted the school to redirect him from Mr. Number One, Mr. Number Two and Mr. Number Three triangles.  He was handling his pressures with explosions, and we were hoping to show him alternatives. In a social circle of great importance to a school-aged child, one that encompasses after-school playtime, soccer teams and social interaction between the adults attached, it is difficult to find other options, factoring in that these kids see each other as each other’s best options for great times together.

Again the question: Is it such a big deal?  Jennifer Traig cites a study that found that siblings argue 3.5 times per hour, 80% of the time over toys.  (Incidentally, and likely part of being in Phase VI – joining in and finding my place- on child development registers, parents get to be the issue only 9% of the time- see the Physiological section below).[xlv]

Julie Lythcott-Haims, in How to Raise an Adult: break free from the overparenting trap and prepare your child for success, (Holt Paperbacks, 2016, 23,24), says

Sometimes kids are bullies…. When bullying happens, kids need parents and other advocates to help them disentangle themselves from it and recover….

But as Susan Porter wrote in Bully Nation, in a lot of situations we parents label something a bully incident when it’s a normal passage through child development and socialization…. Porter encourages parents and educators to avoid the bully label and instead help children  develop the resilience needed to handle the harsh social challenges of life.

…True bullying — intentionally disempowering or isolating individuals and systematically demeaning and hurting them over a period of time.

(Incidentally, Alexander McCall Smith, in The Sweet Remnants of Summer, Chapter 8, offers a nice example for how to handle the tricky uncertainty of fault assignment in children’s squabbles.)

But then via bullying or not, if a sense of lessness becomes a worm embedding in a child’s already weak sense of self, then what?  

The idea of lessness (it is tempting to suggest the term ‘marginalized’) was also fertilized by adult opinion.  Yasik had listened in on enough conversations to know he was different in his birth narrative, in his shortness, in his struggles with learning.  And at times it got capped off by adults like his soccer coach who, Yasik’s skill to the side, wouldn’t let him be goalie because of his height, again letting him know he was coming up short (I couldn’t let that one go).

I am going to look at the adoption narrative more specifically here as a mindset or perception factor. My earliest journal entries note that Yasik’s explanation of his story showed that almost from the beginning he was working on his story. While he thought he came from the moon, he would for a time also refer to his arrival in Canada as “when I was born”. He told us that there are kids who come from mom’s tummy and kids who are picked kids. But at the same time, because he knew I could not have any more kids and we have to assume he was hoping for a sibling, he suggested that maybe Dad could have a girl. At other times he said he liked being an only child.   The one certainty is that we cannot deny he had family narratives for relationships on his mind from almost the beginning.

Being four and half at the time of his adoption, he knew he was different, that parts of him belonged to someplace else.  The other kids in his class had narratives of life with their parents before kindergarten.  No surprise then when that one question belonging only to non-biological families, the ‘real’ parent issue, came up rather early as well, so we talked.

One day he made it clear that he was aware of his differences from his buddies with the blunt and direct, “You aren’t my real parents.” 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.

There were no blatant physical differences between Yasik, Dave and I as Susanne Antonetta has experienced with her Korean born son, but the baseline experiences of the ‘real’ parent issue are the same. I will paraphrase some of her experience with ‘The Question’ and then encourage you to read make me a mother.[xlvi]

Around the same age that Yasik was beginning to piece a narrative of his story together, Antonetta’s son, Jin, was also working out how he came to be. It was hard for Jin to accept the story, though true, but the explanation was given to him in an age-appropriate narrative: “For him, it’s hard to understand being flown somewhere to be given to two strangers, however good everyone’s intentions.” But for the most part Jin did not seem to be giving too much thought to his adoption says Antonetta although she wondered if he “struggled with something I could not put my hands on to fix.”

Antonetta and her husband did follow one of the top ten guidelines for adoptors: Be open about the adoption; answer your child’s questions. She adds something interesting to this advice: Because her son had heard that babies come from mommies’ tummies, she thought her son likely “heard the story with the coda of the tummy belonging to another woman”. When Jin was eight, he began to ask about his bio-mom, telling Antonetta that thinking of her made him feel sad. He told her he thought it was unfair that he didn’t even know what she looked like.

Antonetta’s response was likely the response of most caring adoptors: “I hadn’t expected it all to be so hopelessly confusing”. She sought to draw him closer but sensed his uncertainty, however vague.

One particular instance of the awareness of difference that tends to call up the sense of lessness came when she and Jin were playing together at a park. Antonetta had gone for her bag and returned to where Jin was playing to find him being questioned and taunted by some young boys.  Seeing her ‘Caucasianness’ and his ‘Asianness’ they asked why Jin was with her and then asked if he was an orphan, following the question by then throwing the word “Orphan!” at him. Antonetta had been expecting to deal at some point with the question of adoption and the differences that come with it, but she was unprepared for it happening in an arena of being bullied for the differences.  Jin actually thought the bullies would not have made a scene if they had not seen the racial differences between herself and her son.  She says of the experience:

He was in a rage at me.  He couldn’t forgive me for having been with him, for being who I was. He cried and repeated that I should have just stayed away from him, all the way home. I hurt for him. I hurt in a way that ripped me apart….

Dave told Yasik of his own adoption and then told Yasik he has a bio-brother, bio-sisters and a bio-parent set. Dave explained that probably money problems are why his bio-mother left him in the orphanage. Dave then reaffirmed that Yasik was all ours and we were his now. We also talked about the orphanage, telling him all of the scant story as we knew it then. About all we could do at the time was to be sure that the questions were answered as satisfactorily as possible hoping that he still felt secure.  At the time I wrote: “some [of that sense of security] can’t happen – he is divided but may it never destroy his spirit”.  And when you think of what I have just recorded from Susanne Antonetta’s book, you have to wonder how Yasik was receiving the narrative we were presenting to him.

Of course, being a kid, he used the narrative too at times.  Dave had a shift and was juggling, just once I might add, getting a babysitter for Yasik. He responded by becoming frustrated and obstinate, saying to me, “Why is it parents are meaner to kids who have a different beginning and come from a different place?” Attaching in Adoption: practical tools for today’s parents suggests feelings like this may come from the fear of losing another parent and advises against too much daycare until the child has a sense of security within the family.[xlvii]   So let me repeat in our defense, our memory is that we called in a babysitter once for our disgruntled son.

Others in the community pool of life that Yasik was learning to swim in: teachers, coaches, music teachers, parents of buddies, friend of ours, each was impacting his environment, influencing his spirit, mind and body in not only big ways, but often in almost imperceptible ways. Yasik and I were watching a video sent home with him from school about a snowman who takes a little boy and flies away with him to a snow land.  Yasik said, “Mom I didn’t know snow persons could fly”.  I almost corrected it to ‘snowman’ and then realized he’d been taught to be politically correct.

Psychological Setting(though most often considered mindset): Psychology has to do with theories about how our actions communicate with our thinking and feeling.  Very specifically, for our adoptive family, whether we were aware of it yet or not, we were living the realities of Attachment Theory (which I will save for a dedicated post).

We were doing so, not with an infant, but with a child who was chronologically at a stage of development where normally separation from caregivers is less stressful as children begin to look beyond the home to their community, school life and group activities with peers[xlviii].  Deborah Gray, a clinical social worker widely respected in adoption counseling and writer of Attaching in Adoption: practical tools for today’s parents calls this phase in childhood development, ‘Phase VI – joining in and finding my place’.[xlix] Children whose early years were well-nurtured, she says, now between the ages of six and eleven in this part of their journey toward personal identity, are interested in being part of a team or group, all the experiences Yasik, as noted in the Social section, was becoming part of.

A child raised in an orphanage, (see Orphanage Risk Factors) positively or otherwise, may move into this stage much earlier for the expectation of support from the child’s adult caregivers would too often have been thwarted. Peers as parents in early childhood is dealt with often in writing about institutionalized children.  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. The orphanage is described as a “baby warehouse”.  In eight-hour shifts children received about 15 minutes of individual staff care.

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 damage such severe deprivation can cause.[l]

But then again, having only minutes with adults perhaps is why Yasik, like Maurice Mierau’s children, liked taking medicine or going to the doctor the few times he needed to go.  Neither of Mierau’s children in Detachment: an adoption memoir 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”.[li]

That little inserted bit is, of course, tongue in cheek. In harsh reality, lacking peers or unresponsive caregivers, what does the child do?  Like 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. An unnurtured child will find ways to take care of his or her own nurture.  Yasik would hum along to music or rock himself. Because he continued to rock himself for most of his first year in our family, we assume he developed rocking, as did many children in orphanage care for their early years, to self soothe.

These interactions become their expression of their understanding of parenting, developing out of whatever they can hobble together to cope with their emotions and desires.  The adults are on the periphery like overseeing, but emotionally detached butlers to their needs.

The question then is to what extent does such parenting ‘mitigate some of the damage such severe deprivation can cause’?

Yasik was denied nurturing bonding with a special and consistent someone or someones in his infancy within his biological family’s home, in the hospital, as well as, in his orphanage. It is safe to assume, that Yasik too was prematurely turning to peers in the absence of adult interaction. Deborah Gray, in Attaching in Adoption, goes on to focus on what Phase VI may also mean for adoptees given that now children in general are seeking to fit in.  In this phase they may want to separate themselves from the aspects of their person that make them different from their group. But what does that mean if a child has entered Phase VI prematurely as he or she has learned to turn for support to other children when looking to satisfy emotional needs and perceptions of the world? 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. What understanding and expectations does the child now have for family and friends as he or she begins to branch out or widen his or her social circle?  This is where most adoption studies look to explanations in studies based in Attachment Theory with its types of attachment.

Yasik, placed in kindergarten just weeks after becoming part of our family, soon made it known that he no longer wanted to look at pictures of his orphanage playmates, nor did he want to attend any more ‘Russian adoptee meet-ups’ arranged to continue contact with his first culture and identity.  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 on a chart of child development.

According to the chart he should be, at the age of six, more interested in his peers, authority figures at school and on his teams than with his parents.  Yasik seemed to be keeping in step with the stages of childhood development.  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, 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”.[lii]

Spiritual Setting: Dave and I each had religious backgrounds that left us at this stage in our lives with a belief in a loosely defined higher power.  We prayed but we did not observe religious dictates.  We encouraged Yasik to pray to ‘Dear God’ until likely he let us know he no longer wanted to pray with us.  We encouraged a firm belief in Santa and the Tooth Fairy. At five Yasik and I were out sledding and saw a man dressed as Santa sneaking around the side of a house.  We hurried home to get ready for when Santa got down to our block. But as the years went by Yasik began testing Santa’s telepathy by keeping his wants from us.  We went to great lengths to outsmart him at that point.  But the time came when magic and reality started to argue for Santa got a Gameboy mixed up.  And we forgot to replace a tooth with money.  That one last time, we put 46 cents under his pillow the next night and told him the tooth fairy went cheap because it was irritated with his lack of faith.

Thus far, it seems to me the biggest take-away is the search for homeostasis.  Yasik’s perception of his setting, with the assistance of his genetics, was directed, as is true of each human being, however positively or otherwise, toward homeostasis. Yasik’s adaptations to his environment were making use of cuteness, hoarding, peer parenting, singing, rocking, choosing the interests of his peers in his neighbourhood over those of the peers he left behind in Russia, Pokémon over Pushkin, finding both appropriate and inappropriate ways to contain his frustrations and hurts, making sure he got the right haircut, building a birth narrative, all to keep himself feeling O.K. according to the mindset he had at the time.

End Notes

[i] Traig, Jennifer. Act Natural: a cultural history of misadventures in parenting. Ecco, 2019, Pxii.

[ii] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/There_are_unknown_unknowns

[iii] Saturday Night Live. Oct. 06, 2007 hosted by Seth Rogan. The opening skit was a spoof of Kevin Federline, a Britanny Spears’ ex after gaining custody of his kids.

[iv] Belsky, Jay, Avshalom Caspi, Terrie E. Moffitt, and Richie Poulton.  The Origins of You: how childhood shapes later life.  Harvard University, 2020, 95.

[v] Lachman, Gary. The Return of Holy Russia: apocalyptic history, mystical awakening, and the struggle for the soul of the world. Inner Traditions, 2020.

[vi] Maté, Gabor with Daniel Mate.  The Myth of Normal: trauma, illness & healing in a toxic culture. Knopf
Canada, 2022, 179.

[vii] 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, 89.

[viii] Hurst, Kiley, Dana Bragg, Shannon Greenwood, Chris Baronavski and Micheal Keegan.  How Today’s Parents Say Their Approach to Parenting Does – or Doesn’t- Match Their Own Upbringing  https://www.pewresearch.org/social-trends/2023/01/24/how-today’s parents-say-their-approach-to-parenting-does-or-doesn’t-match-their-own-upbringing/

[ix] Lancaster, Kathy, PhD. Parenting An Adopted Child,2^nd ed.  Barrons Educational Series, Inc., 2009, 6.

[x] Simon, Scott. Baby We Were Meant For Each Other: in praise of adoption. Random House, 2010, 45.

[xi] Peterson, Jordan B. Rules for Life: an antidote to chaos. Random House Canada, 2018.

[xii] https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/2050324516683325

[xiii] Letourneau, Dr. Nicole with Justin Joschko. Scientific Parenting: what science revels about parental influence. Dundurn Press, 2013, 56,57,70,34,35.

[xiv] Heat Moon, William Least. Blue Highways. Eine Reise in Amerika. https://www.goodreads.com/work/quotes/1383812-blue-highwasy-a-journey-into-america

[xv] Mukherjee, Siddhartha. The Gene: an intimate history. Scribner, 2016, 368-9.

[xvi] Mukherjee, Siddhartha. The Gene: an intimate history. Scribner, 2016, 481.

[xvii] Maté, Gabor with Daniel Mate. The Myth of Normal: trauma, illness & healing in a toxic culture. Knopf Canada, 2022, 241-243.

[xviii] Lancaster, Kathy, PhD. Parenting an Adopted Child, 2^nd ed.  Barrons Educational Series, Inc., 2009, 37.

[xix] Traig, Jennifer. Well Enough Alone: a cultural history of my hypochondria. Riverhead Books, 2008, 163.

[xx] Crook, Marion. Thicker than Blood: adoptive parenting in the modern world. Arsenal Pulp Press, 2016, 131.

[xxi] Szalavitz, Maia & Bruce D. Perry, MD, PhD. Born For Love: why empathy is essential – and endangered. William Morrow, 2010, 119.

[xxii] Wheeler, Susan. Mud and Stars: travels in Russia with Pushkin, Tolstoy, and other geniuses of the Golden Age.  Pantheon, 2019, 59.

[xxiii] Gray, Deborah D. Attaching in Adoption: practical tools for today’s parents. Jessica Kingsley Publishers, 2002, 275.

[xxiv] Szalavitz, Maia & Bruce D. Perry, MD, PhD. Born For Love: why empathy is essential – and endangered. Willliam Morrow, 2010, 65-66, 127.

[xxv] Winfrey, Oprah, Bruce D. Perry. What Happened to You: conversations on trauma, resilience, and healing. Flat Iron Books: An Oprah Book, 2021, 164.

[xxvi] Winfrey, Oprah, Bruce D. Perry. What Happened to You: conversations on trauma, resilience, and healing. Flat Iron Books: An Oprah Book, 2021, 36.

[xxvii] Bosco-Ruggiero, MA, Gloria Russo Wassell, MS, LLMHC and Victor Groza, PhD. Adopting older children: a practical guide to adopting and parenting children over age four. New Horizon Press,2014, 65.

[xxviii] “What defines Middle Class these Days in Canada?” Published by Captain Cash/Financial/https://captaincash.ca/blog/the-canadian-middle-class-where-do-you-fit-in/

[xxix] Gilbert, Daniel. Stumbling on HAPPINESS. Vintage Canada,2006, 239.

[xxx] 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, 369-370.

[xxxi] Mierau, Maurice. Detachment: an adoption memoir. Freehand Books, 2014, 103.

[xxxii] Brooks, John. The Girl Behind the Door: a father’s quest to understand his daughter’s suicide. Scribner, 2016, 56.

[xxxiii]Letourneau, Dr. Nicole with Justin Joschko. Scientific Parenting: what science revels about parental influence. Dundurn Press, 2013, 173.

[xxxiv] Mercer, Jean. Thinking Critically About CHILD DEVELOPMENT: examining myths & misunderstandings, 3^rd ed.  Sage Publications, 2016, 156.

[xxxv] Bosco-Ruggiero, MA, Gloria Russo Wassell, MS, LLMHC and Victor Groza, PhD. Adopting older children: a practical guide to adopting and parenting children over age four. New Horizon Press, 2014, 64.

[xxxvi] Gray, Deborah D. Attaching in Adoption: practical tools for today’s parents. Jessica Kingsley Publishers, 2002, 151.

[xxxvii] Mierau, Maurice. Detachment: an adoption memoir. Freehand Books, 2014, 102,103.

[xxxviii] Bosco-Ruggiero, MA, Gloria Russo Wassell, MS, LLMHC and Victor Groza, PhD. Adopting older children: a practical guide to adopting and parenting children er age four. New Horizon Press,2014, 82.

[xxxix] Brooks, John. The Girl Behind the Door: a father’s quest to understand his daughter’s suicide. Scribner, 2016, 55,56.

[xl] Mierau, Maurice. Detachment: an adoption memoir. Freehand Books, 2014, 103.

[xli] Mierau, Maurice. Detachment: an adoption memoir. Freehand Books, 2014, 131.

[xlii] Mierau, Maurice. Detachment: an adoption memoir. Freehand Books, 2014, 161.

[xliii] Mierau, Maurice. Detachment: an adoption memoir. Freehand Books, 2014, 133.

[xliv] Mierau, Maurice. Detachment: an adoption memoir. Freehand Books, 2014, 176.

[xlv] Traig, Jennifer. Act Natural: a cultural history of misadventures in parenting. Ecco, 2019, 180.

[xlvi] Antonetta, Susanne. make me a mother: a memoir. WW Norton, 2014, 135-142.

[xlvii] Gray, Deborah D. Attaching in Adoption: practical tools for today’s parents. Jessica Kingsley Publishers, 2002, 34.

[xlviii] Mercer, Jean. Thinking Critically About CHILD DEVELOPMENT: examining myths & misunderstandings, 3^rd ed.  Sage Publications, 2016, 170.

[xlix] Gray, Deborah D. Attaching in Adoption: practical tools for today’s parents. Jessica Kingsley Publishers, 2002, 246-247.

[l] 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.

[li] Mierau, Maurice. Detachment: an adoption memoir. Freehand Books, 2014, 120 – 121.

[lii] Szalavitz, Maia & Bruce D. Perry, MD, PhD. Born For Love: why empathy is essential – and endangered. William Morrow, 2010, 57,70.

Entry #13    INTRODUCTION TO PARENTING STYLES

Before heading to Russia, as I have written about in earlier blogs, we set up our idea of a child’s dream room and downloaded computer games, indulging in a parental fantasy that has never entirely dissipated. In fact, even to the present day, we keep running ahead of each future possibility with fantasies.  Dave would say, “Speak for yourself.” But…

When we returned to Canada, we took him here and there to show him off.  Dave bought him a glove and bat too big for him, convinced he had to learn how to deal with the real thing. Yasik couldn’t lift the bat.  When Yasik approached his teens, he and his dad made plans to fix up my little Civic when I moved on to a newer model. I imagined Yasik playing the piano and singing “O Canada” to open hockey games before his childhood buddy took to the ice to play goalie for the Canucks.

Of course, there is a ‘but’ coming. We may have been playing dollies with Yasik for the first day or two, dressing him up and bouncing him around like children with a Ken doll as they try to bridge the gap between fantasy and reality, but even while doing ‘tourist’ around Moscow there were indications that our priority was not the thrill of the art museum but that we must constantly watch this little sprite darting about. With all Moscow offered tourists, we were at MacDonald’s feeding Big Macs to the birds.

Could we have articulated what we wanted to do as parents? Was writing out goals part of the pre-adoption course we took? If it was, I don’t remember but we probably would have nodded enthusiastically to suggestions that we might want to deliver into adulthood a good and happy human being, stably independent and contributing to society, enjoying healthy relationships with others.  We were not even challenged to think about how we planned to parent by the social worker who did our post-adoption interviews.  We were asked about Yasik’s medical visits, physical and mental development, eating and sleeping habits, his personality, our child care plans and family adjustments but nary a question about how we were dealing with discipline and helping him with the character development needed to develop into a good and happy human being.

Could we have articulated how we would parent our little man developing into such a normal vision? Certainly, no manual was tucked into the non-existent bag sent along with Yasik as he left the orphanage. Nor did we expect one. If the local radio journalist who interviewed us outside the courthouse in Yaroslavl had asked us how we planned to parent, we would have planted a look on our faces that tried for “We’ve got this.”, hoping she didn’t look too deeply into our eyes where something less confident, somewhat quizzical was starting to show through. But the question never came up, everyone benignly assuming our son of one hour was in good hands because we would ‘just know what to do’.

And we did have resources. As noted in Post 12 Introduction, it doesn’t take a Google search to know that we humans parent like our parents parented us. Yes, we may have tried to update their technique or improvise in situations in which their methods were found wanting or because there were two sets of parents speaking to our parenting, maybe the techniques were debated, but our parents had up to 20 years to worm their techniques into our hearts and minds.  We may not have been able to easily identify what exactly they did that we now found ourselves doing, but try to find solid confirmation that their techniques had not found some ground in our methods. What is even scarier is trying to objectively recognize that this is what they did, even if as children we heartily disapproved, and then we went right ahead and reverted to as well.  They spanked, and yes, we spanked Yasik.  The time out chair was after their time.[i] We did it, but it is unlikely Yasik will continue that practice for it is not much more acceptable now than spanking.  Now there is “time in”.[ii]  We fought to have meals together as was regular with my parents and siblings, but scheduling and television often lured us from that technique.  We helped Yasik with homework, put him in sports.  Our parents could not easily afford sports nor had much homework help been modeled for them in their homes (and my grandmother was a school teacher!). That is not to say that they didn’t try to help or at least hope that we could manage.

Other resources were at hand as well. The Origins of You: how childhood shapes later life dedicates a whole chapter, Chapter 5, to presenting their study or “adventure” in “Why Parents Parent the Way They Do” or a study of “intergenerational transmission of parenting”.[iii]

Parenting is multiply determined. In addition to a parent’s own child-rearing history, parents’ health and well-being, their occupational experiences, the quality of their intimate relationship, and the social support they secure from friends, neighbors, relatives, and co-workers may all influence how parents parent…. too … how children themselves behave matters when accounting for why parents parent the way they do.

I am including the infographic below for it is a good summary of how expansive the considerations for a child’s setting are.[iv]

Gabor Maté goes further, assuring us that “all of us, by virtue of being human, are endowed with a natural drive and talent for child-rearing…. Both men and women have latent child-nurturing circuits in their brains, …”  Maté was referring to “the body’s natural opiates – all of which awaken in parents nurturing habits that are essential to the survival of the young.”[v]  That is a relief.  Parents come equipped.

Adopters too?  Yes, although we may not have dramatic hormone changes, bio-fathers, adoptors and other consistent care-givers “show bonding to the same degree as biological mothers” which “awaken in parents nurturing habits that are essential to the survival of the young”.[vi]

Gordon Neufeld points out that by the time of our adoption there was lots of research and information available, as well, had we thought there was a need to go beyond our naïve confidence in our readiness to parent.[vii]

It is beginning to look like we came into parenting with some juice in our brains to vitalize a motivation to parent and we came into parenting with input from the worlds we inhabited, a quite expansive setting for Yasik’s set of development or journey into his life.

I am going to interject here, because I have heard it so often, that if anything should not work out according to the fantasy, adoptors have a nice little ‘escape hatch/cop out’ from responsibility for their parenting, especially parents of older adoptees, should they accept it: the tsk, tsking of onlookers who intone, “Well it’s in the blood”, or those who shake their heads in commiseration to remind us, “Well those first 3 years are the most important.”

Bruce Perry appears to agree: “Since much of the brain develops early in life, the way we are parented has a dramatic influence on brain development. And so, … a good “brain” history of a child begins with a history of caregiver’s childhood and early experience.”[viii]

As recounted in earlier posts, Yasik’s parenting began first with his bio-parents and then a hospital staff followed by the orphanage so that for the first and crucial (they say) four years we and our styles can be absolved from responsibility for outcomes, right? Yasik was not quite 3 months short of 5 when we entered his life.  By the age of 3 a child’s brain is 80% developed.[ix]    Well what can a hapless adoptor do about that? Everything has been sewed up before they even start. Can’t fault their parenting styles.  But it looks like Perry has more to say: The adoptors need then to recognize the delay in development or the hard-wiring in place and work not with the chronological age of the child but with the child’s actual stage of development.[x] We are not off the hook. Our parenting styles matter. To turn a quote from Gabor Maté around: “no, [parents] did not create the world in which they must parent [their children]. Yes, parents are responsible for their children;”[xi]

As the very long page, Orphanage Risk Factors, has made me quite aware, the world of adoption has spent time reporting on the conditions and the effects of the orphanage ‘alloparenting’.  What world did Yasik, who was in orphanage care in Russia from 1993 to 1997, come from? I asked Google a specifically Russian orphanage parenting style question. An article written by Rachel Stryker in Global Studies of Childhood, Volume 2, Number 2, 2012 called “Emotion Socialization and Attachment in Russian Children’s Homes”  (https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.2304/gsch.2012.2.2.85) notes that Russian children raised by their biological parents are usually raised in the authoritative parenting style. Children raised in orphanages in the 1990s, the time of the dissolution of the Soviet Union with its socialism guided parenting and the time of economic struggle, were raised in what was called “toughened attachment”, considered necessary to preparing them for the harsh world they would be turned out to at the age of 18, toughened enough to deal with the economic struggle and the need to get along in such a world.

[The article] argues that … detdoma [orphanage] workers’ … [prioritized]… 1) [socializing] children’s attachment in an attempt to establish economic and emotional security for children in uncertain times after the fall of the Soviet Union; and 2) [shaping] children’s understandings of attachment within transnational contexts….

Orphanage workers thus understood that children raised in detdoma during perestroika and the years immediately following led very liminal lives…. that state of being between caregivers as well as between economic and political systems – justified a particular form of attachment socialization referred to in the orphanages as ‘toughened attachment.’… [The] philosophy of toughened attachment is characterized by the understanding that the best forms of attachment behavior are non-responsive. The rationale is that non-responsive care trains children to be resourceful and thus increases their chances for survival in bleak times…. -namely, a relationship whereby children from an early age could be taught to best maximize opportunities in resource-lean environments. In particular, detdoma workers encouraged children with very limited economic prospects to make multiple, flexible, and peer-based relationships with others….

In 1996 then, ‘toughened attachment,’ or purposely non-responsive infant and child care, was thought to instill in children a more practical approach to relating to others in uncertain circumstances. The concept of toughened attachment had much of its basis in the traditional practice in Soviet-style childcare collectives of ‘toughening’ children’s bodies in institutions – for example, … systematically exposing children to cold air and cold water so they develop resistance to winter weather…. Orphanage workers believed that just as one could toughen children’s bodies to make them more fit to survive the natural elements and disease, so could toughening children’s understanding and expression of attachment aid them in the challenging and uncertain times after the fall of the Soviet Union.

Such attachments were socialized in a variety of ways, including swaddling (thought to encourage self-soothing), delaying responses to child crying, encouraging children to ask peers rather than adults for help when they had problems, or telling children in consciously cheerful or humiliating ways, to discover the answers to questions on their own somewhere in the orphanage. Throughout this process, those children who were compliant and cheerful about such interactions were rewarded verbally or by being given some important status or role in the orphanage, although not with touch. Those children who did not comply and expressed anger, sadness, and despair were discouraged using the socialization techniques… mentioned in this section above.

Not aware of how Yasik had been parented in his first world, did not as Gabor Maté says let us off the hook.  We were still responsible to parent him in way that gave him a good start to life in our world.  Accepting that responsibility as we understood it, how would our parenting be judged by those who have studied parenting and what can be learned from our parenting journey?  The judging is based on the work of Diana Baumrind, a developmental psychologist who began her research in the 1960s, providing three of the basic parenting styles. In the 1980s, Stanford researchers, Eleanor Maccoby and John Martin added the fourth style.[xii] These four styles are Authoritarian, Neglectful/Unengaged, Permissive and Authoritative. As is evident by the list of styles mentioned earlier, these four shots are only the ‘opening volleys across the bow’ of the discussion on parenting styles.   Depending on how we come packaged into parenthood, in these times, we can choose to parent from a buffet of styles. An article in The Irish Times, which I accessed through my library’s online data offerings, provided a list of styles parents might choose: Helicopter, Drone, Lawn Mower/Bulldozer/Snow Plough, Free Range, Tiger, Dolphin, Koala, Jellyfish, Lighthouse, Gentle, Crunchy/Silky/Scrunchy, Concierge or as noted above, Conscious.[xiii]  Seriously.

Howevvver, I am not going to fill my plate from that buffet.  The 4 original styles will satisfy.

I know it seems facetious exploration to go over well known and likely self-help level material but Jean Mercer brings forward these considerations. After reminding readers that the adoption process is stressful for many, but not all, children, she goes on to say “The effects of adoption depend on three highly significant factors that may be quite different for different adopted children: the child’s age at separation, the circumstances surrounding the adoption, and the care-giving abilities of the adoptive parents.”[xiv] On with the judging of our parenting styles.

As an appetizer/mood setter/ tension builder, I have included a little quiz I found and indulged in, based on the four parenting styles. If you are a tad curious for yourself you will find the quiz (one of several on Google) at the end of this post.

But be aware: because both parents must be considered for their styles and input,[xv] I appealed to the better angels of Dave’s nature, getting him to take the quiz just after I completed it.  Maybe it was nearing suppertime and I was fogging over; whatever, I managed to add up the numbers each of us chose for each question instead of the number values given to each. And then I spent the next 24 hours angsting over the designations these numbers offered.  One of us was borderline Neglectful and the other, Permissive.  Maybe Permissive could be met with a bit of a shrug and giggle, but Neglectful?  That one elicits, at the very least, a grimace and groan.  I wanted to delete the quiz, shoving the results under the rug, but I also want to honestly explore our parenting.  In the morning, I went back over the quiz looking for a way to ease it into my determination to be open and honest in my search and, whew. I saw my mistake and I recounted.

For some of the questions I was on the fence, thinking it depends on the situation, choosing the middle option, #3. And while Dave did not stay on the same fence for as many question responses as I, we came out with exactly the same scores, barely inside Warm in the first set and barely inside Demanding for the second set. Whew again! We managed to raise Yasik according to the nice sounding parenting style – Authoritative.

But I cannot ignore the impact of my emotional response to the three negative styles and what my image of myself and Dave would have had to acknowledge had we landed in any of these styles that are less than admirable and certainly not trending currently.

The following infographic provides definitions of each of the parenting styles.[xvi]

The following infographic provides a chronology of the trend in parenting.[xvii]

TIME PERIOD	PARENTING STYLE
Post-WW2 Era	Authoritarian: emphasizing discipline, low warmth, and high expectations
1960s – 1970s	Permissive: emphasizing warmth, lenience, self-expression and individuality
1980s – 1990s	Authoritative: emphasizing warmth, connection, boundaries and explanation
Present Day	Conscious Parenting: [emphasizing warmth, boundaries] “while also expressing age-appropriate expectations and demonstrating an increased element of attunement, self-reflection, and parental awareness”

And remember, If you are in danger of taking all this too seriously check out this address:  https://www.verywellfamily.com/parenting-styles-from-around-the-world-4162019

Add it all up and our parenting styles come from all that is swirling about in our brains, bodies and emotions, the parents who parented us, the times and the environment in which that parenting played out, and our values for, as is the habit of values, they take shape influenced by this mix of nature and nurture.  And we are off, skipping along the yellow brick road, off to ask the wizard what kind of setting we provided for Yasik.

 This address will take you to the parenting style quiz Dave and I worked through.

Practical Psychology  “Parenting Style Quiz (Free Test + Instant Results)”  Feb 1, 2024 https://practicalpie.com/parenting-style-quiz/.[xviii]

To make some sense of the designations Warm, Cold, Demanding and Undemanding the site the quiz is taken from lists Authoritarian as Cold and Demanding, Permissive as Warm and Undemanding, Neglectful as Cold and Undemanding and Authoritative as Warm and Demanding.

Please also note though before you do so that there is a caveat: although provided for another context, Bruce K. Alexander reminds his readers in The Globalization of Addiction: a study in poverty of the spirit “clinical assessments are not hard data, even when dressed up in numbers.  Furthermore, it is difficult for clinical researchers to prove…. Human motives are always mixed and at least partly concealed, hence, endlessly arguable”.[xix]

Footnotes

[i] “Time-out (parenting)”  2024 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time-out_(parenting) 

[ii] Holden, George, Tricia Gower, Sharyl E. Wee, Rachel Gaspar, and Rose Ashraf  “Is It Time for “Time-In”?: A Pilot Test of the Child-Rearing Technique”  Pediatr Rep. 2022 Jun; 14(2): 244–253. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9149873/

[iii] Belsky, Jay, Avshalom Caspi, Terri E. Moffit, Richie Poulton.  The Origins of You: how childhood shapes later life.  Harvard University Press, 2020, 110.

[iv] Lang, Diana and Marissa L. Diener  “Influences on Parenting”  2020  https://iastate.pressbooks.pub/parentingfamilydiversity/chapter/influences-on-parenting/

[v] Maté, Gabor MD and Daniel Maté   The Myth of Normal: trauma, illness, and healing in a toxic culture.  Knopf Canada, 2022, 160, 165

[vi] Mercer, Jean. Understanding Attachment: parenting, child care and emotional development. Praeger Publishers, 2006,  74

[vii] Neufeld, Gordon, PH.D. and Gabor Maté, M.D.  Hold On To Your Kids: why parents need to matter more than peers  Vintage Canada, 2004,  5

[viii] Perry, Bruce and Maia Szalavitz  The Boy Who Was Raised As A Dog: and other stories from a child psychiatrist’s notebook.  Basic Books, 2017, 89

[ix]Brain Development 2024 https://www.firstthingsfirst.org/early-childhood-matters/brain-development/

[x]Perry, Bruce and Maia Szalavitz  The Boy Who Was Raised As A Dog: and other stories from a child psychiatrist’s notebook  Basic Books, 2017, 250

[xi] Maté, Gabor with Daniel Maté.  The Myth of Normal: trauma, illness & healing in a toxic culture.  Knopf Canada, 2022, 179

[xii] “The Psychology Behind Different Types of Parenting Styles”  https://jessup.edu/blog/academic-success/the-psychology-behind-different-types-of-parenting-styles/

[xiii] The Irish Times “Helicopter? Free-range? Concierge? What kind of parent are you? How do you parent? There’s a meme for that amid the modern obsession with dissecting and defining parenting styles”  July 18, 2023 July 18, 2023 https://www.proquest.com/central/docview/2838432152/3D22720E0AA34700PQ/10?accountid=48753&sourcetype=Newspapers

[xiv] Mercer, Jean. Thinking Critically about Child Development: examining myths & misunderstanding. Praeger Publishers, 2016, 246

[xv] Francis, Richard C.  Epigenetics: the ultimate mystery of inheritance.  WW Norton, 2011, 72-73

[xvi] Zeltser, Francyne  “A psychologist shares the 4  styles of parenting – and the type that researchers say is the most successful”  Jun 29, 2021 https://www.cnbc.com/2021/06/29/child-psychologist-explains-4-types-of-parenting-and-how-to-tell-which-is-right-for-you.html

[xvii] “Parenting Styles and their Evolution: Old, New, Recent Studies and Recommendations”  Oct 17, 2023 https://www.consciousmommy.com/post/parenting-styles-and-their-evolution

[xviii] Practical Psychology  “Parenting Style Quiz (Free Test + Instant Results)”  Feb 1, 2024 https://practicalpie.com/parenting-style-quiz/

[xix] Alexander, Bruce K.  The Globalization of Addiction: a study in poverty of the spirit.  2008, p. 154

Entry #13 A    Authoritarian Parenting Style

Depicting Authoritarian Parenting

I think we managed ‘happy families’ (Vera Stanhope gave me that one) for about as long as our parental leave lasted (3 days) or maybe until we signed Yasik up for school – roughly 3 weeks.  The journal says Week 3 was ‘one heavy duty week’. Yasik was, in parenting jargon, ‘testing boundaries’ in ways I have read are not unusual for institutionalized adoptees, or, for that matter, children from a great variety of family settings. His arsenal, sans effective verbal skills at the time, was physical: kicking, slapping, pinching, punching when we frustrated his desires with a “No”.   Surprised that the little cutie wasn’t seeing things our way, and having not prepared ourselves for that possibility, we went full ‘do what our parents did’; I shut down and Dave threatened tortures like loss of TV privileges and hugs, much the same as how we dealt at the time with disagreements between ourselves. And then, we spanked Yasik.  In our defense the journal testifies, only one smack to his bottom. Yasik cried but the smack quieted him, so I guess it slipped under the wire for not being abuse. Perhaps the crying though shook us up because we did some serious weighing of the pros and cons. We knew we were not comfortable talking about our autopilot choice to spank with anyone else, at all. Is spanking just politically incorrect or emotionally damaging? Is it faster and tidier? Does it teach him to hit to make a point?  But he needs to pay attention to our authority. He can’t be hitting back or talking smart we felt. But then again, we have to watch the expectations we have that set him off.  Right from the start, putting him in kindergarten, I was rushing him and we were regularly late to school, igniting volcanoes of frustration between us. Cecile David-Weill in Parents Under the Influence: words of wisdom from a former bad mother (63,64) considers it important to clarify the basis of a choice to spank: if it is not a “malevolent impulse” or cause “lasting pain” it may be fine. For her it is quite another matter if it is regular and the ‘go-to’ response to the child’s behavior. Leaving long term negative consequences, it is abuse.

Dave and I were a couple born in the traditional parenting era, and now in our own middle years, we were coping with a daily experience more often the purview of a young couple (a common experience for adoptors), and parenting a child with limited communication experience in English and very new to developing a sense of secure attachment to parents.  This is not a ‘poor-us’ plea. We simply knew we had to begin the process people in Recovery refer to as Live Life on Life’s Terms.  We were going try something more appropriate, wanting to do the ‘right thing’, again based on what we had picked up around us about disciplining.

My only spanking experience up to this time had come when I was in my mid-twenties, still unquestioningly believing in “Spare the rod, Spoil the child”. I was babysitting for a couple who were raised, like me, in a traditional and religious society and who regularly turned to spanking to rein in their active adoptee. Being left with the responsibility to ensure that this four or five year-old child was not ruined while the couple were out of town, I kept the lid on anything I understood to be an infraction according to the couple’s set of unacceptable behaviours. And I spanked away each of these misbehaviours as heartily as they did.  One such infraction unfortunately, in the short term, but rewarding in the long-term for me, occurred one morning when friends were visiting.  The child misbehaved; I carried him into the bedroom and between whacks, screaming and crying filled the household. After all was returned to quiet and smiles, the woman visiting commented either directly to me or to another friend, “It seems to me that people are harder on children who are not their own.” That observation struck hard against a firmly unquestioned belief.

Sensitivity to the comment was still there twenty years later to rattle my ideas about disciplining Yasik.  ‘Time Outs’ seemed to be bandied about among knowing parents we were in touch with as the ‘done thing’. Dave said that was how Dennis the Menace was disciplined, sounded like a good recommendation I guess. We embraced it as a discipline we could admit to among our circle of friends and anyway we had a child’s wooden chair as yet unfulfilled in its destiny.  One afternoon in our couple-only period we spent an afternoon shopping antique shops on Main Street.  We bought the little chair for family who were expecting, not thinking it might be a hassle to carry home on a plane.  They side stepped the gift and now we had a reason of our own to use it.  We swung it into a corner of the hallway, getting into position to do battle.  I remember experiencing less emotion or stress when disciplining was simply the smack. Now we were starting the disciplining process with a tussle to get him on the chair as he and we were still amped up. Next was the stand on guard to keep him on the chair. Dave would very firmly place him on the chair and I would smack his bottom when I couldn’t get him to stay on the chair. Once he even said, “Ouch”.  At least once each we let him knock himself over in his fight to resist the chair. But he did acquiesce, even if at times with tight-lipped giving in that could be read as ‘I will bid my time until I am bigger’. Other times it was hard to keep a straight face. When once he had to give in, he would turn to us to humbly plea, “No look,” before he stood up and went off to do what we ask. There was also the time I held him in my lap until he gave in and sat on the chair quietly and then he slipped over to me and we kissed and hugged. Wish I’d done it that way more often. In fact, most of the time he responded well to this discipline and moved on, affirms the journal.

And miracle of miracles, in short order just the threat of the chair was enough to get compliance. Check that method off and move on.  It seems we still were not giving discipline a meta perspective.  A couple of cases in point: one evening after work, I was tired, impatient and would not wait for him to play in the tub. Yasik was finding endless wonders in the tub.  I wanted the bed time routine over so I could turn off and tune out.

“Come on Yasik, bath time is over. Now get out of the tub and come into the bedroom to get your pajamas on.”

Playing sounded like it was slowing down, and silence was taking over. Yasik had shown shyness about being naked, suggesting the way things might have been handled in the orphanage. But I was not trying to understand his no show in the bedroom.

“Come on Yasik, get in here.”

And now there was a wail. Yasik was sitting in the tub, alone and crying in real anger. Sighing in self-pity, I was about to drag myself off his bed and into the bathroom to scoop him out of the tub.  That self-pitying tiredness now curling at the edges with anger. Yasik did not want to run naked from the tub to the bedroom, a stretch of maybe 10 feet.

Dave must have been hovering near by, for he magically appeared at the bedroom door.“Don’t!”, with a warning eyeball.  Getting a 5-year-old to sprint naked from the bathroom to the bedroom was what we expected. We were not going to cave. He was going to obey. He was going to sprint naked from the bathroom to the bedroom.

Yelling, “No look!” Yasik snuck to the door to see if I was looking before running to the bed. Again it was hopeless not to see the funny. I popped out a “Boo!” and we both laughed.

And here I interject a piece from The Adoptive Parents’ Handbook: a guide to healing trauma and thriving with your foster or adopted child by Barbara Cummins Tantrum who notes (18), “[It] could be that the abuse [being discussed] happened at bedtime or in a bath (common for sexual abuse), it could be that it feels vulnerable to try to turn their brain off to sleep, and it could be that Mom and Dad feel far away“.

Another time, when he was a bit older, Yasik and the other two in his bestie triad had been to Roger’s Arena to watch moto-cross races. The races were exciting, the treats soaked in sugar and the night hours sleep-deprived. By the time he was dropped off mid-morning, still high from the fun, he was likely more spent than he knew. The interaction may have gone something close to the following, though when I read it to Yasik while writing this piece, he was a tad scornful, not buying that he would have talked like that.

My rendition then:

While Yasik was still wrapped in the high of his overnight, Dave and I were not finishing off a fun night but rather into the demands of our day. Yasik came in the back door and dropped his bag.

No give him a moment to slump on a chair.  No “Hey kid did you have fun? What did you do?” Instead, we turned from doing the dishes to offer a smile, “Hi.” We are after all trained in the graces to some extent. Yasik didn’t smile back. “I’m hungry. Is there anything to eat?”

Tuned to a different wave length than he, we dismissed this.“Just put your bag away.  It’s too close to lunch anyway.”

“I’m not showering. I gotta eat.”

“Uh, uh….  No, get cleaned up.  Then I think you still have homework. And you definitely have piano practice.”

“Aaaggh. Noooo. That’s all I ever do. Piano, piano, piano. Homework, homework, homework.”

“Yasik. Just do it and get it over with. You have to do it before you can be on the computer anyway.” Yasik was downright snarky the journal says.   What did we expect?

Had we become complacent or tired of what corporeal punishment or its more politically correct cousin, ‘Time Out’ demanded? Or did we honestly think that having experienced spanking and the chair that Yasik was only needing the reminder of such consequences or some threat to the things he loved? Whatever our awareness, we now slipped into threat mode at signs of eruption.  Predictably I suppose, if we had not taken the time to think through what we were hoping for or how best to get there.  It could backfire.

One morning as usual we running late to drop Yasik off at his school. Checking for lunch box and bag, I noticed he hadn’t quite finished his homework. That was a BIG no-no to a couple, one teaching high school with the expectation of homework, the other finally getting a chance at higher-ed and both wanting to keep up appearance as parents who have their parenting together. With minutes to spare before we really, really had to go, we went into threat mode: “You won’t be going to T-ball tomorrow if you don’t hurry up and just do this last page!”

The wail seemed to deflate his entire body.  Taking the high ground against this outburst, we brooked no argument, “Yasik, you gotta do your homework.”

“Whhhhy? NOBODY in my class has to do homework?”

(True enough, being second language, or whatever the current term is, and struggling with reading, Yasik did have a heavier homework burden than his classmates.) Nonetheless, in my best no-nonsense voice, I carefully enunciated: “You. Won’t. Be. Going. To. T-Ball. Tomorrow. if you don’t get it done.”  Dave backed me up with a ‘No debate’ nod.

He failed to do so. Following through on our threat is always considered admirable. We didn’t take him to the game. He felt the pain for disobedience all right.

Thing was, we had the date wrong.  It was two days away and he got to go because he’d already gone through the wailing and missing-the-game pain the day before. I kind of think he could hardly wait to get home that evening to say, “Hey you guys, the game is tomorrow night, James said.” I looked at Dave. Dave looked at me. “What can we do? We got the days screwed up and he got the punishment.”

Yasik also got the last big grin.

And so the first couple of years went; learning effective anything takes a while I would observe at this juncture. Yasik’s school had a huge park across the street but had no indoor gym; it was a little community school which meant going off to another school for indoor physical activities. Two years into our parenting, encouraged by school staff, one morning, I went with Yasik on the school bus to help him get involved in gym as through the first year, he’d merely been watching rather than taking part. We chose not to push him to join in gym play the first year as most days there were so many other firsts in his life. Now just like deciding to take the worn training wheels off his bike and pushing him to try biking without that support, we decided to push him to join in the activities in the gym period.

We stepped into the gym, kids running ahead of us, teachers taking charge, me thinking I must look in charge too. It is what competent mothers exude, right? Slipping into this vibe, I tried to get him to do things just because magically I was along.  But my presence did not hold the weight I was assuming. He wouldn’t budge from his chosen place near the door. We were in a room full of kids he played with at the park, teachers who assured us he was doing well. Translation: I can’t have anyone thinking something might not be working as it should appear but neither can I take any action that would look or sound out of control. That is the possible beauty of threats. They can be whispered with what appears like a calm (read repressed anger) interaction.  So I started to whisper threats. “Get out there and play right now or there goes today’s computer and TV.”  I gave a hint that if he waited any longer, tomorrow’s TV was going too.

And then what Gail?  But I persisted and he adamantly refused.  A teacher thoughtfully slipped over to suggest that I and Yasik go to the trampoline because she told us being on the boys’ team with Yasik’s more confident counterparts may be too hard for him. He may feel safer playing with the girls and they were on the trampoline.  He wanted to but wouldn’t.  Was he embarrassed about being relegated to the girl’s team, as well?

I continued to cajole and threat.  Finally, I promised a prize, ergo bribe, and he got on for the first time, smiling in shyness, still uncertain, because it was great.

Inevitably a few bounces in he fell and wanted down in a bit and then he wouldn’t go again.  This was a 6-year-old boy who was struggling with processing failure. I was responding by telling him I was proud of him and a prize was coming his way. But that fall overwhelmed him. When it came around for his next turn, he refused to climb back up on the trampoline.  I who had not thought that perhaps let it be was enough, or perhaps there was a private trampoline somewhere that he could test out before the next gym outing, threw out the bribes and went back to dire threats of returning to spanking.  And I could have managed that because there was a convenient bathroom off the gym.

And in the moment I won. Yasik gave in and got on the trampoline. I saw a mix of shy enjoyment and a struggle with fear for between the 1^st and 2^nd attempt there were tears on my neck. As I watched him get up and try the trampoline again in front of peers who babied him still, I had to fight tears too. Yet he conquered the worst of it.  He was on his way. I was proud of him and of his stubborn refusals too.  He wasn’t going to follow blindly, I note in the journal.  But the question remains about how I handled my role in his struggle. I hope I at least followed through on the prize.

Dave too holds memories of times he is concerned about how he shepherded. As I have mentioned several times, not only did Dave look forward to sharing his own love of the computer with Yasik as we prepared to adopt him, but in a very short while, after we returned from Russia, Dave and Yasik were poking the keyboard, learning that Yasik believed he had come from the moon and seeing that very quickly and steadily Yasik was becoming proficient at working his way around the internet.  An excitement at a son’s quickness gradually U-turned into a concern about what his child might become exposed to.  To ward off danger, Dave secretly set in a path from which he would maintain control. Of course, sensible parents applaud, but Dave voiced concern over his handling of his control, secretively rather than in open discussion with his son.

Yasik is visiting this weekend. In preparation I have written down a couple questions on my clipboard to tease out some input from him that might be triggered by the definition of Authoritarian parenting style.  He hasn’t yet come up with specific examples but he said he definitely remembers times I handled interactions with “Because I said so” or “Don’t ask questions, just do it!” expectations.  I hope I tried for slightly more subtle language.  Yasik also remembers discovering Dave’s computer controls and working around them, but without any discussion on either side.

Defining Authoritarian

Your mission, if you choose to accept, is to underline the following characteristics you identify in the narrative.

Δ   Cold: low responsiveness, aloof and distant, affection is given sparingly, if at all; boundaries are maintained between parent and child.

Δ      Demanding/Unbending: strict, making non-negotiable rules, not considering the child’s needs or desires, “My way or the highway”, accompanied by harsh criticisms on making mistakes, or the more PC, emotional manipulation.  The child’s strong will must be broken.

Δ     Control: to foster obedience and implement discipline.  Parents monitor child’s behaviour, activities inside and outside the house.

Δ     Punitive discipline/highly negative consequences often justified as “tough love”: threatening, beating, spanking, thrashing, pulling, pricking, kicking, punching, and emotional punishment like neglect, yelling, scolding for not doing things “right”, silent treatment, stonewalling.

Sites referred to for the definitions:

https://www.goodhousekeeping.com/life/parenting/a26987389/types-of-parenting-styles/

https://jessup.edu/blog/academic-success/the-psychology-behind-different-types-of-parenting-styles/

https://www.parentingforbrain.com/4-baumrind-parenting-styles/

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK568743/

https://publichealthpost.org/health-equity/authoritarian-parenting/

Distilling Authoritarian Parenting

We may have begun to parent a child already brewed in Authoritarian parenting. We do not know what Authoritarian parenting meant on a daily basis for Yasik but the article I include in Post 13 Intro suggests it is possible Yasik was being nurtured with “toughened attachment” which seems another label for Authoritarian parenting style. We do know that when meeting us for the first time in the little waiting room of the Yaroslavl orphanage became too stressful for Yasik, he turned to the sweet doctor and folded himself in her arms, arms that willingly accepted him, letting him sob into her neck. But did that moment speak to the orphanage’s daily parenting style? Did Yasik know it was safe to turn into the little doctor’s shoulder as a security he knew he could trust or was the moment meeting us so overwhelming he took the first outlet available. Certainly the woman at the desk and the woman who brought Yasik into the room were not stepping in: out of shyness, uncertainty or the expectations of ‘toughened attachment’?

Whatever parenting he experienced, he would have learned ways to respond. If his early experiences of parenting were traumatic or at least authoritarian, then the way he expressed his frustrations to our discipline may have been techniques he had learned to defend himself when receiving ‘toughened attachment’. Or maybe his responses were defenses against what his imagination understood about having a mama and papa.  He was told that evening after meeting us that now he had a mama and papa.  Did that mean to him that life would be different from life in the orphanage; he need not suffer discipline and insecurity anymore? Or, as the honeymoon period receded into the hurley-burley of everyday life, did some of our parenting seem to him just like ‘toughened attachment’?

Russia at the time argued for this style of parenting because in the shifting time of the 90s it was the more well known, and therefore, more dependable style for orphans. The Soviets/Socialists were working on making a ‘new man/human’, answerable to society, not encouraged to be independent, the Soviet way or the highway.  Religions have been trying to do the same for a very long time, operating from the stance that people are sinners and needing harsh redemption via authoritarian leadership, Hobbesian style. And we, even in the West, do not remain immune from it.  Traditional parenting or ‘Trad parents’ check off authoritarian definition boxes above.  It starts with the assumption that small children are capable of manipulating their parents – a sign, I guess of the evil that resides within – and that effective disciplining must incorporate some pain. https://generationcedar.com/2024/03/05/gentle-parenting-vs-traditional-parenting-a-word-to-todays-young-mother/   or  https://iastate.pressbooks.pub/parentingfamilydiversity/chapter/overindulgent-helicopter-styles/

To quote a response to that one: “The truth is that children aren’t capable of manipulation until adolescence, because to be able to manipulate, you need a more developed prefrontal cortex.”  The Adoptive Parents’ handbook: a guide to healing trauma and thriving with your foster or adopted child, Barbara Cummins Tantrum   (North Atlantic Books,2020, 105).

It is also seen as a wise choice among working class parents who know that to be good employees, children need to know how to be obedient and develop a strong work ethic.  Some also see that at times Authoritarian parenting helps when children are falling into bad company and making choices that will hurt their future.  It might also be an interventionist tool when a child veers off course, choosing friends that take the child on a path away from education and healthy lifestyle choices. But studies have shown that a meta view of the outcomes of authoritarian parenting produce children with low self-esteem and self-doubt, turning to peers for guidance and sometimes acting out behind their parents’ backs or struggling to take on adulthood’s need for internal direction. https://openpress.usask.ca/lifespandevelopment/chapter/parenting-styles/

A voice that seems to support Authoritarian parenting, Dr. Gordon Neufeld and Dr. Gabor Mate say in Hold on to your kids: why parents need to matter more than peers    (Knopf Canadian Publishing, Vintage Canada, 2013, 60)

The first business of attachment is to arrange adults and children in a hierarchical order.  When humans enter a relationship, their attachment brain automatically ranks the participants in order of dominance…. that divide roughly into dominant and dependent, care-giving and care-seeking, the one who provides and the one who receives.

But, of course, having read the entire book, I know that he brings this aspect of authority in as opposed to the empty and often disastrous peer-oriented authority.

A voice that seems to questions Authoritarian parenting, Born for Love: why empathy is essential—and endangered by Maia Szalavitz and Bruce Perry  (Harper Paperback, 2010,313)  says,

Needless to say, spanking or any other form of harsh discipline does not and cannot encourage empathy: empathy is learned by having the experience of being treated kindly, not by being made to suffer…. most bullies do have the experience of being victimized – and it makes them want to get even, not help others….

Research shows that children who receive corporal punishment are more aggressive, more likely to be antisocial as teenagers …. Ninety percent of the research on spanking shows negative effects.

A voice that finds a middling spot on the spectrum of parenting is Jean Mercer in her book, Thinking Critically about Child Development: examining myths & misunderstandings,3^rd ed. (Sage Publications, Inc., 2016 ,206). Research has shown her that spanking (“as properly defined, not to blows with a paddle or other physical punishments”) is not ineffective in the short term but “questions remain about its long-term effect.”

Some explanation is offered in Great Myths of Child Development  (Wiley-Blackwell, 2015) put together by Stephen Hupp and Jeremy Jewell to those who believe God has endorsed physical punishment as a loving thing to do. My father certainly believed ‘Spare the Rod, spoil the child’ was a direct message from God to guide his parenting. Taking us to the bathroom, sitting himself down on the edge of the tub, “Spare the rod, spoil the child” was Dad’s invocation, followed by a confusing excuse, “This hurts me more than you” to set our bare bums on alert as we lay across Dad’s lap. According to Hupp and Jewell, modern translations of the proverb say the ‘rod’ was more likely the symbolic shepherd’s staff for guiding, as a shepherd guides a sheep (Myth #40).  Relying on older translations, some leaders of the church, supported its message of the pain route to obedience. https://iastate.pressbooks.pub/parentingfamilydiversity/chapter/overindulgent-helicopter-styles/

Myth #41, also in Great Myths of Child Development addresses ‘Time-outs’ showing that brief time-outs are usually too weak to help decrease real behavior problems and may also teach children what not to do, and without positive ‘Time-in’, does not teach the child what to do.

They also tackle the gender question of parental discipline. Data shows that mothers use corporeal punishment or spanking as often as fathers (Myth #47). And they visit the argument for letting babies ‘cry it out’ when being put to bed (Myth # 13). Reviewing the various arguments for and against, they conclude “… so long as the child is over 5 or 6 months old, safe and well-cared for, it’s reasonable to stop responding to cries to be held or rocked during the night, allowing the child to develop self-soothing skills”.

Others’ parenting experiences, speaking to at least some aspects of the Authoritarian parenting style

The book, Hunt, Gather Parent: what ancient cultures can teach us about the lost art of raising happy, helpful little humans by Michaeleen Doucleff  (Avid Reader Press / Simon & Schuster, 2021)

Mom Feels Like A ‘Failure’ After Spanking Her Daughter By Nia Tipton Feb 04, 2024  https://www.yourtango.com/family/mom-feels-failure-after-spanking-daught

A mom has admitted to feeling incredibly guilty about the way she handled her unruly daughter and is seeking advice on how to not react the same way in the future…. the young mother explained that she had been cleaning the bathtub when her 3-year-old daughter wandered in. Concerned for her safety, she calmly told her daughter to either leave the bathroom or stand by the door since she was using bleach and their bathroom was quite small.

…. With her daughter continuing to not listen, she picked her up and began carrying her out of the bathroom herself.

However, while carrying her daughter, the little girl began throwing a tantrum…. At this point, she immediately put her daughter in a time-out, sitting her on a chair in the corner of the room.

The time-out didn’t work though, and her daughter began to run around the room. Fed up with her daughter’s behavior, she grabbed her and spanked her. As soon as she did it, the young mom admitted to feeling incredibly “low” and a “failure” as a parent….

“What could I have done differently in this situation? I couldn’t leave her in the bathroom to calm down because I had chemicals in the tub. Maybe the best solution is not doing things that she can’t help with when she’s awake, I guess.”

[Readers responded] “Give yourself some grace. Try hard not [to] do it again,”….

“Also, try to lower your expectations just a little bit. She’s a kid …. it won’t turn her into a monster. Pick your battles.”

Another user added, “… You didn’t beat her or anything. You spanked her.”

…. At the end of the day, no parent is perfect, and there are moments throughout child rearing when certain things don’t go to plan.

The Atlantic, (July/August issue 2022, 87-89), speaks to fathers and the liminal space they find themselves in as fathers today, once filling the understood role of administrator of discipline was theirs, still confronted by children acting out of control, and no longer sure how to proceed.

Detachment: an adoption memoir   Mierau, Maurice   (Freehand Books, 2014, 152-4)

Peter who is 8 and Bohdan who is 7 had been adopted by Maurice and Betsy Mierau three years earlier.  The Mireaus were well into their own parenting style with the boys.  One winter afternoon, Mierau took the boys sledding, armed with hot chocolate. Because of copyright protection you will need to read the story for yourself, an incident that checks the boxes for Authoritarian, although overall, the memoir shows that this couple work hard at being warm and supportive Authoritative parents.

Lesbian and Gay Foster Care and Adoption by Stephen Hicks and Janet McDermott   (Jessica Kingsley Publishers, 2016, 230) recount an interview with a counselor and social worker couple, both working with children and families. At the time of the interview for the book they had been adoptors for 12 years. The children were a brother and sister whose early lives were traumatic, and before being adopted, the children had been in a “difficult” foster situation. This is how they end their interview:

We’ve ended up being much stricter parents than I ever expected we would be, which has been a bit of a downside in some ways. I end up being somebody I almost don’t know, as a parent of adopted children. You don’t recognize yourself. If somebody had told me this was the kind of parent I’d be I’d have said: “Don’t be ridiculous. I’m not going to be like that, I’m going to be my liberal, fun self.”

But that had to change. I think all parents probably have that fantasy. I remember my dad saying he couldn’t believe how I was with the children – my sister called me Attila the Hun! But after a while my dad said I had been right to be tough. But it didn’t come easily to either of us.

I have just started listening to the audio book, I’m Glad My Mom Died by Jennette McCurdy. (Simon & Schuster, 2022). Seconds into the book, I am hearing notes of Authoritarian parenting though, checking out a summary of the book, I already know that this memoir is about much more than parenting style, still … it checks off some of the boxes, even if the control is more often achieved with PC emotional manipulation.

Entry #13B Neglectful/Uninvolved Parenting Style

Depicting Neglectful/Uninvolved Parenting

This parenting style, it seems to me, is the most difficult to consider.  Some of the definitions online assess the benefits and drawbacks for the parenting styles.  For this one, Uninvolved/Neglectful they state quite baldly, there are no benefits.

Approaching motherhood, my journal tells me, “I felt I was up to mommying”.  And if ‘mommying/daddying’ for someone working and someone taking a full university class load and working part-time, would, as a friend noted, allow us to avoid the diaper stage, so much the better. Would any traces of Uninvolved/Neglectful parenting show up in our parenting?

Riding the sky train to work in ’96, a year before our adoption, I saw a poster without the Uncle Sam pointing finger but catching my notice nonetheless. I don’t remember what was being advertised, but its focus was ‘the new priority’ – job, family, you. Now I truly wonder what organization would want that as a sales pitch, unless it was a bid for irony. And good on me.  As I read it, I thought if job did take priority during the week I would try very hard to keep weekends free.

So let me state straight up at the start of this post: only once (as I have said in earlier posts) did we leave him at school day care. Kudos to us.

Then where do the following journal entries fit in?

At the end of our very short parental leave I started back to work, teaching a 5:00 pm class on the first day of the new semester. Dave was taking advantage of some studio time after one of his classes. Lucky for us, still new perhaps to juggling schedules, my mother and sister happened to be visiting or maybe I had reeled them in as they lived only an hour away. Yasik had spent about 2 or 3 hours with my family up to that evening.  I was pretty sure he knew they were gift bearers and friendly, and I knew he would be more than safe and cared for by them. But I had no idea what might be roiling in this little heart that had now known 3 weeks of belonging against 4 and half years of insecurity.  I made sure he had strapped himself into the bumper seat in the back, my sister and mom took the front seats, I slipped in beside Yasik and we drove off to Vancouver. 5:00 p.m. is full -on rush hour and my school is situated on a tightly organized street. There was only a moment to double park, pop a quick kiss and jump out. My heart holds the memory I caught as I turned to wave good-bye to this little boy alone now in the back, watching me wave and turn away.  I remember his confused face, I remember him turning to my sister, I guess hoping for the best. Both she and my mother quickly offered reassurances as they turned back into the street. Of course it was all Ok. He was taken back to our home; my husband picked me up after class and by the end of the evening we were all ‘happy families’ again ( the positive, not the negative connotation).

And so began the daily battle of what we often refer to as modern day parenting: parenting demands pitted against work expectations.   Read across the decades; such battles are endlessly recorded. And the underlying motives for such battles? Many hope sincerely to be up to the challenge of holding two dreams at the same time: work and family.   I became an Adult Ed. teacher because cut and paste and kiddie stories were not my thing. Adult level classes interest me but Adult Ed. schools are not found on every corner nor do they always offer classes that run parallel to kindergarten hours.  My husband had secured a long hoped for dream of attending art school. We believed we could juggle effectively.

Yasik’s first day of kindergarten: here it is verbatim from my journal to maintain the attitude emanating from my record.

Sept’97, Thursday, I bathed, fed him and took him to kinder where he stayed outside the door for 45 minutes and I sat inside – bored with the woman’s cutsie voice and inane activities – weather and silly questions – but she speaks Russian, knows what she is doing and handles them all well – so I sat it out and then got him and walked in the hall and edged him in and he knew where he was going – so we looked at the rabbit, he resisted a bit where he could but a helper sucked him in with a book and then slide projector and computer and he was in and sat with me on the rug and again resisted but I held him to it and we made it thru a long 2 ½ hours – I know how long it was because I watched the clock desperate to get out.

By noting that I bathed and fed him I guess I am recording that I had done my duty. But what was with leaving him outside in the hall while I sat in the classroom?  Was that the teacher’s suggestion? Was that my contest with him?

The teacher’s voice really was remarkably little kid like.  But obviously, my mood was bare minimum motherly.  When I either got fed up or kicked into mother mode, I went out into the hall with him and drew him along to the classroom, luring him in with a chance to pet a rabbit kept in a cage in the classroom.  God bless the teacher’s aide who seems to have taken it from there, dangling technology and books before him. I was less generous, holding him to keep him from escaping. This kid had only a few words of English, was prematurely peer-oriented without knowing what he was dealing with among this new set of peers, and still uncertain if his parents really were people he could count on.  Every fiber of his little body must have been desperate to get out of there. And I was hrumphing about having to be there for 2 and half hours of kiddy stuff.

The last weekend of October, ’97, just before Yasik’s fifth birthday and our first with him, we took him for his first visit to my parents’ home on Vancouver Island.  This would also be his first Hallowe’en adventure.  It did not disappoint any of us. At first the thrill for Yasik was getting to run up and ring the doorbell. And then the wonders of freely dipping into a bowl for a handful of candy.  And for us the wonders of watching the wonders that were his.  We put him to bed in my parent’s large bedroom, up and away from the rest of the house, still in that glow, but sticking to our parental responsibility and planning on some adult time with family downstairs. While we were laughing and talking together, my sister, who is more attuned to young children, slipped up to check on Yasik. She found this little mite, swallowed up by the bed, and staring wide-eyed into the darkness.  She slipped in beside him and whispered with him until he fell asleep.  Again, the memory stays with me.

On Saturday afternoon, November ’97, my day off and after my marking was finished for the week, I took Yasik shopping at the nearby mall, just after his 5^th birthday. He was now our child for 3 months.

I took him to the mall to get long pants for the cooler weather. Soon he was pleading to go home. Dave would have been pleading too by this point, but he had already learned to avoid following me around a mall.

“Momma, Yasik go home. Momma Yasik GO home”. (Well, it would have been something like that.)

“Just wait, please Yasik. I’m just checking this one more store”. Trying to accommodate, I ran ahead of him to a shop lured by a rack of clothing on sale. I have never been certain that for a moment, with all those clothes crowding my vision, I didn’t forget about him.  I seemed to have assumed that he was right behind me and could see where I was headed, he of 40 inches tall, barely reaching the mid-point on the rack.  But, of course, unused to malls, limited in English, he missed my side-step around the rack.

I clicked back into parenting within what seemed to me mere moments, though the journal says somewhere between 2 and a whole 7 minutes or more, and stuck my head around the rack to check on him. He was not there.

As it was created to do, the urban myth about the child kidnapped in a mall, went all breaking news in my brain. I started scanning in every direction and frantically checkout the nearby shops and then called out to a security guard walking past. And he did his job, trying to calm me, calling for other guards to watch and striding off to look. I heard Yasik crying before I saw him. There he was holding a guard rail in front of The Bay on the opposite end of that level of the mall. His face was stricken. He was standing there with big tears, and once seen, made no further sound.  I gathered him to me, and held on for dear life. I thanked the relieved guard and led Yasik to the closest clothing store, to a change stall. There I pulled him into my lap and we cried, sitting on that change bench until he quieted. And then we got out of that mall as fast as our shaky legs could go.

It can happen just as they say, so fast.

And I wonder why I think I might be an imposter mom?

It is possible to think that Dr. Gordon Neufeld, had he watched this scene, would have understood Yasik’s frightened cries to have exposed his deep understanding of abandonment.  In a class lecture Neufeld made the point: “There is no experience that has more impact upon us as humans than that of facing separation”.[i]  

A long-time colleague and friend came to visit during those early days of parenting. Like my sister, she was someone far more naturally attuned to parenting than I and had always loved being with little ones.  One afternoon during her visit, she and I, with Yasik in tow, picked up my sister-in-law and her two kids for a mid-morning swim at a community pool which offered a kiddies’ pool and an adult pool.  We had been told that Yasik was not a stranger to swimming as the orphanage took the kids to a community pool in Yaroslavl.

I, who loves to swim, and my sister-in-law, not a fan of swimming, got ourselves and the kids into swimming gear. My friend, not having packed a bathing suit, relegated herself to the poolside.

My niece and nephew were already quite accustomed to pools and happily followed their mother into the children’s pool. I walked with Yasik over to the same pool.  I was not aware of any agitation emanating from him.  I stepped into the pool near where his cousins were already splashing and laughing. And once again, just as with the way he would not try out the swings and teeter-totters at the playground until we went sliding with him, and with his resistance at kindergarten until we enticed him with the rabbit, Yasik would not come into my arms to get a lift into the pool.  I tried to persuade him several times with a voice moving from “Come sweetie” calm to one attempting to hold down rising tension. My sister-in-law, my nephew and niece, my friend and likely others in the pool were within hearing. Yasik stood above me mute but definitely not planning to be persuaded into the pool. Sensing the awkwardness, my friend came to the pool’s edge, put her arms around Yasik and led him back to her chair, saying (need I say, with a calming tone), “He can sit with me for a while”.

I turned to my sister-in-law.  She and the kids seemed happy doing their own thing. I climbed out of the kiddies’ pool and went over to the adult pool for a nice long swim.  It is the feeling of shame that remains.

Recently I asked this friend if she had memories of her visit and the swim outing. Very much to her surprise she did find that she had made a journal note after the visit:

It is so much rush, rush in their lives. Little Yasik is a dear. It is almost overwhelming all he faces. We went swimming this a.m. – he was afraid to…. He is so totally dependent on adults & his new parents. They’re ‘elderly’ to be taking him on. I do hope it works out.[ii]

Epilogue: the following summer, Yasik readily worked through all the children’s levels for swimming down at the park.

Some of these examples of times of neglectful parenting can be chalked up to being new parents, still learning the new reality, but the following examples cover times when lack of experience doesn’t hold water as well.

For me, the weakest link in my parenting was the many times we let our son have overnights with school mates before our first year with him was even up.  He was at the age for which it is common. It solved babysitting strains for several families.  Yasik was well-attuned to playing with other little kids having spent most of his time until he became ours with many little playmates.  And as I have repeatedly reminded readers in our defense, we did put him in the school-run daycare ONLY one afternoon. However, those rationalization were long ago countered for me by a story I thought might have been in my nearly worn-out copy of Deborah D. Gary’s widely respected, Attaching in Adoption: practical tools for today’s parents, but I can’t find it there (update: just found it on page 62). This story I have for so long worried over is about a couple who did not allow any allo-parenting for the first two years with their children in order to secure the children’s attachment to themselves.  They did not allow their children to have sleep overs or be babysat by others. The children went everywhere with them and were cared for solely by themselves, wanting to ensure that the children were well-attached to themselves and could understand, after previous experiences of insecure relationships, what the meaning of family now was.

Dave and I were not yet deeply aware how weak his bonds of attachment to us were.  We were parents about whom Dr. Bruce Perry would say: “… the limited experience many people have with young children before they have their own still puts far too many parents and their children at risk”.[iii]

Yet, I think your average parenting book will encourage allo-parenting, the ‘it takes a village to raise a child’ concept.  Hunt, Gather, Parent: what ancient cultures can teach us about the lost art of raising happy, helpful little humans. (Avid Reader Press, 2021),  by Michaeleen Doucleff, PhD. shows its value in many cultures. But most of these books will be looking at children whose attachments are being secured from day one. For these children the option of living in a society where allo-parenting is encouraged is almost certainly ideal.

For children whose early years have offered little in secure attachment perhaps nuclear attachments are essential before taking the child into a wider social circle, a developmental stage our son was chronologically expected to be ready for.  Yet we can assume Yasik had cycled through a large variety of care-givers before becoming part of our lives and family.  It is reasonable to suggest his attachment had become prematurely peer-oriented. His understanding of family unclear.  As many articles in Orphanage Risk Factors point out, a big problem for orphans is the constant change of caregivers on shift work offering inconsistent care-giving leading to an insecure attachment experience for children.

Here though I insert the opposing view of Peter Lovenheim. In The Attachment Effect: exploring the powerful ways our earliest bond shapes our relationships and lives (A TarchgerPerigee Book, 2018, 71-73), Lovenheim counters some of John Bowlby’s strong emphasis on the caregiver, for as social beings we are not necessarily damaged by receiving care from more than one caregiver in order to establish a secure sense of attachment.

Our week days were well packed with school and work and the commutes tying it all together. As we saw it, that meant lots of left over demands for the weekends. If the neighbour wanted Yasik to have a sleep over at her house to free her from the demands of keeping her son entertained and if Yasik was eager to play with his friend, allowing Dave time for to complete assignments and for me to get 27 essays marked, this was a win-win all the way around.

“‘When you are in a jam, it’s hard to remember that you are in a relationship with a person, not just trying to get someone out the door in ten minutes. Problem is, we have our own agendas and sometime we see the kid as an impediment’”. [iv]

Bouncing back from Peter Lovenheim, I, still uncertain whether or not to shake off my sense of guilt about jumping too quickly into allo-parenting,  return to the arguments of Gordon Neufeld, PhD. and Gabor Maté, M.D in their book Hold On To Your Kids: why parents need to matter more peers. They begin the book’s argument for securing parent-child attachment before allowing the child free-range with peers by drawing parents in with “…in the short term, peer orientation appears to be a godsend”. And as a salve to any worries, Dr. Neufeld acknowledges that “At first glance peer-oriented children appear to be more independent, less clingy, more schoolable, more sociable and sophisticated”. But then Neufeld and Mate give the reader 264 pages to say, “WRONG! IT IS NOT A GODSEND!”.[v]   Yasik was simply not yet secure enough in his attachment to us. Sleep-overs in the first years as a family were not a win-win for us.

It also cost us precious memories like being the ones who took him to the PNE for the first time. I marked papers, Dave completed university assignments and Yasik went to the PNE with the buddy and his parents.

Later I recognized that I shouldn’t have added a new course to my schedule, one that required extra hours to pull together in Yasik’s first year with us.  We also had a new debt load as we began to pay off the costs of adoption.  But did we think carefully enough, were we even aware of what trade-offs we were going to have to deal with? About all the awareness I can find in the journal was ‘we are all just caught in a big pressure pool and we’ve got to help each other.’

Dave’s contribution when I read the definitions to him: “I was triggered by Yasik and you and the dog to be involved but at times would have rather indulged in my own interests and engagements”. That is Dave, easily guilted into taking care of others’ needs, even when he wants to do his own thing.

Yasik’s input when I read the definitions to him: “I think you know the answer to that. Yes, there were times when I was left to fend for myself”. (though he was mainly referring to times later than this period). “Look where it led me”.

Defining Neglectful/Uninvolved Parenting

Your mission, if you choose to accept, is to underline the following characteristics you identify in the narrative.

Δ   Cold/Low Responsiveness/Emotionally Absent/Unsupportive/Unconcerned: Parents are neglectful even when they might provide food, shelter and basic amenities for their children. They show lack of warmth, connectivity and care, interest or attention or affection towards their children, not interacting with their children much at all.

Δ   Low demandingness/ Disconnected/ Undemanding/ Indifferent/ Disengaged/ Detached/ Uninvolved/ Overwhelmed with other things: Children are often left to fend for themselves, even taking on a limited parenting role. These parents offer little nurturance, guidance and attention to the child’s social-emotional and behavioural needs, have limited engagement with their children, don’t converse or interact with their children much, don’t attend their children’s activities or events and don’t strive for any kind of emotional connection but do not discipline them either, and rarely implement rules or structure.

Sites referred to for the definitions:

https://www.goodhousekeeping.com/life/parenting/a26987389/types-of-parenting-styles/

https://www.parentingforbrain.com/4-baumrind-parenting-styles/

https://themindsjournal.com/4-common-parenting-styles/

https://www.cnbc.com/2021/06/29/child-psychologist-explains-4-types-of-parenting-and-how-to-tell-which-is-right-for-you.html    A psychologist shares the 4 styles of parenting—and the type that researchers say is the most successful

https://jessup.edu/blog/academic-success/the-psychology-behind-different-types-of-parenting-styles/https://jessup.edu/blog/academic-success/the-psychology-behind-different-types-of-parenting-styles/

https://openpress.usask.ca/lifespandevelopment/chapter/parenting-styles/

https://www.verywellmind.com/what-is-uninvolved-parenting-2794958

Distilling Neglectful/Uninvolved Parenting

Born for Love: why empathy is essential – and endangered.

Summary

This book has several stories of child neglect rising out of parents’ lack of care due to ignorance or struggles, as well as, stories of abuse even when parents thought they were doing the best they could for their children. The family story in Chapter Six has all the accoutrements of the good life. The child is well provided for,

Ryan didn’t spend his early life in a neglectful orphanage like Eugenia.[vi]He wasn’t raised by a family of con artists like Danny.[vii]He wasn’t beaten or staved or witness to domestic violence or wartime trauma. He grew up in a stable two-parent home.[viii]

Yet in terms of consistency of care, Ryan’s early care was as unstable as the shift workers’ changes in an orphanage. “Ryan’s parents had never been educated about the social needs of infants”.[ix]  When infant Ryan became attached to a caregiver, the caregiver was replaced because his mother would become concerned that Ryan seemed more attached to the caregiver than to her. “This made no sense to [the mother]. She couldn’t understand what was wrong and why her own baby didn’t seem to like her”. So she fired them, eighteen caregivers, before Ryan entered preschool.[x]  By the time Ryan was 3 he had begun to shut down his emotions. When he was 17, he could not understand why raping a developmentally-disabled girl was problematic.[xi]

Scientific Parenting: what science reveals about parental influence looks at a study examining causes for problematic behaviour or negative emotional responses in children. The researchers used the Maternal Sensitivity Scale which measures “a mother’s awareness of her child’s signals of needs or wants, her accurate interpretation of those signals, the appropriateness of her response, and how promptly she responded”, either with high or low sensitivity to their child’s needs.  The chapter inserts a defense of mothers who showed low sensitivity:

Keep in mind that the women in the low-sensitivity group were not necessarily bad mothers. The study did not recruit parents accused of child abuse or neglect, nor did it focus on families from groups generally considered to be high-risk (impoverished, uneducated, suffering from alcoholism or drug addiction, prone to violence, etc.) Low -sensitivity mothers didn’t leave their children home alone for hours on end to go party, or drink themselves sick, or bully their children with taunts or smacks or insults.  Some of them were absent-minded. Many of them were overworked and exhausted and didn’t have the energy or patience required to meet their children’s every immediate need, but loved their children all the same and wanted nothing but the best for them.  The vast majority were probably doing their best, and would be horrified at the thought that their actions might be hurting their children. And yet, their children were over twice as likely to display aggressive or violent behaviour as those of high-sensitivity mothers …. It shows that in parenting the little things matter just as much as the big ones.[xii]

On P. 175 Scientific Parenting:what science reveals about parental influence also says:

Certainly, neglectful parenting has an adverse effect on children’s development. Our neural gardens need more than fresh soil to truly flourish. They need pruning and weeding and watering.  An untended garden may grow thick and green if the sun is shining and rain comes often enough, but it will be a wild, chaotic patch of earth, fruitful perhaps, but also cluttered and choked with weeds. The same goes with young minds…. Infants need more than food and warmth and safety; they need stimulation and interaction and play, and the more of it they get, the better they’ll be at thinking and reasoning and, above all, feeling.

Great Myths of Child Development, Myth #42: daycare damages the attachment between children and parents: the writers question Spock, Bowlby, Ainsworth and Schlessinger’s dire warning of leaving a child to the insecure attachments that may result for daycare exposure.  The concerns their views generated remain in the wanting-to-do-it-ALL-right parental psyche, even as these parents see no option but to enter the work force or have the desire for a career, as well as, parent.  These writers quite strongly dispute the dangers of daycare,

“The preponderance of research says that [daycare] does not [damage children]”. It may even be beneficial in parent child interactions, giving parents greater income, lessening their stresses and helping to make children more school ready. These kids may get more illness, ergo, they will develop a greater immunity to illness….

Yasik certainly came packaged in immunity to illness.  (What I am also saying /suggesting? That orphanage life may have had some real pluses for Yasik?  Yes, of course, it did; the difference is that in a day-care setting, the child is home developing a secure attachment to the parents to balance the time away from the parents.   Yasik didn’t get to go home at night to that other element in the need for secure attachment, his own parents.)

Myth #42 goes on to say

The argument seems to be that “if a mother is not with her child almost all day, then she can’t really be a loving parent. Although it’s true that a daycare worker won’t love and care for a child just like a parent will, sending a child to a daycare doesn’t mean the parent stops loving or caring for their child. The same point could be made about fathers, but the anti-daycare crowd rarely seems to argue that fathers should stay home.” So to all those anxious parents in the world, we say don’t fret. Human babies are not geese, and they won’t “imprint” on a daycare worker instead of you.[xiii]

Perhaps because our faith in the traditional family is deeply embedded, studies have been called for to examine the question of the outcomes for children raised by working mothers versus stay-at-home mothers. The findings: “evidence suggests that children of working moms grow up to be just as happy as children of stay-at-home moms. In fact, having a working mom comes with potential benefits for adult children”.[xiv]

And that observation about the focus on mothers, ignoring the role and responsibilities of fathers:

One of the hugely overlooked truths of parenting is that parenting involves both parents and their equal contributions make up for a suitable condition that ensures an overall general development of the child. It’s a myth that the mother has a bigger role to play in raising a child. Absence of a father can have drastic effects on the emotional, social and economic well-being of the child. Therefore, both of their involvement is crucial.[xv]

And Dr Perry’s question in The Boy Who Was Raised As A Dog – Can a child raised in serious abuse have capacity for further development, could his neural system be shaped by patterned, repetitive experience in a safe and predictable environment?[xvi]

[Neglected] children need patterned, repetitive experiences appropriate to their developmental needs, needs that reflect the age at which they’d missed important stimuli or had been traumatized, not their current chronological age…. A foundational principle of brain development is that neural systems organize and become functional in a sequential manner…. If one system doesn’t get what it needs when it needs it, those that rely upon it many not function well either, even if the stimuli that the later developing system needs are being provided appropriately. The key to healthy development is getting the right experiences in the right amounts at the right time.[xvii]

And the needs-to-be-restated preliminary to that is the need for parents to be better informed of the needs of the children they set out to raise. “… the limited experience many people have with young children before they have their own still puts far too many parents and their children at risk”.[xviii]Later in The Boy Who Was Raised As A Dog, Dr. Perry makes the point several times that such development comes with therapy in a caring environment, perhaps a given.

The stories of survivors of Uninvolved/Neglectful parenting range from abuse to resilience. These children can struggle with a sense of low-self-esteem, abandonment, depression, forming close relationships, hostility, delinquency, substance abuse and a weak sense of empathy.[xix]

People who grew up with very little affection tend to develop these 10 traits later in life (according to psychology) 

Remember, these trends don’t apply to everyone, but they do provide insight into some of the ways our upbringing can influence our adult behaviors….

1) Emotional Self-Sufficiency

Those who grew up with little affection often build walls around themselves. They develop a sense of emotional self-sufficiency, an ability to navigate through life relying primarily on their own emotional strength.…Their childhood experiences often leave them feeling that they cannot depend on others for emotional support, leading them to rely heavily on themselves.  Remember, this doesn’t mean these individuals are incapable of forming emotional bonds. It just means they’ve learnt to rely on themselves first and foremost.

2) Difficulty Trusting Others

Trust is a tricky thing, isn’t it? Especially for those who grew up with very little affection.

3) Craving for Affection

Here’s something raw and honest: people who grew up with very little affection often nurse a deep, unspoken craving for it in their adult lives….This longing often manifests in different forms – some might seek validation consistently, others might strive to excel in everything they do, hoping to earn the approval and affection they crave.

4) Strong Independence

This strong sense of independence can be empowering, but it can also make it challenging to accept help from others. It’s as if accepting help or support is a sign of weakness, a betrayal of the self-reliance we’ve cultivated over the years…. Being independent doesn’t mean you have to do everything alone.

5) Unusual Empathy

Here’s something you might not expect: those who grew up with little affection often develop a heightened sense of empathy…. Having experienced emotional scarcity in their own lives, they tend to be more attuned to the emotional needs of others. They can pick up on subtle cues, feel the pain of others, and offer compassion because they know what it’s like to feel emotionally neglected.[xx]

What is Distracted Parenting?

Cell phones, tablets, and computers are everywhere.  Almost 70% of Canadian adults own a smartphone.

However, the use of hand-held devices can get in the way of the day-to-day interactions parents have with their children. At times, many adults may turn to their phones when they feel down or they may become consumed with waiting for a message or e-mail.  The distraction may get in the way of meeting children’s needs and may impact their healthy development.

Smartphone use may be behind a 10% increase in unintentional childhood injuries. The mere presence of a cell phone on the table makes those sitting around the table feel more disconnected. 

Parenting in the Digital Age:  The Importance of Secure Attachment Responsive, face-to-face parent-child interactions during early childhood is important in the development of a child’s language, cognitive, and self-regulation abilities. We are wired for human interaction. +[xxi]

A perspective on Uninvolved/Neglectful Parenting specific to adoption: It is hard to image an adoption life story that didn’t begin with some kind of abandonment, whether intentional or otherwise. Thus Betty Jean Lifton would say of adoptees:

They are self-negating. They may look secure but they suffer from feelings of shame, inner badness, and defectiveness. They fear homelessness, betrayal, disintegration, and going mad. But, most of all they fear abandonment.  The message adoptees give to friends and spouses is: “Do anything you want to me, but don’t abandon me”.[xxii]

Others’ parenting experiences, speaking to at least some aspects of the Negative Parenting Style.

For likely as long as the novelist has become aware of the working mother dilemma, novels have built the working mother trope with bits like in Scott Turow’s novel, The Laws of Our Fathers.   The protagonist is a busy judge starting a high-profile case whose young daughter does not want to go to school so the judge cajoles, threatens, manipulates and promises future impossible temptations.

Someday, I always promise, it will be as she asks…. But not, of course, today. Today there is duty…. I must go off to my other world…. telling myself I am not my mother, [who apparently left her alone when she went off to work] that I am somehow on the road to conquering what remains of her in me.[xxiii]

The End of Mom Guilt: why a mother’s ambition is good for her family For Lara Bazelon, the mother, the conflict between career and parenting seems more divisive than for the father but she believes “prioritizing your career- not all the time, but some of the time – models… for the children…independence and resilience.”[xxiv]

Teacher Says The New Wave Of Parents Are ‘Roommate Parenting’ — ‘I Can’t Believe The Decline In Quality, Involved Families’

One teacher argued parents are not invested in interactions and relationships anymore.https://www.yourtango.com/self/teacher-says-new-wave-parents-are-roommate-parenting

A Quora question: Why isn’t love enough in parenting an adopted child?

I’ll tell you the story of my sister. She was 18 months old when she came to us. I was 4. Of course my parents didn’t share the situation that brought my sister to us with me. But one of my earliest memories is me asking my mom what is wrong with this baby. Even at 4 I could tell this baby was broken. Later I learned the gritty details. I don’t ever use the word hate. It’s a strong word reserved for specific things. I hate my sister’s bio family. They are evil people. They intentionally broke this innocent baby. They starved her in every way you can. No love. No food. No nothing. Their family dog treated my sister better than they did. They would sit my sister in a room by herself during dinner and would throw scraps to the dog. The dog took the scraps to my sister. That dog was a better mother to her than the humans in that house. In child development the first year is critical in developing a child’s trust and security. This is achieved through the love and care we give out infants. We feed them, hold them, bathe them, cuddle them when they are sad, we talk to them with sweet words and show them that no matter what we are there for them. My sister got none of that. Zero, zip, nada. She got neglect on every level. I do not know if they ever physically hurt her by hitting. But they broke her trust and capacity to understand love. She never recovered because they did it at the most critical time in her development. When she was helpless and completely dependent on those who were supposed to care. My parents and us kids love her deeply. And she cares for us, but she is incapable of trusting us to not hurt her. We never have. My parents changed the entire way they parented me and our older brother to accommodate her needs. We used to have a fairly strict snack and meal schedule. Suddenly we had free reign of a section of the pantry and was always stocked. They gave her extra time and attention that we didn’t get, we were never neglected and didn’t lack love and attention, but she did demand more. There were other changes, but I can’t remember them. Those were just the ones that impacted me the most. Love wasn’t enough to keep her with us. When she turned 18 she ran. She has gone no contact for years at a time. We often describe her as a person that lives in a made for TV movie, or after school special. She doesn’t live in reality. The problems she creates for herself are always someone else’s fault. She refuses to have any personal accountability for her life. The way she is can all be traced back to that first 18 months of her life when people were monsters and a dog was her mother. I hate her bio family. Don’t abuse your children. Love them unconditionally. And for the love of everything if you take on a broken baby don’t make it about you. Just love them and accept them for who they are. Not all adopted kids are broken. For some, like me, love is enough. But there is a large chunk of adopted kids that have very real, very damaging trauma. Those are the ones that need the most love, but will never thank you for it. Just give it to them.[xxv]

Baby, We Were Meant For Each Other: in praise of adoption, Scott Simon, Simon Schuster, 2010, 142-3

Summary

Neglectful parenting could be saying something about the parents experience of being parented.  Because of his own experience of being parented, Steve Sagri has not had a “successful family life“.

“… even with my daughters, even when they were adorable little kids, I never felt real comfortable,” he says, “I never knew how to behave around them. I didn’t now how to be a parent. How would I? I’d never seen it done…”. “Maybe my real fear is of getting hurt,” he muses,  “Maybe that is why I’ve built so many ten-foot walls around me. Maybe it’s because I was rejected as a kid that I don’t want to give anyone the chance to reject me now. So I just keep moving…”

Love Works Like This  Random House, 2002,Lauren Slater P. 169. Goodreads describes this writer’s experience of parenting with:  “career-oriented“, looks at having a child and the need to “reconcile the needs of self with the demands of others“.

It has come to the point where I cannot listen to Eva cry unless she is crying in my arms. I suppose this is a form of love, but not the kind I would most wish for. It is instinctual, biological, love on a cellular level. Intimacy, I am coming to understand, is corporeal.  It has to do with the distance between bodies. I wish for more. I wish for a passion that transcends space. When I am with Eva, she is my heart. When I am gone from her, at work, or with a friend, she ceases to exist.

And then there is this:

I saw an ad for the BEST dishwasher soap for loving parents. It did have to remind parents they might need to buy a dishwasher first, of course.

The plot to zing the ad’s proposition straight into parental hearts was built around a mother sitting on the floor holding out encouraging arms to her infant taking her first step. The camera then slides from the middle of the floor over to the kitchen area. There a young father is bent over the sink washing dishes, his back turned away from mother and child.  OMG, he was hand washing dishes. Only when the last dish has been washed does he turn back to his little family. But too late, handwashing dishes has denied him that precious moment parents wait for with bated breath, missing his child’s first step. The judgment or false pity is in the narrator’s tone: for handwashing dishes he has been charged with being negligent and missing out on one of  life’s truly important moments.

 Footnotes:

[i] Easterly, Sara, Kelsey Vander Vliet Ranyard, Lori Holden.  Adoption Unfiltered: revelations from adoptees, birth parents, adoptive parents, and allies, “Referring to Dr. Gordon Neufeld’s words… (Gordon Neufeld, PhD, “Session One: Becoming Attached,” Recorded Class Lecture (The Art & Science of Transplanting Children Course, 2011).  2024, 142

[ii] Pegg, Lois.  Journal Entry.  Dec. 7’97

[iii] Perry, 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, 168.

[iv] Neufeld, Gordon, PH.D. and Gabor Maté, M.D. Hold On To Your Kids: why parents need to matter more than peers.  Vintage Canada, 2004, 196.

[v] Neufeld, Gordon, PH.D. and Gabor Maté, M.D. Hold On To Your Kids: why parents need to matter more than peers.  Vintage Canada, 2004, 235, 237.

[vi] Szalavitz, Maia, Bruce D. Perry, M.D., Ph.D.  Born For Love: why empathy is essential- and endangered   William Morrow, 2010, Chapter 3, 45 – 71.

[vii] Szalavitz, Maia, Bruce D. Perry, M.D., Ph.D.  Born For Love: why empathy is essential- and endangered   William Morrow, 2010, Chapter 5, 96-119.

[viii] Szalavitz, Maia, Bruce D. Perry, M.D., Ph.D.  Born For Love: why empathy is essential- and endangered   William Morrow, 2010, 121.

[ix] Szalavitz, Maia, Bruce D. Perry, M.D., Ph.D.  Born For Love: why empathy is essential- and endangered   William Morrow, 2010, 142.

[x] Szalavitz, Maia, Bruce D. Perry, M.D., Ph.D.  Born For Love: why empathy is essential- and endangered   2010, P. 125-126

[xi] Szalavitz, Maia, Bruce D. Perry, M.D., Ph.D.  Born For Love: why empathy is essential- and endangered   William Morrow, 2010, Chapter Six, 120- 144.

[xii] Letourneau, Dr. Nicole with Justin Joshko.  Scientific Parenting: what science reveals about parental influence.  Dundern Press, 2013, 85-87.

[xiii] Hupp, Stephen and Jeremy Jewell. Great Myths of Child Development, Myth #42: daycare damage, Kindle version, Wiley-Blackwell, 2015.

[xiv] Cuttita, Nicole, Ms.Ed., MHC-LP

Are Stay-at-Home Moms Better for Our Kids than Working Moms?

https://www.newyorkbehavioralhealth.com/are-stay-at-home-moms-better-for-our-kids-than-working-moms/

https://www.hbs.edu/news/articles/Pages/mcginn-working-mom.aspx

[xv] Debnath, Shreyasi.   https://themindsjournal.com/4-common-parenting-styles/ The 4 Common Parenting Styles and Their Effects on Kids/

[xvi] Perry, MD, PhD, and Maia Szalavitz. The Boy Who Was Raised As A Dog: and other stories from a child psychiatrist’s notebook.  2017, P. 145

[xvii] Perry, MD, PhD, and Maia Szalavitz. The Boy Who Was Raised As A Dog: and other stories from a child psychiatrist’s notebook.  2017, P.152

[xviii] Perry, MD, PhD, and Maia Szalavitz. The Boy Who Was Raised As A Dog: and other stories from a child psychiatrist’s notebook.  2017, P.168  

[xix] Debnath, Shreyasi.   https://themindsjournal.com/4-common-parenting-styles/ The 4 Common Parenting Styles and Their Effects on Kids/

https://wellbeingscounselling.ca/uninvolved-parenting-psychological-effects-on-children/

https://www.verywellmind.com/what-is-uninvolved-parenting-2794958

https://www.regain.us/advice/parenting/the-risks-of-having-an-uninvolved-parenting-style/

[xx] Fey, Tina. https://geediting.com/people-who-grew-up-with-very-little-affection-tend-to-develop-these-10-traits-later-in-life-according-to-psychology/  May 26, 2024, 10:06 am

[xxi] https://www.mjw-cydc.uwo.ca/docs/brochure_distracted_parenting.pdf  Tips for Limiting Hand-Held

[xxii] Lifton, Betty Jean.  Journey of the Adopted Self: a quest for wholeness.  Basic Books, 1994, 110.

[xxiii] Turow, Scott.  The Laws of Our Fathers.  Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1996, 66.

[xxiv] Bazelon, Lara. The Atlantic “The End of Mom Guilt: why a mother’s ambition is good for her family” May 2022

[xxv] https://www.quora.com/Why-isnt-love-enough-in-parenting-an-adopted-child

Entry #13 C Permissive/ Indulgent/Laissez-faire/Passive Parenting style

Depicting Permissive Parenting

I was still trying to sleep this morning at 7:30 am, the retiree’s right, I believe.   I think, Brodie, our Rottie/Shepard-cross hasn’t read the policy which lays that point out quite clearly. He’d just heard potentially exciting noises coming from the trail across the street.  Not really aware that going out the backdoor doesn’t connect him to the front yard, he wanted me to help him check things out. With absolutely no regard for my rights, he confidently strode into our bedroom, came around to my side, nosed my bottom and then sat back on his haunches, expectant that I would now jump obediently out of bed to let him outside. I didn’t roll over, so Plan B. He started whining. 20 minutes of intermittent whining, stalking out of the bedroom, returning to whine and I caved.  Ok, so he did have to pee, but he was out there to warn off potential intruders. Brodie got to indulge the joy of threatening barking. I got to deal with the fallout before the neigbourhood noise patrol might begin shaking their annoyed heads.  I know, I know, any good dog training book I’ve read says we should not give into our dog’s whining or allow him to learn that whining is a way to get what he wants.

And are there any parallels here with how Dave and I might have parented Yasik?  Anything I have read about Permissive parenting might suggest there is.  Actually, there are likely many, many more media sources on Permissive Parenting than on lax parenting of our puppies.

Roger that, let’s get back to seeing what the journal recorded of this aspect of our parenting. Surprisingly, at least to me, I don’t have many journal entries pointing to our experiences with Permissive parenting. Not that we can’t find ourselves often enough in the definition of Permissive parenting.  Just the other night, on a call to Yasik, Dave called him by Dave’s younger brother’s name, something he has done many times over the years.  He mixes Yasik up with his younger brother both because of what a brother signifies and because this brother was one of his closest friends growing up.   Hearing the mix-up, though I have heard it many times before, I ran for note paper as I am now looking at the definition for Permissive parents, that of seeing or wanting to see the child in the light of a friend/buddy relationship rather than in the light of the parent-child relationship. Of course, now, though it is a slip of the tongue, it is also, as these two adults interact, a compliment.

For me the, at times, razor sharp line between playful interaction with my child, wanting him to see me as his friend rather than see me as taking on the business of mothering, began barely a half hour after our driver turned the van back toward Moscow. For Dave it came more apparent later as he and Yasik explored the wonders of the computer together.  For neither of us would this, any more than any of the other parenting styles, have been a conscious parenting style selection.

Yasik was sitting in Dave’s lap but the translator in the front seat continued with Yasik’s immediate care, feeding him while telling us that he was not used to being in a vehicle and might throw food up.  She then showed us this sort of pat-a-cake game. Dave took it over as the front seat-back seat stretch was awkward.  Yasik was getting into the game, relaxing away the tension of saying good-bye to the orphanage.  Initiating is not usually my auto-response when I am in a new situation, but soon I too tried the pat-a-cake slapping hands game.  Four-and-a-half-year-old Yasik, in the middle of a vehicle full of strangers, most of whom are wrapping him in happy attention, was by now feeling the Russian version of Yeah! Alright! This is Cool!  Translation, maybe Yasik’s emotional dial was swinging a bit out of control. There was more haphazard but stronger sting to the slap.  I have never been comfortable saying “No” to much of anything, let alone the first half hour of excited play in my first day with my son.   I allowed the slapping to continue until Dave thought it had gone too far.

Once we felt Yasik was settled into our lifestyle, we set about honouring the suggestion given to us at the orphanage to encourage Yasik’s interest in music.   It was evident watching his wonder listening to music via headphones on the return flight from Moscow.  It was evident watching him soothe himself, alone on the living room couch, rocking and singing songs of his childhood. He loved music. Did we have a rock star or a Mozart in the making? Whatever, we were going to follow up on the orphanage’s directive.  As far as we knew that meant getting him into piano lessons. And for the first while Yasik seemed quite happy with the music lessons, admittedly, maybe more so when he got to play the drums in the class. Never thought to ask the little guy for suggestions.  At his recital, he seemed proud to be dressed in long pants and a nice shirt, playing Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star in front of an audience. Dave and I – well memory balks here – I was in tears.  The practices leading up to this recital had been less tear-inducing, more frustration and laughter inducing as Yasik would flop his head down on the keyboard when asked to hit the keys. Still and all, we were giving him the opportunity to develop a skill we believed had roots somewhere within him.

We were ‘giving him the opportunity’ by bribing him with an allowance. That, and threats always the backup.  Threats and bribes – two side of the same coin? ^[i]

The child will perform for the immediate benefit or pressure, sure.  And we were heaping praise on his efforts as well.  Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star never sounded so amazing to my heart. We believed that we were giving him every opportunity to find his place in the world.

So why was Yasik not embracing the opportunity with the appreciation and thrill we had imagined. The only other little boy in the group seemed proud to be learning to pay the piano. Yasik continued to moan and groan and flop around on the piano seat through the mere 10 to 15 minutes of piano practice before school.  I continued to push, bribing and threatening to contain his conflict with piano practice.  That last sentence might lead you to ask why I put this story in the Permissive parenting post rather than the Authoritarian parenting post for it is a bit of a stretch to see it as illustrating one of the traits in the definition of Permissive parenting:  These parents mostly allow their kids to do what they want and offer limited guidance or direction. They prefer to avoid conflict and will often acquiesce to their children’s pleas at the first sign of distress.^[ii]

The journal records one particularly bad lesson after a week of sketchy practice (some adjustments for the essential story).   I have not recorded (in itself a comment) how Yasik might have been feeling, but I image relief that the class was over and he was going home to TV, computer time or maybe the freedom to go down to the park to play with his friends.  I came away from the awkward class hour feeling self-pity at my unrewarded struggles to get him to practice, probably the driver of the next few minutes. I asked him if he wanted to quit piano.

“Yes”, he said. Groan.

“We’ll have to get rid of your piano you know.”

“Ok.”, this from a kid who had shown signs in the apartment in Moscow of the hoarding trait sometimes noticed in kids who’ve spent time in an orphanage.   I guess the need to hoard was no longer a trigger; maybe competition with his cousin would trigger him.

“We’ll give it to Kyle”, who a couple of years later showed roughly the same interest in piano as Yasik.   “OK.” he said. I’m dead.

On to the next manipulation. I turned off North Road at Foster Ave. to loop around and return to the building housing the piano school.  I told Yasik, now showing some concern, that I was disappointed in his choice. No comment.

But if it was his choice, then “OK, you can quit if that is what you want – but you have to tell Mrs. B. We are going back to the school to catch her before she closes up.”

“OK.”  Maybe it’s for the best I even thought. No more hassle. But I hated to have to tell Mrs B. I hate disappointing authority.  And what if it was a chance he’d never have again.

And into this downward-spirally dream came an inspiration. I had just run a yellow light near Lougheed Mall and he’d told me to be careful.  He had less confidence in my driving abilities than in his father’s.

“OK. If you quit, I can too.  I’m just going to quit driving.  I’m not good at it.  It’s too hard.  We will park in the mall and then we will walk up to the school. You go in to tell Mrs. B. you are quitting and then we will leave the car and walk home.  Dad can come and get the car.”    It was now becoming dark, cold and raining.  We bundled up, got out and started to walk. Seriously.

He was saying we can’t do this.  I said we can and we marched.

We walked almost two blocks when he said, “I was just fooling.  I won’t quit.”

And I said, “OK, I’ll drive.”  I grabbed him and hugged him.  He was embarrassed in the street but I know he was happy for the hug and kiss, and relieved that we were finally just going home.  For a plus, when we reached Lougheed Mall, I let him drive (sitting in my lap of course) around the empty parking lot.   Manipulation or not, I wondered at the time.

I was holding Yasik to piano playing not in a direct authoritarian, no revolt-tolerated plan of action, but with bribes and threats in ‘his best interest’.  Cecile David-Weill, in Parents Under the Influence:words of wisdom from a former bad mother ( P. 57) wonders if a parent might push piano lessons on his or her child to give the child an opportunity the parent felt was missing from his or her own childhood, making the push for lessons “all about her, her own upbringing and her own regrets, rather than about her son and his interests, which don’t even cross her mind.”

Is it possible that both Authoritarian parenting and Permissive parenting come from a place of parent-driven choices for the child, one coming at it from direct demands, the other from threats and bribes? Do Permissive parents really not want to get in their child’s way?  Do they think that a softer approach will get them what they want?  Expected obedience/threats or bribes, are they too just two sides of another coin?

Julie Lythcott-Haims, a former dean of freshmen and undergraduate advising at Stanford University, has written How to Raise an Adult: break free of the overparenting trap and prepare your kid for success because she has seen the impact of over-parenting on young people.  

Some students bided their time until they could finally get out from under their parents…. Some expressed anger at their parents. I read the resignation in their eyes.  I sensed their bewilderment at the dawning realization they were living within a landscape full of possibility unavailable to them because they were on a leash and led down a path of their parents’ making – that they’d spent years learning how to reach for and achieve their parents’ ambitious dreams but were not allowed to dream dreams of their own…. Sure there’s the chance that all of this striving for perfection, even in a field the student doesn’t think she likes, will by some measure turn out to be “worth it” in the long run, or that a kid who never mastered anything in particular will later regret being allowed to quit piano.… I’m focusing on what happens when harsh, not-necessarily-fitting expectations have been imposed on children and they have lived up to those expectations.  A great many students experiencing such things sought mental health counseling.  Some dropped out of school for a while. Some fell completely apart. ^[iii]

Of course this piece seems to fit more precisely into the post on Authoritarian parenting, unless we are flipping a coin here between direct commands and threats or bribes.

Have we ever resolved the question of whether or not it is problematic for little boys to play with guns or how much TV or computer time is damning? Media regularly address one or the other of the concerns, and regularly we hear rumblings the government is going to apply restrictions in the ‘best interests of the child’.  So was it cute or worrisome to come into our living room to find our young man sitting on the couch with his little hockey stick, popping off cars passing by on the street. Little boys, they say, turn anything from carrot sticks to Lego blocks into guns.  I went with being disconcerted while Dave was tempering. Yasik had become what I felt was too interested in shooting bad men.  Yet if we truly believed shooting cars with a hockey stick would lead to a life of crime, our response was lame. Dave and I tried to child-proof the remote with whatever techniques were available at the time, but Yasik figured out how to get all the channels back.

Until the movies came out or until the night I came into Yasik’s bedroom at the end of an evening as I routinely had done since his first nights in our home, to read him to sleepiness, I had been reading him books that progressed from one-sentence per page stories to the magical Harry Potters.

One such night Harry gets into some trouble and Yasik said, “He should have just lied to save himself.” What does a formerly god-fearing, morals-valuing mother say to that?

With all the backbone of someone who hates conflict, I muttered that I didn’t think Harry lied.

Yasik came right back with, “Sure he does.”

Two pages or so later, Harry definitely lies and Yasik said, “See Mom.” There is no record in the journal of any morally-guiding comeback from me.

The Harry Potter movies started to come out when Yasik was around 12; about the same time, for whatever impressions Yasik had picked up, he had come to the decision that the nightly bed time book routine must come to a halt.  Sleeping in a top bunk he shared on the weekends with our client on the bottom bunk, he had barricaded himself or snugged himself up there by draping blankets over the edge of the bunk’s sidings.  He popped his head over his parapet to tell me I didn’t need to read to him anymore. And that was that.  I accepted his decision with hardly a whimper.

Nightly bedtime stories with me were replaced, as was true for all his friends, with computer games, usually set up by his dad for him and for his friends.  I noted in my journal that I wondered (with the bemused word ‘actually’ fronting ‘wondered’) if gaming is like whiling the hours away reading which suggests that however much I may have tried to shrug off Yasik’s gun toting and game playing, I did feel, and at times muttered to Dave, that it might be deleterious to a healthy moral upbringing.

It is less clear in the journal whether we showered Yasik with too many things; certainly he had everything any of his friends had, but was that not par for the course for a middle-class lifestyle?

So let’s go back to those ‘mutterings’. They might segue into a peek under the covers of our marriage.  Which could be a somewhat misleading metaphor.  Rather than where your mind might head if on auto-pilot, focus on the blanket covering our marriage bed, flopping about as the two individuals beneath each seek a don’t-go-to-bed-in-anger relationship and a good night’s sleep.  This to say that if Permissive parenting style defined any part of our parenting, it was more often than not expressed by one or the other of us, not often by both of us together, ergo the image of the blanket covering marital tensions beneath it: Good Cop/Bad Cop parenting.

Starting right from that first hour as parents in the van. Even as Yasik was hitting and later biting, I was reluctant to say “Nyet!” Dave did say “Nyet!” when he thought Yasik was crossing a line.  Within a few weeks, Dave felt he was looking like the bad guy and being rejected for “Nyet!” was coming from him more often than from me.

One evening in that first September as parents, we were taking a walk before bed.  I was holding Yasik’s hand to help him balance as he goose-stepped on top of a small, stone property boundary. I was not paying much attention but perhaps I was letting Yasik stray onto private property.  Dave was disturbed by it. In frustration he said so to me because once again saying “Nyet!” put him in a less favourable light with Yasik.  That metaphoric marriage blanket settled into an uncomfortable silence.

Parents Under the Influence author, Cecile David-Weill, suggests that infants/children develop a “sixth sense” of their caregivers’ “state of mind” and “may feel responsible for the tensions around them”.^[iv]  Did Yasik sense the tension between his parents? Had he become adept at sensing tensions around him very early in life?  Maybe, for when we got home to bathe him, he turned very specifically to Dave. And then they were checking out the wonders of Toy Story together before bed.  The interactions within a family are five minutes of this and then, spin, and it is five minutes of something totally different. A fine line between fun and tension, yet something to take note of.

We were each pulling for our share of the blanket when Yasik needed to go ‘sikats’ on his own.  I wanted to help that little penis point in the right direction but Dave felt Yasik was ready to practice aiming on his own.  I think Yasik did figure out where to point.

It wasn’t all awkwardness or tension as Dave and I tugged for cover over permissiveness or strictness under the marriage blanket.  There were funny moments too.  Times like one afternoon. Dave had come skulking around when he felt I was being too easy on Yasik for an impudence or tantrum. All 40 some inches and 40 lbs. were trying to stand up to Dave and I. When it ended with Yasik crying, Dave turned and went back to the computer set up in the kitchen. I followed him and Dave, with his back still to me, said, “And I don’t care what you think”.  Then he wheeled around and demanded, “What do you think?”  Partly delay tactic, partly not knowing what to say and wanting to avoid conflict or feeling the moment was not right for talk, I returned with a confused, “I haven’t thought anything yet”.

In sum, Dave and I concluded that he expected too much and I expected too little; this was probably in terms of differing priorities because I suspect that while Dave wanted Yasik to learn to behave appropriately and respectfully, I wanted him to do well at school. Depending on which priority was being tested by Yasik, one or the other of us donned the cop uniform we felt necessary for the moment concerned. Sometimes Permissive, sometimes Authoritarian?     

But all this high-minded talk of priorities can get very personal and somewhat less the look of child-centered parenting. At the time it felt to Dave like the two of us are siding against him.   When Yasik and Dave were on the computer, I felt like I was left out.  But did we see more clearly what the problem and solution were? Not really – we weren’t able to step outside ourselves to look at the problem.  The journal suggests I did realize I had a husband who was fascinated with how things work and what they lead to when they work; at that time, it was the computer which combines technology and art potential and it kept one step ahead of him. Besides which he was learning things we all needed to know.  I got a chance at a good education later in life and I valued it as one of life’s highest gifts.  We also had a young son who wanted our attention most of the time even if his emotions degenerated into hitting out in over excited play or anger, responses that should not be excused or ignored.

John Brooks and his wife Erica dealt with angry outbursts from their daughter and came at this struggle in ways similar to Dave and mine:

Feeling like miserable failures. Erica and I turned on each other.  We came from very different parenting models. Erika’s immigrant parents had always been strict and controlling, like their parents, whereas mine were fairly laid-back, like Ward and June Cleaver. Erika accused me of being too easy on Casey while I felt that Erika needed to give her a longer leash. She believed firmly-and rightly so- that we need a united front in complete alignment against such a willful child and she was ever watchful for any threat to the alliance.^[v]

Was he getting spoiled as Dave suggested? How is ‘getting spoiled’ even defined?  Amy Anderson came from a family of 10 while her husband, Chip, was ostensibly an only child. They started their life together with only his step-son but later added two they produced together. To Amy allowing their children choice in school lunches seemed overkill whereas Chip couldn’t see what the big deal was. So one kid wants a choice of mustard, pickle or cheese and the next one doesn’t?  Not an issue unless there wasn’t time or resources for that kind of choice when 10 lunches needed to be made. ^[vi]

The one explanation that cannot be countenanced in a question of becoming spoiled by our Permissive parenting is the accusation that a child is being manipulative.  One evening when Yasik was a few years older, my journal says ‘Last night after Yasik worked on manipulating me by saying, “You guys never play with me.” I agreed to play a board game with him. Dave came in to say, “No, we should teach him not to say ‘Never’ and guilt trip us. He should know to just straight out ask to play”.

The common thought, most of my adult life has been that children are capable of manipulation. Recently I have noticed writers take a paragraph or two to caution against that assumption for a child needs a developed pre-frontal cortex to manage the executive function I suggested he was employing, something not operating until the child is no longer a child.  Check out the addresses in footnote #vii for more on that inappropriate accusation of a child’s tantrum, a tantrum being the child’s way to express frustration.^[vii]

Dave and I have always been determined not to give up and close the door on trust of each other so after some stewing time we would talk about issues of expecting too much or too little and how to give Yasik more independence because we do believe in not taking our disagreements to bed, lucky for the blanket.

So what did we have in the end? A tenderhearted man who was frustrated by feelings of guilt and fear of being left out, a son who was just being a kid, playing with those he loved, and a woman who struggled between a daydream and reality, wanting to enjoy picture perfect and knowing there are realities, some of which I accepted and some I didn’t. Work and school’s priority I understood, but Dave and Yasik wanting time on the computer to play computer games, not so much. Dave understood playing on computer but a kid having a tantrum, not so acceptable.

Defining Permissive Parenting

Your mission, if you choose to accept, is to underline the following characteristics you identify in the narrative.

Δ   High Responsiveness: warm, loving, non-controlling, accepting, relaxed, indulgent, affirmative, involved, but not in a traditional way.   In carrying out their responsibility for their children, these parents are more likely to treat their children as friends rather than acting as authority figures with their children who need discipline. They communicate openly, are highly involved in their children’s lives, going to great lengths to fulfill their children’s desires whenever possible, sometimes at their own expense.

Δ   Low Demandingness: offer limited, inconsistent guidance or direction, have a hard time setting limits with the children, usually with minimal expectations, structure or rules either not set or rarely enforced giving in against their better judgment when their children get upset so as not to disappoint or upset the children, non-punitive. These low levels of expectation seldom result in using discipline. The children are allowed to exercise full autonomy, being left to explore the world all by themselves and decide for themselves. Not wanting to say “No” or disappoint their children, they support their children almost blindly, allowing them to push boundaries and “get away with” poor behavior. Children can avoid punishment by begging because permissive parents are lenient and forgiving. This can be the result of the parents having grown up with an Authoritarian parenting style in their own household and not wanting to put their children through it.

The parents are often liberal, middle-class professionals, thus are rewarded for taking initiative, being self-directed, and assertive in their jobs.  These parents encourage their children to have those qualities as well by rewarding independence and self-reliance.

Sites referred to for the definitions are in footnote #viii^[viii]:

Distilling Permissive Parenting 

Good Cop/Bad Cop

Attaching in Adoption: practical tools for today’s parents   Deborah D. Gray deals with it early on in the book for it may lead to an unhealthy parent-child relationship which might feel good to a child initially but may lead to a sense of insecurity in the child.^[ix]

Some parents find themselves replaying the “good cop, bad cop” style that their parents used…. But for parents having a hard time connecting with children, playing a role as the mushy confidante can seem appealing… In portraying one parent as the “bad cop”, parents are telling their child that one parent is insensitive, unfair, and inadequate…. The logical conclusion for the child is that the tough parent is not safe for attachment. At the same time, the parent who is the “soft touch” does not seem strong or effective to a child. If children … know that they are themselves in charge, not their parents… [t]his makes them anxious.

Bribes/Threats/Manipulation

When Is a Child’s Reward Actually a Bribe? Reinforcing motivation and self-esteem versus manipulative behavior.^[x]

Rewards are a positive consequence for your child’s behavior that has already occurred…. Bribes, however, are persuasion-based offers of something in advance of the moment to stop your child’s current negative behaviors. Rewards are meant to encourage motivation and reinforce positive behavior. Bribes, on the other hand, can undermine a child’s intrinsic motivation and lead to entitlement or manipulative behavior.

Manipulative Parents^[xi]

In most cases, manipulative parents refer to parents who use covert psychological methods to control the child’s activities and behavior in such a way as to prevent the child from becoming an independent adult apart from their control.

Emotional manipulation by parents: love withdrawal, guilt induction, silent treatment, gaslighting.

Fear exploitation: coercion, humiliation, social comparison, financial manipulation

Permissive Parenting Pros and Cons

Permissive parenting: An evidence-based guide^[xii].

Permissive parents don’t present themselves as authority figures or role models. They might use reason or manipulation to get what they want. But they avoid exercising overt power (Baumrind 1966).

The positive and negative effects of permissive parenting

…[O]n the positive side, children with permissive parents are better off than kids whose parents are uninvolved. In addition, kids raised by permissive caregivers tend to have high self-esteem, and they may be more resourceful than kids raised by uninvolved or authoritarian parents (e.g., Turkel and Tezer 2008; Rothrauff et al 2009; Lamborn et al 1991)….

But, on the negative side, there is also a lot of research supporting the claim that “indulged” kids tend to be less self-disciplined and less responsible than are children with authoritative parents….

But there are exceptions.

For example, on the one hand, it’s not clear that permissiveness is always inferior to authoritative parenting. Several studies, conducted in Spain and Latin America, have reported no differences between teenagers raised by permissive or authoritative parents (e.g., Garcia and Gracia 2009)….

Why do different studies report conflicting results? It may be that parenting styles have different effects depending on the local culture (Chao 1994). But it’s probably also a question of methodology….

So by using different screening tools, researchers are, in effect, defining “permissive” parenting very differently. Is one definition better than the other? Not really. It doesn’t matter how we label people — not as long as we understand each other’s definitions…. 

I think the important takeaway from all studies is that “ignoring bad behavior” is generally linked with suboptimal child outcomes. By contrast, being very controlling or bossy — like insisting that a teenager do every task in a specific order — isn’t associated with the best child outcomes….

In defense of permissiveness

… Baumrind’s permissive parents don’t sound like people who routinely let their kids get away with antisocial behavior — not, at any rate, behavior that I find objectionable, like deliberate rudeness, or violations of other people’s rights and feelings.

Instead, Baumrind’s permissive parents sound more like radical democrats. People who believe that parents and kids should exercise equal power.

… I wonder if the evidence against permissive parenting is really evidence against a relatively extreme, “anything goes” type of permissiveness.

… The adolescents who scored as being the best-adjusted — and the most supportive of prosocial values — were the ones whose parents rejected punishment and scolding as a means of disciplining kids (Garcia et al 2019). And as I’ve argued elsewhere, kids are more likely to develop as innovative, creative, critical thinkers when we let them experiment and tinker. If you want to raise a scientist, let your child ask offbeat questions, get dirty, and take things apart.

The Psychology Behind Different Types of Parenting Styles^[xiii]

… [A] growing body of research suggests that parenting’s influence on the children’s psychosocial adjustment can also vary as a function of the cultural context….

[F]urther, research findings regarding change in the parental dimensions of warmth and strictness across generations suggest a tendency toward an increase in parental warmth and a decrease in parental strictness [43,44], although it is not clear which specific practices of warmth and strictness are changing across generations [38,42]….

The present study examines cross-generational differences in parental practices …. Overall, results showed cross-generational differences in parental practices [showed][t]he indulgent style (warmth but not strictness) was related to equal or even better results on psychosocial adjustment outcomes than authoritative parenting (warmth and strictness), ….

Nevertheless, findings from the present study do not agree with some evidence from other cultural contexts where parental strictness is a necessary component of parental socialization in order to obtain children with good psychosocial adjustment.

Respectful Parenting Is Not Permissive Parenting^[xiv]

These parents might worry that their child’s spirit will be crushed or she’ll stop loving or trusting them if there is a conflict of will. They coax or distract their child into the behavior they want (or out of the behavior they don’t want) rather than risk being the mean guy who says “no”.

“Basically, most parents are afraid of disciplining their children because they are afraid of the power struggle. They are afraid of overpowering the child, afraid they will destroy the child’s free will and personality. This is an erroneous attitude. “         –Magda Gerber

Permissive Parenting Is Non-Intervention Because of Fear!^[xv]

1. The parent’s own fear of not being loved!
2. The parent’s own existential fear of being restricted and losing freedom
3. The parent’s own fear of losing inner stability and peace of mind!

Humankind: a hopeful history   Rutger Bregman makes a strong argument for unrestrained play, room for freedom and creativity. “[K]ids can be trusted with an abundance of freedom”.… The question is not: can our kids handle the freedom? The question is: do we have the courage to give it to them?”^[xvi]

Hunt, Gather, Parent: what ancient cultures can teach us about the lost art of raising happy, helpful little humans^[xvii]

…our culture often has things backward when it comes to kids: We interfere too much. We don’t have enough confidence in our children. We don’t trust their innate ability to know what they need to grow.  And in many instances, we don’t speak their language.

  In particular, our culture focuses almost entirely on one aspect of the parent-child relationship. That’s control – how much control the parent exerts over the child, and how much control the child tries to exert over the parent. The most common parenting “styles” all revolve around control. Helicopter parents exert maximal control. Free-range parents exert minimal. Our culture thinks either the adult is in control or the child is in control.

  There’s a major problem with this view of parenting. It sets us up for power struggles, with fights, screaming and tears. Nobody likes to be controlled. Both the children and parents rebel against it. So when we interact with our children in terms of control – whether it’s a parent controlling the child or vice versa – we establish an adversarial relationship.

Why parents shouldn’t always be ‘in sync’ with their children^[xviii] 

My colleagues and I carried out research which showed that brain-to-brain synchrony between parent and child can be helpful for children’s attachment, and tends to rise when a parent and child play, talk or solve problems together. Recently, however, we started wondering whether more synchrony is always better…. Our recent study, published in Developmental Science, suggests it can sometimes be a sign of relationship difficulties….

… For example, research revealed that for about 50-70% of the time, parents and children are not “in sync”. During these times, they may be doing separate activities, such as a child exploring something on their own or a parent working. They rather engage in a constant “social dance” comprising being attuned to each other, failing to do so and repairing this disconnect….

And it’s this flow of connection, disconnection and reconnection that offers children an ideal mixture of parental support and moderate, useful stress that helps growing children’s social brains….

… [P]arents and children constantly being tuned in to each other…. can increase stress on the relationship and raise the risk for insecure child attachment….

In our new study, we actually observed that mothers who had an insecure, anxious or avoidant attachment type showed more neural synchrony with their children….

Great Myths of Child Development^[xix]

Myth #48 – Rewards usually decrease the desirable behavior they’re intended to increase

…[W]hile decreases in desirable behavior can occur following rewards, rewards quite often are followed by sustained increases in desirable behavior. This increase is quite frequently maintained once the reward is faded out.

Myth #49   Praise undermines children’s ability to be successful

…Critics of praise often point to laboratory research showing that after children experience a failure, they respond differently to different types of praise…. Even the praise critics encourage the use of some praise; they just call it “encouragement” instead of “praise.” 

Myth #50 Parents were not permissive when I was a kid

…people like to complain about the new-fangled problem of permissive parenting. Nevertheless, there have always been parents with high degrees of permissiveness, and there probably always will be. Indeed, there will also always be someone there to complain about them. 

In chapter 4 of Scientific Parenting: what science reveals about parental influence, Dr. Nicole Letourneau with Justin Joschko look at studies of mice and the impact of both their genes and their environment in terms of how they came to deal with the worlds they found themselves in. When itty bitty mice born to “scaredy-mouse” mothers were then fostered by “tougher” mother mice, they showed a resilience not expressed by their bio-mothers.^[xx]

Might tuck in here a reminder of Jean Jacques Rousseau (1712 – 1798) and his theory of child raising that supported allowing children to be free and unfettered to learn from experience naturally, unrestrained by adult direction and books.

In How to raise an adult: break free of the overparenting trap and prepare your kid for success, ^[xxi]

Summary

Julie Lythcott-Haims  offers an observation to parents from Stacy Budin, a psychiatrist: “You can’t have a healthy family life if you’re so focused on the kids that you lose connection with each other”.

Lythcott-Haim also offers this:

Kids- – particularly adolescent boys – often make poor choices as a normal part of development as humans; they’ve got an impulse to do the bad or crazy things but their prefrontal cortex is still developing, which means they can’t yet appreciate the danger involved and so can’t use what we would call “good judgement”…. Enforcing consequence for our own kids is essential.

Fish don’t climb trees: a whole new look at dyslexia^[xxii]

… if a child wants to have a goldfish, and the parents are adamant that it will be the child’s sole responsibility, the child has to be willing and able to buy the fish food, feed the fish and clean the tank. That part is usually easy to establish. The parents now have to make peace with the idea of watching the fish tank getting greener and greener, and the fish dying in its watery dungeon, because the minute they give in and decide to change the state of the hungry fish, into a fed fish, they have assumed control. This means that there is now joint responsibility for the goldfish, and their offspring will not take the sole responsibility back.

Others’ parenting experiences, speaking to at least some aspects of the Permissive Parenting Style.

How to raise an adult: break free of the overparenting trap and prepare your kid for success^[xxiii]

… [W]hen it came to raising their two children, they couldn’t have been less like-minded about how to help their kids “make it”. Don’s wife wanted to help their kids as much as possible, which to her meant letting the kids enjoy their free time instead of doing chores, and hovering over them to ensure their homework was done.  Don saw both of these seemingly helpful things as quite the opposite. “I’ve looked back at my life and I believe one hundred percent that the responsibilities I had taught me how to be self-sufficient, and that sometimes you have to do things you don’t want to do but you suck it up and do it anyway, and that’s what teaches you humility, work ethic, responsibility, and follow-through.

“My ex felt like she always had to observe our son and daughter, tell them what to do, and remind them of this or that. And when they didn’t do the things she was constantly reminding them to do, she’d get frustrated and keep telling the kids, ‘You need to start your homework’ – nothing would happen- ‘You really need to start your homework’ – nothing would happen. These repetitive reminders and requests went in one ear and out the other. And there were no consequences”. …. “My child should be accountable for their work…. At work we call it micromanaging versus empowerment”.

Mom Who Tried To Gentle Parent Her 5-Year-Old Daughter Says She Raised A ‘Little Monster’ — ‘Everything Is A Fight’^[xxiv]

One mother … was struggling with this internal battle with her 5-year-old daughter. Originally, she’d casually tried the “gentle parenting” technique, but quickly realized her daughter was growing into a “little monster.”

…Not only does her daughter expect her parents to do everything for her, but the mom admitted that parenting has been a constant battle. 

…“I don’t expect her to magically be able to do everything,” she clarified, “just some small things like eat independently or put her own shoes on.”

…“We’ve had something similar recently with our little guy,” one mom added under the post. “You have to call their bluff — their power in the situation comes from the fact that they think/know that you will ultimately dress them because you wouldn’t send them to daycare/school like that.”

Detachment: an adoption memoir ^[xxv]

“These kids seemed more like wild dogs who needed me to establish dominance over the pack, not exactly my strong suit”….

One of Mierau’s sons saw someone on a bus with a mohawk haircut and wanted it.  Mierau edged past the request by temporizing that they might talk to mom about getting one. Later Mierau said, “I was scared that Bohdan would actually remember this conversation….” 

When his kids wouldn’t go to sleep one evening while they were on a visit to his parents, Mierau “spent half an hour threatening, negotiating, cajoling them. In the end I said fine, do what you want, and fell onto my bed for a few hours of exhausted sleep”.

“’Peter, you have to go down the hill right now. Or else.” I had no idea what or else meant, …”

The Girl Behind the Door: a father’s guest to understand his daughter’s suicide ^[xxvi]

As time went on, parenting Casey often felt like breaking a wild stallion. They instinctively protect their space and dominate their handlers. Sometimes they have limited patience, lash out and bite. Only the most experienced handlers can train them. There is no single method of training that works, because every stallion is different.  In each case, handlers have to project confidence and speak with authority to gain the stallion’s respect…. I wish I’d had a gift for understanding my own daughter. As infuriating as her behavior was we had no reference point to determine if this was normal, because we had no other children. Instead we’d allowed our child to manipulate us into giving her whatever she wanted in order to avert her tears. It had to be us. We were incompetent parents.   

A perspective on Permissive Parenting specific to adoption:

What must also be considered is the impact of adoption on a child who struggles with self-regulation or has learned a regulation that may not work in the world he or she is in.  Or is simply in the emotional upheaval of a new world, one that doesn’t usually deal with the emotional immaturity or lack of confidence or whatever the adoptee’s emotional, mental, etc. state is in face of the expectations of something like piano lessons.    Yasik may have tinkered with a piano because he loved to listen to music and perhaps it had a calming effect but regular practice may have been a whole other, decidedly less calming aspect of music for him.   What was the fight he was having with piano that we believing we had been given a young Mozart into our care did not understand?

Attaching in Adoption: practical tools for today’s parents ^[xxvii]

Parents whose own parents were too rigid tend to see roles as either being rigid or unstructured. They like to choose the unstructured, since it feels loving. Of course, lack of structure does not bring out the best in children. It is a harmful parenting style for children who need a lot of structure to succeed. Almost without exception, children who are described in this book need high nurture along with high structure. If they want to assure themselves that they are parenting in a kind way, not a rigid way, parents can look hard at the nurturing they are doing along with their structure.

The Adoptive Parents’ Handbook: a guide to healing trauma and thriving with your foster or adopted child^[xxviii]

I’m sitting in my office, doing an intake for what looks like a very nice couple who are coming in because they are very concerned about their five-year-old adopted son. I listen to the facts that are sadly so familiar to me – two years of trauma with his bio-mom before his removal, a few different foster homes, and then adoption by this family who earnestly wants the best for him. But then they say the “M” word and I find myself nearly flinching.

“Everything he does is just trying to get attention,” the mom insisted. “He’s trying to manipulate me.”

…The truth is that children aren’t capable of manipulation until adolescence, because to be able to manipulate, you need a more developed prefrontal cortex…. [According to the dictionary] in order for one person to manipulate another, an action has to done to control another with clear purpose by unfair or artful means.

Most children that have been traumatized just don’t have the developmental maturity to be able to do this. Even typical children can’t do this until at least early adolescence (around nine or ten), and generally speaking, children with trauma tend to have developmental delays in the areas of emotional and social maturity.

So, if it’s not manipulation, what is it when a child does things to get certain reactions, leaving us feeling manipulated? These actions are survival strategies for the child; strategies that they’ve had to learn to survive very difficult circumstances.  And when we as adults see these strategies, we often interpret them through our lens and ascribe adult meanings and motivations to the behavior….

One of the keys [to handling the behavior better] can be looking at it from the child’s perspective, and asking what need they’re trying to meet with the behavior.

And then there is this:

At the point of entry into the teen years, Yasik was almost as tall as I was. The 40” x 40 lbs. long gone. He was finding his way into manhood, hair as long as he could get it to grow and flipped outward in the front but wavy in the back. His acne was under control and he was smoothly tanned. He wore T shirts, boarder pants which looked to me like retro-fitted old men’s golfing pants. He had biked into town and bought them himself at a friend’s mother’s store, 2 pairs too big for him I thought, but his pants, his choice.

Footnotes

[i] https://www.childproofparenting.com/blog/threats-bribes  Threats & Bribes: Two Sides of The Same Coin

[ii] https://www.cnbc.com/2021/06/29/child-psychologist-explains-4-types-of-parenting-and-how-to-tell-which-is-right-for-you.html  A psychologist shares the 4 styles of parenting—and the type that researchers say is the most successful

[iii] Lythcott-Haims, Julie. How to Raise an Adult: break free of the overparenting trap and prepare your kid for success.  Henry Holt & Company, 2015, 99-100.

[iv] David-Weill, Cecile. Parents Under the Influence.  Penguin Random House, 2019, 9,10.

[v] Brooks, John. The Girl Behind the Door: a father’s quest to understand his daughter’s suicide. Scribner, 2016, 64.

[vi] Anderson, Amy, “Counting on Cousins” from Rebecca Walker, ed. One Big Happy Family.  Penguin Group, 2009, 63.

[vii] https://www.knoxvillecounselingservices.com/courtneys-blog/2018/10/25/al6ou5mqr2oip3tobptcw8bgg65tux  https://raisedgood.com/toddlers-meltdowns-brain-development-ditch-traditional-discipline/

[viii] https://jessup.edu/blog/academic-success/the-psychology-behind-different-types-of-parenting-styles/

https://www.goodhousekeeping.com/life/parenting/a26987389/types-of-parenting-styles/

https://themindsjournal.com/4-common-parenting-styles/

https://openpress.usask.ca/lifespandevelopment/chapter/parenting-styles/

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK568743/

https://www.cnbc.com/2021/06/29/child-psychologist-explains-4-types-of-parenting-and-how-to-tell-which-is-right-for-you.html

https://www.psychologs.com/7-types-of-parenting-styles-you-might-wanna-steer-clear-from/

https://www.psychologytoday.com/ca/basics/parenting/parenting-styles

https://parentingscience.com/permissive-parenting/

https://www.parentingforbrain.com/4-baumrind-parenting-styles/

https://www.positive-parenting-ally.com/permissive-parenting-style.html

[ix] Gray, Deborah, D. Attaching in Adoption: practical tools for today’s parents. Jessica Kingsley Publishers, 2002, 97.

[x] Bernstein, Jeffrey Ph.D.       https://www.psychologytoday.com/ca/blog/liking-the-child-you-love/202303/when-is-a-childs-reward-actually-a-bribe  Posted March 22, 2023 | Reviewed by Vanessa Lancaster

[xi] https://www.parentingforbrain.com/manipulative-parents/

[xii] Dewar, Gwen, Ph.D. https://parentingscience.com/permissive-parenting/   © 2010 – 2022

[xiii] https://jessup.edu/blog/academic-success/the-psychology-behind-different-types-of-parenting-styles/

[xiv]https://www.janetlansbury.com/2012/09/respectful-parenting-is-not-permissive-parenting/

[xv] https://www.positive-parenting-ally.com/permissive-parenting-style.html

[xvi] Bregman, Rutger. Humankind: a hopeful history.   Bloomsbury, 2020, 286 – 295.

[xvii] Doucleff, Michaeleen, Ph.D. Hunt, Gather, Parent: what ancient cultures can teach us about the lost art of raising happy, helpful little humans.  Avid Reader Press, 2022, P9.

[xviii] Vrticka, Pascal.  https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20240524-why-neural-synchrony-between-parents-and-children-isnt-always-ideal   

[xix]  Hupp, Stephen and Jeremy Jewell Great Myths of Child Development. Wiley-Blackwell, 2015.

[xx] Letourneau, Dr. Nicole with Justin Joschko   Scientific Parenting: what science reveals about parental influence. Dundern Press, 2013, 62-76.

[xxi] Lythcott-Haims, Julie.  How to raise an adult: break free of the overparenting trap and prepare your kid for success  Henry Holt & Company, 2015,  121, 64-65.

[xxii]  Blyth Hall, Sue.  Fish don’t climb trees: a whole new look at dyslexia. Friesen Press, 2020, 196.

[xxiii] Lythcott-Haims, Julie.  How to raise an adult: break free of the overparenting trap and prepare your kid for success.   Henry Holt & Company, 2015, 122-123.

[xxiv]  Slabbekoorn, Zayda. https://www.yourtango.com/self/therapist-explains-why-good-kids-spend-whole-adult-lives-recovering    Written on Jul 27, 2024

[xxv]Mierau, Maurice.  Detachment: an adoption memoir.  Freehand Books, 2014, 101,145,153.

[xxvi]Brooks, John. The Girl Behind the Door: a father’s quest to understand his daughter’s suicide. Scribner, 2016, 62-63.

[xxvii] Gray, Deborah, D. Attaching in Adoption: practical tools for today’s parents.Jessica Kingsey Publishers, 2002, 97.

[xxviii]  Tantrum, Barbara Cumins.   The Adoptive Parents’ Handbook: a guide to healing trauma and thriving with your foster or adopted child. North Atlantic Books, 2020, 104-105.

Entry #13 D  Authoritative Parenting

Depicting Authoritative Parenting

I anticipate that this will be the shortest parenting styles entry.  This is the one we are encouraged to strive after as parents, but to actually affirm that as parents we are golden parents feels a bit uncomfortable, like chest puffing, not quite politically correct or sufficiently self-deprecating. Added to which, the preceding entries reveal, via example after example, and even accounting for natural self-deprecation, our mismanagement of Yasik’s parenting. Can anything be found in my oracle, the journal, to suggest that we might have been parents guided by authoritative parenting skills? Did I like any good reporter only write the breaking news that would horrify, sidelining or shrugging off the positive stories?

Wellll, hopefully not puffing our chests too unnaturally, we did skinny into Authoritative Parenting in the parenting skills quiz we tried back in Post/Entry #13, Introduction to Parenting Styles and certainly it was our ardent desire to be the best parents we knew how to be for this kid we loved.  Had we been offered a lecture on parenting skills in the seminars we participated in pre-adoption, it would have been a no–brainer for us, like every parent in the room, to recognize that Authoritative Parenting was the ideal way to raise a child.

Like Goldilocks, who chose a bowl of just right porridge, did we sometimes manage to hold the parenting teeter totter in a just right balance, not too permissive and not too neglectful? ( Since publishing this post I have discovered that the Goldilocks metaphor is not one that only my brain flagged. Goldilocks and the ‘just right’ message are go-tos for many brains. Dr. Aliza Pressman  in the 5 principles of parenting (Simon Element, 2024,102) tells the reader

Somewhere in the middle, there’s the authoritative parent – high on limits and boundaries and high on sensitivity. Developmental psychologist Dr. Stephanie Carlson calls this position “Goldilocks parenting” – the optimal balance. And the research has remained steady. Goldilocks parenting is associated with the most integrated child developmental outcomes – and more evidence that a middle-of-the-road approach gets better results than the rigid or extreme approaches.

We are aware that we need to teach our children that life is about sharing and caring for each other as they learn to take care of themselves while we as parents try not to be controlling yet stay in charge – to establish boundaries and maintain them, all with a warm, loving and supportive approach.

I begin by retelling one story but rearranging it to look, not at the Permissive or Neglectful or Authoritarian aspects, but to suggest that some intuitive part came from the Authoritative parenting.  It is the story of accompanying Yasik to a school gym to support him as he was now being encouraged to join in more school activities.  At the Christmas program the previous year Yasik was the one kindergartner allowed to remain sitting in the audience rather than being expected to join the rest of his class on stage. Now in his second year at the school, he would be encouraged to no longer sit on the sidelines.  Entering the gym he went into automatic sideline mode.  And as I recount in earlier entries/posts, I went into automatic threat and bribe mode. The bribe worked enough to get Yasik on the trampoline but wasn’t enough to entice him into a second turn. I returned to threat mode and up he climbed again. This time I saw a mix of the struggle with fear and a shy enjoyment register on his face. He had conquered the worst of it.  He was on his way. Between the first and second attempts there were tears on my neck to add to all this and, as I watched him get up and try this in front of peers who babied him still, I had to fight tears too.  I was so proud of him and all he attempted and of his stubborn refusals too.  He wasn’t following blindly – he was taking care of himself, and I was balancing the parental teeter totter somewhere between Permissive and Authoritarian.

What if that teeter totter could be balanced by one parent being the ‘demander’ and the other being the ‘warmer’? The journal acknowledges that Dave and I, while perhaps not able to articulate that we wanted to be Authoritative rather than any of the other three styles, would talk over our concerns: me being too permissive and he taking on the role of disciplinarian more often. (Don’t worry. I am aware that ‘Good cop/Bad cop can be read between these lines) We were trying to follow through on areas needing discipline and Yasik seemed happy with it – after the fact.  The journal notes: “He bores easily- so it is a fine line between control and creativity.  He needs support and control”.  We also talked about how to give Yasik more independence, holding our breath on the consequences. Case in point, Dave warning me off jumping into action when Yasik wanted me to help him go sikats (I am no longer certain that is the correct Russian word). Dave was firm that at five he should be taking care of this business on his own, whether the orphanage had prepared Yasik for this independence or not. The reality was no one was going to help him at school.  He had to figure out how to wiggle up on a toilet with pants tying his ankles together and how to stay dry while managing all the steps to follow before making sure the toilet bowl was cleared of debris.

We had, after all, taken the age-appropriate step of putting him in school three weeks after he moved into our lives, society and country. It took several days of accompanying him to school, a situation the other children, having started a week earlier, had already adjusted to but the moment came when his teacher decided it was no longer necessary for us to stay with him even though Yasik had peed his pants in class that morning, too shy or language-deprived to seek help with oncoming sikats. Later the school office called to say he had settled.  The battle, my journal says, to accept attending kindergarten as part of his new life was over. Well almost or sufficiently.  We were out walking that weekend and pointed out the school to Yasik. He wrinkled his nose and stuck out his tongue.  But come Monday he went without a fight.

As much as there are risks evident in the Authoritarian, Neglectful, and Permissive parenting styles, there are risks in Authoritative parenting, not always fun to engage with, but sometimes….. The first time Yasik wanted to drive, he and Dave were in the London Drugs parking lot with lots of others.  Yasik figured he could manage it even though Dave warned him he would hit a car but he said, “No. I can drive.”  He had seen Dave doing it a fair few times by then. So he climbed in the driver’s seat, got the anti-theft steering wheel club off, and then turned to Dave to check on the next step. “This way Poppa?” Poppa Dave shrugged, reminding him that he knew how to drive.   “Poppa says sorry, you are driving”.  Yasik got the key in and Dave then asked him to think through his next move.  “Look out the back window. You are going to smash that car.”  “Nada, nada, me back.  Me stop down there……  How do you stop? Tell me.” And then Yasik did think and handed Dave the key. “Nada. Poppa drive.”   He figured he might smash the car.  But he had driven cars in video games, soooo.

Learning to ride a two-wheeler bike without training wheels was another of those independence initiatives that surprised me as a parent for its significance. After beating the symmetry out of the training wheels, Yasik made an appeal to Dave to get them replaced.   Big mistake. He should have addressed his appeal to me. Dave knew it was time to remove them, not replace them, to trust biking without these sidekicks.  He took them off and dumped them. Yasik was decidedly disconcerted, thinking that was the end of biking for him.  Dave coaxed him back on the bike, with a moment of hand steadying. With that moment of support, like any kid with access to a bike, Yasik sensed that internal wonder that, Yes! he could handle this balancing act. And he was off, rounding back to show off to me, singing a garbled ABC song.

And then it was September again, several years later: our routine, a tight weekday schedule of university for Dave, elementary school for Yasik and teaching high school for me interspersed with happy holidays and weekend relaxation was fairly established.  We were once again shedding the happy summer freedom and preparing to buckle into the school regime.  Dave had already driven off to his school; I needed to get Yasik to his school before catching the bus to my school.  Only the second day into this regime and I was already falling into ‘Rush, rush, we gotta go’. Yasik hadn’t yet made the ‘Rush, rush, we gotta go’ adjustment. Still holding on to his slow go, he planted a shaky flag: “You can’t run my life.”  I planted an opposing flag: “Yes I run your life until you are 18 and then you run mine”.  Any hint of Authoritative, warm but demanding, open to opinion on family decision making here?

The rush to the tantalizing year 18 speeds up when puberty is activated. One day Yasik found himself confused by the advances of a neighbourhood girl, telling Dave, “I don’t know. I am not a girl” when Dave helped him extricate himself from said girl’s teasing.  Months, weeks, days, nanoseconds later, (I don’t remember nor am I holding tightly to the journal on this one), Yasik was thrilled when a girl from his school called to say she liked him.  Yasik was still naïve enough to leave the phone on speaker. He had been to birthday party she had invited all their class to, but it seems he was singled out by the birthday girl. When we picked him up after the party, face all aglow, Yasik asked us if we liked this particular classmate on a scale from 1 to 100%. We had merely been introduced to her at one recent school function, yet we went with 100%.  He said, “Me too”. Another day, she invited him to her home; he arrived to find he was the special and only guest.  While her mother thought this arrangement was a viable babysitting option, we stewed over possible problems in our hot tub that night, arguing heartily for varying positions.  At the same stage, Dave’s mother was still hauling him out of parties, and my religion managed to keep me in the land of zero personal experience. We decided that if and when Yasik planned a return invite to his home, we would put in an if/only clause that at least one other classmate be invited as well.

For the spring break of Yasik’s last year in elementary school, the school hosted a 3-day camp for the students as long as each student was accompanied by a parent or caregiver. Whether Dave volunteered or not, he was that parent. At the camp Yasik worked toward and received a babysitting certificate. Word of his new skill traveled down the road and soon he was offered a babysitting job for a neighbour, at $5.00 an hour. No longer did he have to work at home for a piddling $5.00 a week. “Fine”, says parent Dave but, “If you want work done for you then, it’s work for work or pay for it”.  I don’t think that was how Yasik initially understood the world of family expectations versus the world of outside employment. We conferenced says unblinking journal and that seemed to work out some misunderstandings.

But there was still lots of fun with Lazer tag, big paint ball tournaments and Dave and Yasik building a paintball web page, sitting down first to pull together a business plan.

Defining Authoritative Parenting

Your mission, if you choose to accept, is to underline the following characteristics you identify in the narrative.

Δ   Warm/ High Responsiveness/Nurturing

Supportive, in a secure environment, openly affectionate, with a hands-on approach, valuing open and frequent communication in an egalitarian/partnership, discussing decisions with the children, listening and taking into consideration the children’s thoughts, feeling and opinions before making decisions that affect the children, respecting their point of view, encouraging self-expression and autonomy to develop their own identity. Allowing kids to explore with positive reinforcement to encourage confidence, assisting them in resolving problems, while not intrusive or restrictive, flexible, understanding, recognizing that independence should increase with age.

Δ   Demanding/High Demandingness/tough but fair

Assertive, firm but clear, with realistic boundaries set by the parents, teaching them to regulate themselves, consistently guiding them to learn from their mistakes, with achievable and clearly explained regulations and goals. Discipline is not harsh and control is moderate, with the aim of guidance. Offering freedom to make mistakes without judgement, allowing natural consequences to occur and guiding the children through the consequences.

https://mcpress.mayoclinic.org/parenting/what-parenting-style-is-right-for-you/

https://www.cnbc.com/2021/06/29/child-psychologist-explains-4-types-of-parenting-and-how-to-tell-which-is-right-for-you.html

https://www.verywellmind.com/parenting-styles-2795072

https://www.parents.com/parenting/better-parenting/style/authoritative-parenting-the-pros-and-cons-according-to-a-child-psychologist/

https://www.healthshots.com/mind/emotional-health/authoritative-parenting-benefits-side-effects/

https://positivepsychology.com/authoritative-parenting/

https://www.joonapp.io/post/what-is-authoritative-parenting-and-is-it-right-for-you

https://parentingscience.com/authoritative-parenting-style/

https://psychcentral.com/health/authoritative-parenting

https://wellspringprevention.org/blog/pros-cons-parenting-styles/

Distilling Authoritative Parenting

Fantastic Antoine Succeeds: experiences in educating children with fetal alcohol syndrome.[i]

This book begins by clarifying that “rich, open, unstructured” parenting is not the best for FAS/FAE children. Note that while high responsiveness may be in that phrase, high demandingness is not.

The parenting handbook: your guide to raising resilient children[ii]

Tania Johnson and Tammy Schamuhn offer some age-appropriate ways to encouraging the growth of resilience:

Ages 5-7 Games that involve strategy, physical activities that require attention, fast-moving ball games, guessing games (Yasik and a friend were drawn in by the I Spy books), imaginary play

Ages 8-12 Organized sports, gross motor games that require attention: jump rope, Lazer tag, paintball (I don’t remember Yasik jumping rope much but but check, check, check on Lazer tag and paint ball), playing a musical instrument, dance, (didn’t manage dance and previous posts note how well piano went), brain teasers

Parents who raise mentally strong kids never use these 7 phrases when their children are young.[iii]

To teach children to develop “mental toughness”, “high self-esteem, develop resilience that allows them to stay positive amid challenges and learn from their failures”, avoid the following phrases.1. ‘Calm down!’ Instead let them know it is OK to be upset and then redirect them to something calming. 2. ‘Don’t worry about it.’ Instead ask them what they can do about whatever is worrying them. 3. ‘You’ll do fine.’ Because you don’t really know it all will be well, rather encourage them to do their best and then deal with whatever the result is.  4. ‘Don’t ever let me catch you doing that again.’ The reminder here is that if the parent has encouraged honesty in the child, even when the child has done something punishable, an opportunity for growth is more possible.  5. ‘You’re the best!’ Instead of praising the outcome which may not be repeatable, praise children for their process. 6. ‘That’s perfect!’ Again, “praise their effort, rather than the outcome.”   7. ‘You’re making me mad.’ Rather than teaching children how to blame another, teach them by example, to think about how to control their own thoughts, feelings, or actions in frustrating situations.

What Kind of Parent Am I?: self-surveys that reveal the impact of toxic stress and more[iv]

Dr. Letourneau offers a questionnaire you might check out which offers some concrete ideas in Authoritative parenting. Dr. Letourneau takes parents from this questionnaire to the tennis metaphor of “serve and return” to encourage parents, when the child seeks their engagement, to come back with a response, rather than ignoring the child’s overture, whether to get put to bed, or to laugh together over something that amuses the child.

Is Authoritative Parenting the Best Parenting Style?[v]

Summary

Anita Febiyanti and Yeni Rachmawat stress that parenting styles are impacted by cultural context: individualist and collectivist cultures. They contend that while most parenting theory is western (ie Baumrimd), parenting in practice does not always match theory which endorses authoritative over authoritarian parenting.
But are the children always more successful, reliable and responsible in an authoritative environment? It may depend on how children understand themselves in relation to the society they live in. In an individualist culture, the values are “emotional independence, assertiveness, autonomy, and the need for privacy where the individual loosens its bound with the others”.  Parents negotiate; strong control is not acceptable.  In a collectivist culture children “have cultural values where the people are attached to a strong bond and every individual is obligated to maintain group loyalty and focus on the communities in which they live” …. “[prioritizing] socialization, obedience, security, and family integrity”. Parents are strict, with rules and warnings.

How to raise a boy: The first lesson on boundaries starts with the mum — and it’s best drawn as early as possible [vi]

Summary

This article might be seeing things in a context similar to the point being made in Is Authoritative Parenting the Best Parenting Style? though I am not sure that it should be relegated to a cultural context. I think it has universal importance. Pooja Sardana provides this opinion as a mother of a young boy. She begins with the observation that “Managing boundaries is about power in a relationship” and offers Steve Biddulph’s Raising Boys: Why Boys Are Different — And How to Help Them Become Happy and Well-Balanced Men as a guide.  She paid attention when she read: “Wherever you see a gang of boys looking unruly, you know the adult leadership is failing”.

Sardana became concerned as she dealt with a son moving through his childhood with ever more effective manipulations starting with tantrums, then employing cuteness tactics. By the time he reached the end of his first decade he was attempting intellectual argument to get what he wanted whether it crossed others’ boundaries or not. She ends the article with “We’ve started building an age-appropriate mechanism that reflects real-life relationships and consequences”.

Hunt, Gather, Parent: what ancient cultures can teach us about the lost art of raising happy, healthy little humans.[vii]

Summary

Concerned by how things were working out for her and her daughter, Michaeleen Doucleff, accompanied by her young daughter, visited some more traditional cultures to see how they parented differently from the western model she knew was not working well for her or her daughter. Her interpretation of Authoritative stresses the importance of holding to both sides of the definition.

“So [she says] I consulted Dr. Google and decided that “authoritative” was the “optimal parenting approach” that would help with [my daughter’s] tantrums…. From what I could tell authoritative meant being both “firm and kind”. With this start and from her observations of parenting successes in other cultures, she offers Chapter 10, “Introduction to Parenting Tools” for dealing with tantrums, changing behaviours, and transmitting values.

The 5 Principles of Parenting: your essential guide to raising good humans[viii]

Sonia, a single mother of a 3 year old, 7 year old and a 10 year old tended to over compensate by doing more for her children than might have been good for their individual journeys to self-sufficiency out of guilt that they did not have a second parent. She needed to “let them do for themselves what they can do for themselves” …. even “what they can almost do”, perhaps initially showing them how, providing support or doing it together as necessary and then let them at it.

How to Raise An Adult: break free of the overparenting trap and prepare your kids for success[ix]

Summary

Julie Lythcott-Haims was a dean of freshmen at Stanford University. Ergo, she has dealt with a variety of young adults who may or may not have been ready to handle college on their own after high school. She has written a book to help parents help their children do just that. She suggests parents start when their children are young preparing them for ever increasing levels of personal development. She offers some examples of the things that can be expected of children at each age level: ages 2-3 – basic chores and grooming, 4-5 – important names and numbers and safety skills, 6-7 – basic cooking, 8-9 – pride in personal belongings, 10-13- becoming independent like being able to stay at home alone, 14-18 – more advanced skills in cleaning, car maintenance, handling prescriptions, job interviews and cooking full meals.

But do so with support. She advises parents to first ask themselves whether or not the directives are about them rather than about their children so encourages parents to notice who their children are, what they love and are good at, not what the parents love, are good at or think is the best path for their children. “Know when to push forward, when to pull back. Prepare them for hard work. Don’t do too much for them.”

The authoritative parenting style: An evidence-based guide[x]

Summary

Headlining with questions, Gwen Dewar defines Authoritative parenting as combining warmth with setting limits leading to successful outcomes in child-raising, setting it apart from the other styles because it is a middle path between Authoritarian and Permissive.

While she does consider pros and cons like the place of culture which she dismisses as likely a matter of semantics, she sees the Authoritative parenting style as leading “to better emotional, cognitive and behavioral outcomes”. It is the style that combines warmth with limits. Authoritative parents “want kids to develop self-discipline, maturity, and a respect for others”.

To help parents take on Authoritative parenting style, Gwen Dewar provides a set of statements, with examples, to try on for size – check her site out if you interested in asking which of these statements ring true for you in your parenting?

She also asks the question I ask: is it possible to be a purist authoritative parent in every situation?

Dewar reminds the reader that, although it is important to remember that one size does not fit all, in studies across cultures, one point remained consistent with Authoritative parenting: “[w]hen their children misbehaved, they talked with them, and explained the reasons for the rules” to “think – constructively and non-selfishly – about how their behavior affects others” for which she uses the term ‘inductive discipline’.

Listening Well: bringing stories of hope to life[xi]

Heather Morris offers helpful tips for good listening skills.

Influence of Authoritative, Authoritarian, Permissive, and the Uninvolved Parenting

Styles on the Reading Attitudes of Students in Anambra State, Nigeria[xii]

This study compared the reading attitudes of children from each of the parenting styles and found that authoritative parents fostered the most positive reading development in their children.

The Parenting Handbook: your guide to raising resilient children[xiii]. 

I have only begun to read this book, but as the title shows, it will be one I will be summarizing later.

Specific To Adoption           

Attaching in adoption: practical tools for today’s parents[xiv]

Summary

Deborah Gray endorses Authoritative parenting’s high structure and high nurture for adoptees because she says that most parents of adoptees are parenting kids who are “emotionally younger than their chronological ages” … “Recognizing that children have missed dependable nurture, parents are supplying what was missed”. Gray cites parents, who with lots of hugs, first explained to their children and then expected from the children that they must stay close to them until they understood who they were attached to now that they belonged to a family. And until they understood where the sadness within comes from, not from lack of love in the adoptive family nor a lack of material things or food, but from past grief their now family would be seeking to help them deal with the grief by offering nurture and guidelines. This book ENDORSES hugs, snuggles, and kisses.

Parenting Adopted Teenagers: advice for the adolescent years[xv]

Rachel Staff brings forward the same point regarding focusing on the developmental age rather than the chronological age of an adoptee.  They need to be in a safe, structured and nurturing environment, ergo high structure, high nurture, aka, authoritative.

Methods Of Care For Children Living In Orphanages In Saudi Arabia (An Exploratory Field Study)[xvi]  

Summary

This article demonstrates that interest in care of orphans/adoptees is global rather than only western, and more specifically, that Saudi Arabia is trying for healthy parenting styles for children in orphanages by adopting “one or more of the following five methods of care when treating children: attention vs. non-attention, equality vs. discrimination, kindness vs. cruelty, acceptance vs. rejection and democracy vs. authoritarianism”.

These children have “lost their parents and could not be taken care of by other family members and those who were born out of wedlock and have been abandoned (unknown lineage)”. The children live together in a home with one caregiver in shift rotation and its attendant weaknesses), with the intention of providing an environment of more intimate, safe, loving care “guiding the child into adulthood”. The caregivers usually have sufficient life experience or a “mother’s (caregiver’s) instincts and emotions in dealing with children” as they are between 31 and 40; they are also required to have a bachelor’s degree and continuing education in caregiving is offered to them.

8 Ways to Bond with your Adopted Child[xvii]

This site sounds like Authoritative parenting to me!

Child Welfare Information Gateway[xviii]

Child Welfare Information Gateway connects adopters to trusted resources on the child welfare continuum. We provide publications, research, and learning tools selected by experts to support thriving children, youth, families, and communities.

Sharing of an adoptive parent’s experience of key themes …[xix]

Some of the key themes to be aware of when seeking to be both high in responsiveness and high in demandingness:

Loss: Adopted children mourn the loss of their birth parents

Rejection: Adopted children may often feel rejected by their birth

Guilt/Shame: Adopted children often believe there is something intrinsically wrong with them

Grief: There is no ritual to grieve the loss of a birth parent

Identity: Adopted children often feel incomplete and at a loss regarding their identity because of gaps in their genetic and family history

Intimacy: Many adopted children, have difficulty attaching to members of their new family

Mastery and Control: Adopted children sometimes engage in power struggles with their adoptive parents or other authority figures in an attempt to master the loss of control they experienced in adoption

The Adoptive Parents’ Handbook: a guide to healing trauma and thriving with your foster or adopted child[xx].

Summary

In this book Barbara Cummins Tantrum offers guidance when parenting a traumatized foster or adopted child.  Come into the relationship seeking to “avoid power struggles”, even if the child is using lying as self-protection.  As do most authors I have read on this subject, Tantrum also advocates for routine, reflective listening in whatever way allows children to trust they are being heard, and going into calm mode first before engaging with traumatized children. She warns that these children may have sleep issues coming from a lack of a sense of safety.

Baby We Were Meant For Each Other: in praise of adoption[xxi]

Summary

Scott Simon is for affirming that adoptors offer the best support to their children not by avoiding/dismissing struggles but rather helping their children learn from their struggles.

He also makes the point to adoptors who may feel they don’t quite have the right to claim to be the ‘real’ parents that they will be the ones not only to love, but to change the diapers, get food on the table, take their children to the doctor and offer their children “A reason to come home. …”

The Boy Who Was Raised As A Dog: and other stories from a child psychiatrist’s notebook.[xxii]

Summary

Chapter 10, “The Kindness of Children” provides an example of a child who was not at his chronological age when he was adopted. In some ways the child did act appropriately for his age but presented as a much younger child in other respects.  Dr. Perry describes this developmental delay as “splintered development” due to deprivation/lack of stimulation of some brain regions. I appreciate and find hope in the phrase ‘or had not yet’. Dr. Perry finishes the sentence off with: “or had not yet received enough stimulation to make up for the earlier neglect”. Dr. Perry encouraged the parents to interact with the child at his developmental level. He talked with them about the impact the child’s emotional stress would have had on his development. With this explanation, Dr. Perry aimed to reduce the parents’ fears that they were “babying” him.

Dr. Perry also tells us about a foster mother who babied children who had experienced trauma and were not at their chronological ages.  She believed in holding them and rocking them long after they had left infancy.

“These children had never received the repeated, patterned physical nurturing needed to develop a well-regulated and responses stress response system. The had never learned that they were loved and safe; …”  “A foundational principle of brain development is that neural systems organize and become functional in a sequential manner”.

What Type of Parent are You? The 4 Types of Parenting Styles Behind The Decisions You Make[xxiii]

Summary

This is a good article to round off the Resources section as baseline and pragmatic information is presented from recognizing that most parents will get their guidance from family, friends and professionals to recognizing that parents’ parenting practices will slide back and forth across the parenting spectrum as the family’s needs change. The writer/s ask parents to ask themselves both what values guide them and what goals direct them.  They understand that these guiding principles are impacted both by internal direction as well as by how they want to be seen as parents. And we are assured that research shows moving across the parenting spectrum may not always be problematic for a family.

Making daily or making more over-reaching parenting moves will be considering “genetic influences, social environment, parental income level, parental education level, the number of active/engaged parental figures and the developmental and/or physical needs of the child” and cultural value.

And then there is this

Here is a situational irony: While anyone can see this is the parenting style loving parents should follow, I, who loves my son, find myself the least engaged in studying it.  It is Goldilocks’s choice, the one any loving parents who love their children would choose. Either because I have an ingrained suspicion of anyone’s capacity to be this good in their relationship to their children; Or because I am jealous of those who can jump out of bed each morning and maintain Authoritative parenting for the 16 hours of that day; Or I am making too much of what I read of this style; Or I just wish I had known more about it and engaged with it more than I did.  Really don’t know.  I do know that the conversation we should have had with Yasik about whether to move to the country or stay in the neighbourhood he had grown up in we did not think was necessary to share with him.  Our parents never asked our opinion about moving; that was not considered our business. One particular move our parents made got me off a path to problems but set my brother on a path in the other direction. An article I cannot now locate offered a drawback to Authoritative parenting for families living in a “low socio-economic background as the children might be exposed to more violence and aggression and the parents need to be strict with their rules and regulations to establish restrictions on them” (Gfroerer et al., 2004; Rothrauff, Cooney, & An, 2009).

Some writer among the above ended with:  be sure to give yourself grace when you make mistakes, too.

Footnotes

[i] Fantastic Antoine Succeeds: experiences in educating children with fetal alcohol syndrome.  Ed. Judith Kleinfeld and Siobhan Wescott, University of Alaska Press, 1993, 13

[ii] Johnson,Tania, R.Psych, and Tammy Schamuhn, R. Psych. The parenting handbook: your guide to raising resilient children  Barlow Books, 2024, 26,27

[iii] Huddleston, Tom Jr Parents who raise mentally strong kids never use these 7 phrases when their children are young. . Apr 16 2023, https://mail.google.com/mail/u/0/#label/Adoption/FMfcgzGtwWGdxtvgqRbFdKVwwWqTbnWN

[iv] Letourneau, Dr. Nicole. What Kind of Parent Am I?: self-surveys that reveal the impact of toxic stress and more  Dundurn Press, 2018, 51,52-53.

[v] Febiyanti, Anita and Yeni Rachmawat. Is Authoritative Parenting the Best Parenting Style?  Department of Early Childhood Education, School of Postgraduate, Universitas Pendidikan Indonesia *Corresponding author. Email: anitafebiyanti@upi.edu Advances in Social Science, Education and Humanities Research, volume 538 Proceedings of the 5th International Conference on Early Childhood Education (ICECE 2020)

[vi] Sardana, Pooja. How to raise a boy: The first lesson on boundaries starts with the mum — and it’s best drawn as early as possible  Nov 19, 2024 22:48 IST https://indianexpress.com/article/opinion/columns/how-to-raise-a-boy-the-first-lesson-on-boundaries-starts-with-the-mum-and-its-best-drawn-as-early-as-possible-9675420/

[vii] Doucleff, Michaeleen. Hunt, Gather, Parent: what ancient cultures can teach us about the lost art of raising happy, healthy little humans.   Avid Reader Press/Simon & Schuster, 2022, 2,3, 198-200

[viii] Pressman, Dr. Aliza. The 5 Principles of Parenting: your essential guide to raising good humans   Simon Element, 2024, 34-36

[ix]Lythcott-Haims, Julie.  How to Raise An Adult: break free of the overparenting trap and prepare your kids for success    Holt Paperbacks, 2016, 167-169, 218-225

[x] Dewar, Gwen. The authoritative parenting style: An evidence-based guide   Ph.D., 2010 – 2024  https://www.apa.org/act/resources/fact-sheets/parenting-styles

[xi] Morris, Heather. Listening Well: bringing stories of hope to life  St. Martins Publishing Group, 2022

[xii] Echedom, Anthonia U. (Ph.D), Tochukwu Victor Nwankwo & Evangeline U. Nwankwo.  Influence of Authoritative, Authoritarian, Permissive, and the Uninvolved Parenting Styles on the Reading Attitudes of Students in Anambra State, Nigeria  Journal of Library and Information Sciences December 2018, Vol. 6, No. 2, pp. 1-25 ISSN 2374-2372 (Print) 2374-2364 (Online) DOI: 10.15640/jlis.v6n2a1 https://doi.org/10.15640/jlis.v6n2a1

https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Tochukwu-Nwankwo/publication/330076069_Influence_of_Authoritative_Authoritarian_Permissive_and_the_Uninvolved_Parenting_Styles_on_the_Reading_Attitudes_of_Students_in_Anambra_State_Nigeria/links/5c2bdae6299bf12be3a7223a/Influence-of-Authoritative-Authoritarian-Permissive-and-the-Uninvolved-Parenting-Styles-on-the-Reading-Attitudes-of-Students-in-Anambra-State-Nigeria.pdf

[xiii] Johnson, Tania , R. Psych and Tammy Schamuhn, R. Psych.  The Parenting Handbook: your guide to raising resilient children.  Barlow Books, 2024

[xiv] Gray, Deborah D.  Attaching in adoption: practical tools for today’s parents.  Perspectives Press, Inc., 2002, 28-29, 54,61-64,191, 224-5,229-231,

[xv] Staff,Rachel. Parenting Adopted Teenagers: advice for the adolescent years.  Jessica Kingsley Publishers, 2016, 25-26

[xvi] Ashaalan, Latifah, Ibtisam Al-zeiby.  Methods Of Care For Children Living In Orphanages In Saudi Arabia (An Exploratory Field Study)  Journal of International Education Research – First Quarter 2015 Volume 11, Number 1 https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/EJ1051139.pdf

[xvii] 8 Ways to Bond with your Adopted Child Adoption Choices of Colorado  Jul 8, 2019

[xviii] Child Welfare Information Gateway Child Welfare Information Gateway https://www.childwelfare.gov/

[xix] Sharing of an adoptive parent’s experience of key themes …

Abba Adoptions  https://www.abbaadoptions.co.za › docs › adopt…

[xx] Cummins Tantrum, Barbara.  The Adoptive Parents’ Handbook: a guide to healing trauma and thriving with your foster or adopted child.  North Atlantic books, 2020, 71, 85, 109, 193-197, 233-235

[xxi] Simon, Scott. Baby We Were Meant For Each Other: in praise of adoption.  Random House, 2010 57, 166-8

[xxii] 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, 100-103, 152, 241-58.

[xxiii] What Type of Parent are You? The 4 Types of Parenting Styles Behind The Decisions You Make  https://maisonvieneworleans.com/what-type-of-parent-are-you-the-4-types-of-parenting-styles/

Entry #13 E Good Enough

Depicting Good Enough

In our pre-adoption assessment interviews, I asked the social worker contracted to assess our preparedness for adoption if I should stop taking birth control pills. That she jumped on the question with a fair degree of horror in her voice has stayed with me. “Absolutely not!” or words to that effect, for this child is going to need your undivided attention.  Whether because our 55 minutes were up or because my mind was slow to register her response, I did not ask why.

Yet Good Enough Parenting’s baseline seems to be that parenting occupies only a third of the influence on a child’s life, once the constant needs of infancy are passed. But before I get into Tronick’s ‘Rule of Thirds’ I need to back track to D. W. Winnicott who gave parents permission to slow down to ‘Good Enough’, saying that meeting a child’s needs about 30% of the time is good enough and promises the child the opportunity to grow in self-discovery and self-reliance.  Scroll down to Distilling Good Enough to check out Pip Johnson’s Good Enough Parenting.  She says, Edward Tronick: “found that imperfect attunement is consistent with healthy attachment” for parents.  Daniel J. Siegel, M.D., in Brainstorm: the power and purpose of the teenage brain (2013,52,53) defines ‘attunement’ as being interested in what is going on in the mind of another, an “essential aspect of empathy”.

Pip Johnson details Tronick’s ‘Rule of Thirds’. Contrary to images they may have of themselves, in healthy child-parent relationships, parents are “perfectly in tune with the child around a third of the time. Another third of the time, parents struggle to work out what is wrong with their child and so are unable to meet their needs. This might be when kids are angry or crying and we don’t seem to understand why, and so they must soothe themselves and recover on their own. The final third of the time, which Tronick judged to be the most important for creating healthy attachment, is when parents are not initially in tune with their children’s needs but work to become attuned. This experience provides a safe experience of distress and resolution, which promotes general resilience” demonstrating that “imperfect parenting is better for kids….”

Recently I came across two words in Azar Nafisi’s memoir, Reading Lolita in Tehran: a memoir in books (2003, 86) — “essential paradoxes”.  Paradoxes, combining seemingly contradictory features to reveal truth and coupled with the qualifier ‘essential’, are popping up like wild daisies everywhere in my meadow. Popping up like that, these little daisies make what feels to me like tectonic shifts. I know very little about tectonic shifts but if what I do know is correct, my brain, post- tectonic eruption, is settling into whole new paradigms, geologically referred to as ‘denudation’. Denudation sounds apt on the face of it.

In the realm of parenting, one of those ‘essential paradoxes’ we live with comfortably or otherwise, might be the need to de-nudify (if it is a word) or shift perspectives on Authoritarian, Neglectful, Permissive and Authoritative Parenting Styles.  On paper, the directions for parenting are printed in black and white but get a bit more smudgy in the real world, the messiness of life. Maybe just a little of each parenting style shaken together into Good Enough is good enough parenting. Perhaps we start as amazing Authoritative parents with dabbles in Neglectful and Permissive but when our child gets that teen blast of neuronal development and hormones, at times we lose control and explode into Authoritarian mode in attempts to retain control. Top all this with moments when one parent flips to the page on Permissive parenting and the other parent says, “Nope, it has to be the page on Authoritative parenting”. And then there is that crow flying over their heads as they argue, cawing, “Imposter syndrome. Imposter syndrome.” (I guess the couple are outdoors playing tug of war with these pages) And arguing or not, the couple hear that irritating crow forcing unwanted thoughts about the everyday insecurities of doing parenting right, measuring themselves against the Jones next door with their picture-perfect family. (I failed Child Care 12 because while I did fine on the tests, I couldn’t knit around the corner of the baby bonnet and never thought to get my mother to do it for me like others did). Somewhere I read that if we sculk about as imposters, we cannot love ourselves, and if we cannot love ourselves, we cannot adequately love another. Groan, what does that mean and how do we measure if we love ourselves?

Adopters, seeing themselves as imposter parents, may also be harbouring a wiggly little worm drilling holes in the certainty of their right to be legitimate parents of their ‘forever’ child, however they shield themselves with what at times sounds like a desperate affirmation. In the dream I had decades earlier, I am running with this little boy I believed to be mine from pursuers determined to take him from me because, I guess in their minds, I was not the legitimate mother of this little blondie.   In adoption story after story, it is those feelings which may sometimes be closely examined or tentatively hinted at, or at other times, outright denied. You will find books by people whose adoption experience ignited in them questions that led to academic research, you will find memoirs in which people circle their experiences as they learn to cope with what Dr. Claire Weekes, in Hope and Help For Your Nerves (1969), termed ‘fear of the fear’, and you will find stories of people who wanted everyone to believe, sometimes quite aggressively, the child they adopted was fully, and only ever, their child.

Some of this insecurity is stirred up when here and there we come across stories: we read that Joanie Mitchell found the daughter she gave up at birth in favour of her career.  There was no ‘breaking news’ cast for the baby girl’s adoption, only a shroud of secrecy.  But now the world had righted itself again and we were happy to hear Joan Mitchell has found her long lost daughter. In memoir after memoir, reality show after reality show, the big news is the reunion of birth parents with an adoptee.  The adopters, while given a quick, little and hopefully reassuring hug, with the promise “You will always be ___’s ‘real’ mom and dad”, are then written out of the script.

I have been mulling this feeling of insecurity as an adopter for a long time.  My thoughts, standing before me like some security gorilla at a bar, arms crossed over a ridiculously bloated chest, have demanded I read beyond the adoption fluff books to find a checklist against which I can determine if good enough is not just the most realistic, but actually the best parenting style for our child. If we are his parents, are we good enough if he became ours through adoption and we parented him in a manner that was in tune some times, absolutely not in tune at others, but always striving to become in tune.

Because Yasik came to us just weeks before kindergarten and after school play with friends took up a good portion of each day, influencing only 30 % of his life was a given. Against that 30% opportunity, were Dave and I sometimes “perfectly in tune” with Yasik? I can only judge our attunement by the cuddles, laughter, turning to us in stress, sharing fun times that were woven into my memory and journal notes of our life with Yasik through to his teen years. Playing soccer or hide and seek with the dog, building rafts, camping and beach memories. Dragging us through low bush to show us a treasure he’d found, an old car battery. Yelling and laughing together with Dave while battling it out on the computer. Working with me to help beached salmon get on with their trip upstream. Confiding with us about a girl and wanting us to rate her as highly as he did.   In an earlier post I shared the night I dressed Yasik for bed. I didn’t have a clean set of PJs ready for him so I put him in trunks.  He started to sob into my chest. He didn’t have the language to tell me what was troubling him. Moments later Dave came in and without language was yet immediately aware that Yasik wanted a T-shirt top too.

Yasik was working on the spelling of the week and Dave, the parent preparing his young son for the future and trying to make sense of spelling drills, told him this was just the beginning.  Yasik needed to learn these words so he would be able to read and write them and go on to more and more spelling. It never stops etc.  Yasik laid his head down and wailed.

In the last minute rush to get him off to school one morning, I wanted to check that he was ready for spelling. Lost flashed a neon warning light across his face. I stopped, called him to me, held him, fighting tears and said we will go over them together. He lay against me, not holding back at all and then spelled them all well. This from a kid who was still struggling with language.  Another night Yasik and I were saying good night to ‘Dear God’. I said, “Thanks for helping Yasik with his spelling”, and he pipes in, “I got them all right God”.

Another time, Yasik brought home a note from the teacher. It said, “Yasik has been very uncooperative today”.  Dave told Yasik he would only punish him for not telling Dave what had happened, not for what Yasik had done.  Yasik asked, “Even if it was nasty?”

He went on to tell Dave that “the teacher was making me read something over and over and I just didn’t want to read it over and over. I didn’t say anything bad. I just didn’t read.”

The journal doesn’t offer Dave or my response to that day maybe because it was still so fresh in our memories how much we felt for Yasik in that situation. The journal does however note how often we felt we didn’t know what we were doing nor were we there for Yasik. We were “parents[who] struggle to work out what is wrong with their child and so are unable to meet their need”.

What strikes me about Edward Tronick’s second ‘third’ is that there is a sort of dusting off of the hands, with a ‘well that’s that. It is what it is’, no reparations possible here, justifiably or otherwise.  We could be there to read to Yasik at night and practice reading with Yasik some as homework helpers, but I was at work, not home-schooling, and Dave was at school or work. And that is actually the way life works. Child at school under the supervision of others for 3 to 7 hours each week day, parents elsewhere. The female judge in Scott Turow’s novel, The Laws of Our Fathers, {1996,66) is being pressured by her daughter to be allowed to stay home from school, but she is a busy judge starting a high-profile case so she cajoles, threatens, manipulates and promises future impossible temptation. “Someday, I always promise, it will be as she asks…. But not, of course, today. Today there is duty…. I must go off to my other world…”.

Even if we had home-schooled, our child would have been in dreamland for at least 1/3 of the 24 hours each day offers.  If he had a bad dream we might have taken him into our bed or comforted him but if he flailed about and we were needing what sleep we could scrape out of that night to meet the demands of the day to come, we may have said, “Enough now, off to your own bed”. The unexpected may have come up and we didn’t pick him up on time; he had to deal with a few scary moments of ‘Where are they?’. If he was too short for the school toilets, we weren’t there to help him figure out how best to pee.  Other times we simply made the wrong parenting choice and it was irreversible. I was country at heart, not urban, and had this fantasy that Yasik too would have a much richer life in a rural setting. Just as he finished elementary school and was about to enter middle school, we sold the first home our child had become attached to, a child who had spent his first year with unstable parents, then a year and a half in a hospital and 2 years in an orphanage before moving into a new country, new family, new friends and new routine, with the new family at his side about a third of the time.  A Google quickie says that the disruption of moving is one of the 5 major stress events in a child’s life.  The only argument Yasik could come up with to show us he was worried about moving was to remind us that this home he definitely didn’t want to leave had the attraction of being right next to a major throughfare where “We get to see accidents here.”

We moved to a new neighbourhood, one where most of the kids on the block had long established relationships.  Our adult to-do list didn’t include helping him negotiate a new social structure. Yasik’s covering with yelling and door slamming was too easily translated as another message. I write at one juncture:  Trying to stay on top of things but it feels like we never quite do. 

There was one nice plus in the move to the country, a very big hot tub. Though I have noted often enough, not only because that damn crow was relentless, but because it was actually a fact, Dave and I were aware from time to time that we were not yet ready to write a self-help on parenting. And so we conferenced at the end of the day in that relaxing tub – arguing heartily for varying positions.  Yasik’s early forays into the world of girl-boy were, as I have said before, well out of my personal experience and maybe not well-exampled by Dave’s experiences. Or were they? His mother would show up at a party and drag him out.

We were savvy enough to understand that some of what we were dealing with was transitioning to the teenage brain. Though’ Yasik had new curiosities igniting his neurons, those neurons may not yet have found the best synapse to leap over or were still in need of a few years of pruning. What do teens do with sensations of independence they don’t really understand but test out and sometimes get frustrated when the results aren’t great.  Yasik would pull out these cool words to spit at us when he was angry at some thwarting. A moment later we would see the tiniest bit of uncertainty as he watched for the results, even some surprise and definite discomfort. Oh, that didn’t go well.  Disgust sometimes when it didn’t have the desired effect – a kid working on the sensations of growing up. Our role when we could or were up to it was to handle this experimenting with care. That old hot tub witnessed more than one session with parents who dearly loved their son, who “not initially in tune” with Yasik’s needs, worked “to become attuned”.

 

Defining Good Enough

Your mission, if you choose to accept, is to underline the following characteristics you identify in the narrative.

Good Enough Parenting – an adaptation of Google’s AI generated Definition

Good enough parenting is a theory that acknowledges that parents are not perfect nor can they do everything.  It’s okay for themselves and their children to make mistakes for that is how we all learn and develop strength.

Here are some characteristics of good enough parenting:

• Responding to your children’s needs, especially in their infancy.

• Working to accept and celebrate your children, not for who you hope them to be but for who the individual each child is, here and now.
• Setting boundaries, looking for the best possible reasons for your children’s misbehavior. Providing routine care, being loving, present, and available, but not trying to give your children more than that.
• Acknowledging problems and working to solve them not assigning blame, trusting your children to figure their problem out.

The concept of good enough parenting was developed by UK psychoanalyst and pediatrician Donald Winnicott in the 1950s. Winnicott suggested that as little as 30% of the time spent meeting a child’s needs is enough to raise a happy and well-attached child.

Research has shown that over-parenting can negatively impact a child’s emotional growth and executive functioning. It can also lead to anxiety, depression, and feelings of helplessness.

https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/going-beyond-intelligence/202011/what-does-it-mean-to-be-a-good-enough-parent

https://www.psychologytoday.com/ca/blog/the-narrative-nurse-practitioner/202407/what-does-it-mean-to-be-a-good-enough-parent

https://www.mffy.com/blog/is-good-enough-parenting-relevant-in-2022

“To Be Good Enough”    Savithiri Ratnapalan https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC2654842/#__sec2title

“The Good Enough Parent Is the Best Parent,”   Peter Gray https://www.psychologytoday.com/ca/blog/freedom-to-learn/201512/the-good-enough-parent-is-the-best-parent

“What Is a Good Enough Mother?”   Marilyn Wedge https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/suffer-the-children/201605/what-is-good-enough-mother

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Good_enough_parent

A key function of good enough parenting is to provide the essential background to allow for the growing child’s disillusionment with the parents and the world, …

Complex PTSD: from surviving to thriving: a guide and map for recovering from childhood trauma      Pete Walker    CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform, 2013, 41

When I apply the concept of “good enough” to people, I generally mean that a person is essentially good hearted, tries to be fair, and meets his or her commitments a large portion of the time.

I also like to apply “good enough” to other concepts such as a good enough job, a good enough try, a good enough outing, a good enough day or a good enough life. I apply this concept liberally to contradict the black-and-white, all-or-nothing thinking of the critic which reflexively judges people and things as defective unless they are perfect.

‘Anthem’ The Future    Leonard Cohen  1992 album

‘Ring the bells that still can ring
Forget your perfect offering
There is a crack in everything
That’s how the light gets in.’

Distilling Good Enough

The Not Good Enough Mother    Sharon lamb    Beacon Press, 2019, 44,45,46,55,56,66, 146, 183

This is the book that introduced me to the idea of Good Enough and it remains for me the one which stirs my mind the most.

Summary

Sharon Lamb is a psychologist and expert witness evaluating parents. She also, she makes clear early in the book as she attends an Al-Anon meeting that she attends Al-Anon meetings, not “as a therapist but as a supplicant”.  She has a son she is uncomfortable talking about around people whose children are living successful lives. She has a need to be with people who are living with troubled loved ones.

She offers definitions of good enough parenting throughout the book: “… No mother has the right food for the child all the time – God, the lunchbox items my kids tossed away. No mother always praises her child—I recall a time Willy showed me a drawing and I stared at it blankly, my mind elsewhere, until he said, “Don’t you like it?” No mother listens to her child whenever he speaks –…”

…Sometimes I think that I will die before I see that my son is okay, really okay, that my own life and my family’s lives have been ruined by drugs and by what I didn’t or couldn’t do.  When I think like that, I run, hide, space out, or watch Law and Order. But I have a counter-thought that is as soothing as the end of many episodes of Law and Order. This thought is that we are all, right now, in this moment, okay.  And I add to this comforting thought, every person, every family has some trauma to live through at some point or other in their history, whether it’s a death, a mental illness, an accident…

Lamb gets into D.W. Winnicott’s message, adding another piece about needing only to be good enough with, “The good enough mother mirrors the baby when he needs mirroring and allows him to go on being when he doesn’t.  …Then later, when she allows him his separateness, allows him to “go on being” and doesn’t intrude into that space, she gives him the opportunity to develop creative thought and to understand that even when she isn’t reflecting him, he exists. He is all right.

Mirroring produces mind-mindedness, the ability to understand what is going on in another person’s mind. …. [G]ood enough parenting depended on parents being able to understand what was in the minds of their children. 

…It is deeply unfair that mothers carry the largest load in what is surely a shared responsibility for children. Motherblame and mother guilt are social mechanisms that relieve everyone else – state, health insurance companies, schools, dads, therapists – from their responsibility. It is just such a complicated issue, the cause and effect of child development, and motherblame is an easy answer.

WINNICOTT AND PARENTING       Ingrid Masterson  HOME / INSIDE OUT / ISSUE 24: SPRING 1996 /
https://library.parenthelp.eu/wp-content/uploads/2021/03/iahip.org_.pdf

Summary

A review of D.W. Winnnicott’s message in The Child, the Family and the Outside World taken from work with war evacuees which led him to see from the “emotional life of babies and children” that “[t]here is no such thing as a baby …”, for a very needy baby cannot be a baby outside a relationship with a caregiver, usually a mother — rather a stark observation.

As the baby continues to develop, “[r]easonable success, in the gradual introduction of the baby to a world of external reality which can meet his needs in a ‘good enough’ manner, helps him move from ‘need’ to ‘desire’”.

… Parents who can hold reality for their child, especially the reality of their own good feelings alongside their human limitations, as well as his good and bad potential, until he can take over this function, are helping him to come to terms with a world that can be sometimes gratifying, sometimes frustrating, but essentially good enough to realise some of his desires.

…The main demand of parents is that they be around long enough and be secure enough in themselves to survive emotionally ‘intact’, for the child to reach each stage at his own pace without forcing beyond his own developmental capacity.

Bad Therapy: why the kids aren’t growing up    Abigail Shrier   Sentinel, 2024

It is probably best to say of this book: Just read the book.  It is a counter-balance in very many ways.  In particular the chapter “The Road Paved by Gentle Parents” deals with parenting styles.

Why parents should stop blaming themselves for how their kids turn     Yuko Munakata PhD Jan 12, 2021  https://ideas.ted.com/why-parents-should-stop-blaming-themselves-for-how-their-kids-turn-out/   This post is part of TED’s “How to Be a Better Human” series, a TEDxCU Talk.

This is such a good article I am tempted to leave it on the page as is but I know it belongs to Yuko Munakata so I encourage the reader to go straight to the article.

Summary

Yuko Munakata tells us that while parents want the best for their children, they do not control how their children will live out their lives. Near the end of the article, he offers Andrew Solomon’s observation on parents: “even though many of us take pride in how different we are from our parents, we are endlessly sad at how different our children are from us.” Munakata encourages us to let go of trying to control our children’s lives for endless studies show children are shaped by genes, yes, but also by environment, peers and culture. To further the point, he talks of studies that show how varied children and the lives they live are even if they are raised in the same household.

Munakata’s advice in light of these studies: “Stop blaming yourself as if you’re in control of your child’s path. You have influence — but you don’t have control”.  And stop blaming your parents for the same reason. Stop judging other parents.  As a parent of a child who was going to have a limited life said, “Parenting, I’ve come to understand, is about loving my child today. Now. In fact, for any parent anywhere, that’s all there is.”

The 4 Common Parenting Styles and Their Effects on Kids   Updated Jan. 30,2025

https://themindsjournal.com/4-common-parenting-styles/

One of the hugely overlooked truths of parenting is that parenting involves both parents and their equal contributions make up for a suitable condition that ensures an overall general development of the child. It’s a myth that the mother has a bigger role to play in raising a child. Absence of a father can have drastic effects on the emotional, social and economic well-being of the child. Therefore, both of their involvement is crucial.

Scaling Up Parenting Interventions is Critical for Attaining the Sustainable Development Goals

Matthew R. Sanders · Gauri Divan · Meghna Singhal · Karen M. T. Turner · Richard Velleman · Daniel Michelson · Vikram Patel   April 2021 / online: 4 May 2021 https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10578-021-01171-0 Child Psychiatry & Human Development (2022) 53:941–952 https://doi.org/10.1007/s10578-021-01171-0

Summary

These authors are offering “culturally and socioeconomically diverse” research backed suggestions for how parenting support programs can improve “a wide range of developmental, emotional, behavioral and health outcomes for parents and their children”.

These are: (i) creating a safe, nurturing and engaging home environment, (ii) creating a responsive, positive learning environment, (iii) providing assertive and consistent boundaries and discipline, (iv) having reasonable expectations of children and oneself as a parent, and (v) having the capacity for self-care in the parenting role.

Acting on these suggestions – the features of Good Enough Parenting – promises to lead to “positive family relationships skills, healthy relationships with peers and significant others, good language and communication skills, intellectual skills, emotional and behavioural self-regulation, independence and self-care skills, compassion, healthy habits, environmental responsibility, cultural connection” (some paraphrasing here).

Retired elementary school teacher shares biggest parenting mistake she saw during long career   Emily Shiffer 01.24.25   https://www.upworthy.com/retired-elementary-school-teacher-shares-biggest-parenting-mistake-she-saw-during-long-career

Summary

Elementary teachers qualify to offer their opinions on parenting because they spend lots of time with kids and their parents. So TikToker @elenanico22 “interviewed her mom Lisa, a retired elementary school teacher, in an advice video. She asked her mom to share her insights on the question: “What’s one thing you saw people messing up with their kids?”’

The mother and elementary teacher’s “response was simple: “They didn’t enjoy them.” ….  They wanted them to be something that – most of us aren’t exactly what other people want us to be — so enjoy the kid you have.” Others who work with children agreed: “This is so true. I work in childcare and lots of parents literally cannot stand their kids…”

Why good-enough parenting needs to be a movement   Crysta Balis June 2021. Updated Mar 17, 2023  https://www.todaysparent.com/family/parenting/good-enough-parenting/.

Summary

Crysta Balis writes of her relief in finding British paediatrician and psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott’s research as the pressure to become a perfect parent became untenable.  Starting from the recognition “that adapting and readapting to a child’s ever-evolving needs for attention versus independence is no easy feat”, Winnicott affirmed that “perfect isn’t possible, nor is it the goal”. When the ‘good enough’ mother (hopefully he meant the father as well) in their love for their children ‘fail’ “to adapt to every need of the child [the parents help] them adapt to external realities. [Their] imperfections better prepare [the children] for an imperfect world.”

Balis also presents Edward Tronick’s ‘Rule of Thirds’: “parents are actually fully attuned to, or “in sync” with, their infants’ emotional needs only about 20 to 30 percent of the time. Another third of the time, parents are out of sync and drop the ball entirely, like when they just can’t figure out why their child is crying or angry, or when that child manages to console themselves despite the parent’s failed attempts or exasperation”, and “the final one, when, through trial and error, we manage to troubleshoot our way back to being in sync with our kids”.  Added to these studies, a 2018 Harvard study “shows that kids with working moms might actually benefit more in the long run, despite spending less time with their moms overall”. Bottom of Form

Good Enough Parenting      Pip Johnson, Clinical Psychology Registrar August 6, 2021 https://forestpsychology.com.au/good-enough-parenting/

As well as summarizing D Winnicott’s contribution to parenting styles, Pip Johnson offers a look at Edward Tronick, “famous for the ‘stillface’ experiments” who “found that imperfect attunement is consistent with healthy attachment” for parents.  Contrary to images they may have of themselves, in healthy child-parent relationships, parents are “perfectly in tune with the child around a third of the time. Another third of the time, parents struggle to work out what is wrong with their child and so are unable to meet their needs. This might be when kids are angry or crying and we don’t seem to understand why, and so they must soothe themselves and recover on their own. The final third of the time, which Tronick judged to be the most important for creating healthy attachment, is when parents are not initially in tune with their children’s needs but work to become attuned. This experience provides a safe experience of distress and resolution, which promotes general resilience”.

All this to say once again that “imperfect parenting is better for kids…. The point of Winnicott and Tronick’s work isn’t that we should not try so hard (though for some that may be true). The point is that we should look after ourselves and be kind to ourselves when we fail”.

ADVANCED PARENTING: advice for helping kids through diagnoses, differences, and mental health challenges    Kelly Fradin, MD    Balance, 2023, 20, 104

While Kelly Fradin wants you to know that you are “ultimately responsible when something goes wrong”, she points us to the Pareto principle, eighty–twenty rule, that the 20 % we do accounts for 80% of the outcome. So later in the book she assures us that “You can be a good parent even if you do not take every opportunity to do more”.

The Good Enough Mother Aiming to be the “perfect” can cause problems for both you and your child   Alexandra Sacks May 2018 https://medium.com/@alexandrasacks/the-good-enough-mother-ab19fd7dad06.

Summary

Not to pick on this article for it is simply the next one in my summarizing line-up. But once again it becomes evident to me that so far the majority of the articles are mother-focused.  Some might respond with “Duh, the phrase ‘Good Enough’ most often is accompanied by the designation, ‘mother’. Still … kids have fathers too.

The article begins with reference to D.W. Winnicott’s taking the pressure off mothers, noting that the phrase ‘good enough mother’ has been around since 1953 but my guess is that might be a surprise to a fair few mothers. Alexandra Sacks addresses the possible mother guilt of only being ‘good enough’ for what might seem to some mothers/parents like excuse-making.

She counters this false, often self-generated guilt by stating the obvious but too often so obvious as to be no longer noticed: we are humans. The word should go straight to that place in our brains that reminds us that being human is so all encompassing that perfection hasn’t a chance to get off the ground.

Certainly, your children aren’t usually judging your parenting and even if and when they do, Sacks reminds parents that “Self care is not selfish — it’s simply a requirement for psychological (and physical) survival”, essential to being a good enough parent, let alone a perfect one. Meanwhile the children the parent believes are being failed by failing parents, have a front row to seat to watch how to cope in difficulties and then have a great opportunity to go off and practice how to take care of their own needs when parents aren’t there for them.

The Abandoners: on mothers and monsters   Begoña Gómez Urzaiz     W.W. Norton & Company,2022, 62-76, 126-134

This entire book asks readers to relook at our perspectives on parenting and mothering. Well worth the demand to examine our deeply embedded ideas.

The chapter “An Ogre, a Princess, an Ass: mothers who leave in Meryl Streep’s Career” discusses views of mothers portrayed by Streep’s characters, particularly mothers who leave or in some way fail their children in the view of society at differing times, for they are always expected to offer personal renunciation as they are “always something different” from fathers.

In a chapter called “Momfluencers and the Economy of Turbomotherhood” Gómez Urzaiz talks of one mother and father caught up in the possibilities of online influencing and looking for an additional edge perhaps or perhaps out of sincere desire decide to showcase their ‘journey’ of adopting from a transnational/transracial option.  In the end they become a showcase of ‘rehoming’ an adoptee they are unable to care for.

Cry When the Baby Cries by Becky Barnicoat review – the black and white truth about motherhood   Rachel Cooke  Mon 10 Mar 2025 09.00 GMT  https://www.theguardian.com/books/2025/mar/10/cry-when-the-baby-cries-by-becky-barnicoat-review-the-black-and-white-truth-about-motherhood

Barnicoat’s memoir of early parenthood is funny, unflinching and a welcome corrective to the ceaseless pressures new mums face from social media

 

What Does It Mean to Be a Good Enough Parent?   Reviewed by Abigail Fagan July 16, 2024  https://www.psychologytoday.com/gb/blog/the-narrative-nurse-practitioner/202407/what-does-it-mean-to-be-a-good-enough-parent

Summary

I am quoting a fair bit here for the specific detail is helpful. Abigail Fagan, being mother of two children came to realize that “… after my second-born, I realized my girls were simply different. Their behavior had little to do with me, but instead with who they were”.

… Researchers Beatrice Beebe (a long-time mother-infant expert) and Susan Woodhouse (a parenting and infant researcher) independently found responding to infants about half the time seems to be ideal. This is the “Optimum Midrange,” according to Beebe. She found babies in relationships with caregivers in this midrange of responsiveness actually became more resilient than babies of caregivers who didn’t respond—or responded too much. Babies use time without a caregiver’s involvement to learn self-regulation, which offers an essential skill for resiliency.

To Woodhouse, a good caregiver provides a secure base… A mother needn’t respond all the time, but when the baby is in most distress. This way, a child learns they can engage and count on a parent when truly needed, which promotes secure attachment.

The 4 Common Parenting Styles and Their Effects on Kids   Shreyasi Debnath Updated: February 20, 2025  https://themindsjournal.com/4-common-parenting-styles/

Now, the question is which one parenting style do I follow for my child? … What parenting styles one will follow highly depends on the cultural and economic background, your status as a parent – if you’re a single parent, working parent, has health issues etc. … None of the parenting styles is fruitful when used independently. … Align their needs with your capabilities. Be attuned with your child’s development.

Why parents shouldn’t always be ‘in sync’ with their children   Pascal Vrticka    27 May 2024 https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20240524-why-neural-synchrony-between-parents-and-children-isnt-always-ideal

Summary

Research has shown that secure attachment between parents and their children involves “the coordination of parents’ and children’s brains and behaviour during social interactions”. Considering that in reality parents and children are not, nor can feasibly be, in constant ‘sync’, perhaps it is best not to make that a priority for it can add unneeded stress on the parent-child relationship and impede the child’s need to develop self-reliance.  “What really counts is that the parent-child relationship functions well overall”.

Development and Validation of Parenting Style Scale      S. Batool, Afia N. Mumtaz 2015   https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/Development-and-Validation-of-Parenting-Style-Scale-Batool Mumtaz/f95465dd5e09beafbf3c04cc4b4df09a26d14be4

This article provides data on a study of the efficacy of the major parenting styles, considering the following areas contributing to an understanding of parenting styles.

‎ Others would like to make sure the list notes: parents’ and child’s experience of parenting, the level of attachment between them, the beliefs, values, knowledge, cultural influence,

biological/genetic influences, knowledge, the characteristics of the parents and the child: temperaments, disabilities, exposure to trauma-ACE, self-regulation, and mental health. And likely this is still an incomplete list.

Baby We Were Meant for Each Other: in praise of adoption    Scott Simon    Random House, 2010, 53, 54, 57, 167

Children without homes don’t need just people who are willing to love them. They need parents. Parents aren’t simply good-hearted people who swoop in with hugs, candy, and promises. They are people who astonish even themselves how gladly and rapidly they put their children at the center of their lives.  Parents don’t altogether stop trying to be cool, staying up late, or telling naughty jokes. But with their first cries, children call us to be less selfish and more humble (even humiliated).  They give us a living stake in the world beyond our own short lives…. Parents are the kind of people who are enthralled and fascinated, even as they are often exhausted and appalled, by the challenges and vexations of children…. The best we could do for each kid is to help them to learn from their own bumps and bruises, and all the shots life is going to throw at them….”

One young fellow adopted as a teenager says of his adoptative parents: “They were parents, … Someone to give you not only unconditional love, but regular meals. Someone to take you to the doctor and dentist. A reason to come home…”

The 5 principles of parenting: your essential guide to raising good humans    Dr. Aliza Pressman    Simon Element, 2024, xix-xx, 64, 128

Summary

Dr. Aliza Pressman makes her agenda clear in the Introduction by saying that we need only to respond to our child’s needs 50% of the time, BUT on the very same page she states her list of non-negotiables:

• Take care of the mental health of the primary caregiver.
• Do not engage in physical or emotional abuse.
• Commit to habits of consistent sleep, movement, and nourishment.
• Establish clear Rules that enable emotional and physical safety.
• Be sensitive … to your child’s needs (which are not the same thing as their “wants”).

The heading on the next page is Remember That Good Enough Is Good Enough.

Pressman moves through the book with advice to guide your parenting. She also provides a piece I have never yet encountered: three periods of great neuroplasticity take place in our development- first, in our first years of life, second, in our teen years and third, in the years we become engaged in care-giving, in whatever capacity, not just in parenting.  A bonus I would think to parenting.

And here she finds a plus for failure in parenting: The more our kids get to see us making mistakes and learning from them, the more they’ll come to understand that life isn’t about getting things right the first time.  Disappointment is natural, but taking the fear out of failing means remembering that imperfect people are worthy of love.

Am I a “Good Enough” Parent?    Dr. Jack Stoltzfus  September 5, 2023 https://parentslettinggo.com/am-i-a-good-enough-parent/

Summary

Dr. Jack Stoltzfus calls parenting “one big guilt trip” citing a study noting that “only 3% of parents thought they were excellent parents”. In his 2024 book, he offers parents a chance to grade themselves with a report card, checking for how they accept what they can’t control, letting go where needed, what their motivations are and are they consistent with their values, do they help their child and are they unconditional and invested in their love and understanding of their children, apologizing when needed. For those aspects that fall below what their values see as acceptable, do they have an improvement plan?

Good enough parenting for all children—a strategy for a healthier society    Jun 23, 2021 http://dx.doi.org/10.1136/adc.78.4.293

I am not sure how I gained access to this article for the site says it must be purchased. I will therefore not summarize it except to say that it looks at issues of children’s negative life experiences, seeking the ‘why’ for a healthier society in regards to good enough parenting within the concept of ‘it takes a village’, especially in the years from infancy to ten. The need for love, care and healthy guidance are basic, without which a child becomes at risk for problems.

The Cambridge Study in Delinquent Development by Farrington and West “found that one of the best predictors of later delinquency was the teacher’s assessment of “troublesomeness” at the age of 8–l0 years”, further showing evidence that “four other factors were found to be strongly and independently associated with future delinquency: (i) poor parenting; (ii) economic deprivation; (iii) family criminality; and (iv) educational failure”.

Thinking Critically about Child Development: examining myths & misunderstanding, 3^rd ed.   Jean Mercer    SAGE Publications, 2016, 273       

“…it is hard to know whether the children’s development was determined by the parenting behavior or by one or more related factors”.

Great Myths of Child Development    Stephen Hupp and Jeremy Jewell    Wiley-Blackwell, 2015

#31 Parents can usually tell when their child is depressed:   Although most parents may feel they’re “in tune” with their child’s emotional state, this may not always be the case.  In dozens of studies over the last several decades, research has shown that parents are fairly poor informants when it comes to identifying depression in their children…. Interestingly, researchers have found that parents are better informants when their children have disruptive behavior problems (e.g. aggression) as opposed to problems with their mood (e.g. anxiety and depression).

#34 Adults can usually tell if a child is lying: … Studies show that adults are not very good at determining whether or not children are telling the truth.

#40 If you “spare the rod” you will “spoil the child”:   A more modern translation of this biblical reference suggests the rod is more likely referring to a staff shepherds use to guide sheep and that the verse itself is saying, “If you refuse to discipline your children, it proves you don’t love them” or “Those who don’t correct their children hate them …”  The writers then summarize current opinion on the rightness or wrongness of spanking, concluding with … although spanking may be an effective strategy to gain immediate compliance in some case, it may not always be the most effective strategy, it’s related to lower moral internalization in the long term, and it may have unintended negative side effects for the child. …. “[We] also believe that a few occasions of mild spanking will not likely cause harm to a child, and parents shouldn’t be made to feel guilty for using mild spanking as an occasional discipline tactic.  If parents do decide to use an occasional spanking, they should also realize that, at best, the spanking teaches children “what not to do,” so they will also need to think but teaching the child “what to do,” instead, by using some additional approach.

Born for Love: why empathy is essential and endangered    Maia Szalavitz and Bruce D. Perry, M.D., PhD.    William Morrow, 2010, 41

“When parents feel blamed, they are less able to empathize with their children’s [problems] and may respond defensively, instead of changing their behavior.”

Listening Well: bringing stories of hope to life     Heather Morris     St Martin’s Press, 2022

Some helpful advice is offered in developing the art of listening to yourself and others.

Eve: how the female body drove 200 million years of human evolution    Cat Bohannon    Alfed A. Knopf, 2023, 204-205

[Because human babies are needy for much longer than other creatures], in order for hominins to flourish, some kind of cultural revolution around child care must have occurred. How else, after all, would species with such needy babies survive? …. [Some] say we came up with kinfolk eusociality – a kind of furry “spinster aunt”.  Maybe we even started alloparenting, as we still do now, with unrelated folk helping care for others’ babies.

Hunt, Gather, Parent: what ancient cultures can teach us about the lost art of raising happy, helpful little humans   Michaeleen Doucleff, PhD.    Avid Reader Press, 2022, 278-287

Michaeleen Doucleff provides a good section on allo-parenting: “any person…who helps to take care of a child….key people who work alongside the mother and father, connecting to form a steady stream of unconditional love as a child grows”. Seeking to cultivate a culture of allo-parenting moves away from the isolating primacy of the nuclear family culture.

Act Natural: a cultural history of misadventures in parenting    Jennifer Traig   Ecco, 2019, 105,218,286,287

Jennifer Traig provides a window on the history of parenting and a self-deprecating willingness to let the reader look through the window into her own parenting.

“There are so many ways to get it wrong and we are just getting started….”  “Parenting is so hard and we are all looking for permission to slack off in some areas”.… “I’m now generally a capable parent, at least when I choose to be…. Though we have been worrying about it for less than a hundred years, we’ve somehow managed to keep the species going without giving it much thought”. 

And though she generally parents the way she was parented, she is “still making parenting mistakes everyday.  I am pretty sure that’s okay. If I’ve learned anything, it’s that barring the really awful stuff, things mostly turn out fine, and the ones that don’t were beyond our control anyway”. 

“In a sense, all parenting is a history of parenting. We do what our parents did because that’s what we know; or sometimes we do what they didn’t do, because now we know better”.

The Trouble with Perfect: how parents can avoid the over-achievement trap and still raise successful children   Elizabeth Guthrie, M.D. and Kathy Matthews   Hardcopy – Harmony, 2002;   audio –  Prince Frederick Recorded Books, 2008

It is my opinion that if you want a spectrum on the idea of ‘good enough’ you might weave your way through Act Natural and The Trouble With Perfect to a parenting path that works for you.

Elizabeth Guthrie and Kathy Matthews advise parents to keep from wanting to control their child’s life, however irrelevantly; instead, get a job to burn of some of the need to control energy and maybe to shake off the “could cloud” that hangs over their guilt susceptible hearts and minds.  And she suggests parents take a good look at what the short and long term consequences are when they control OR when they allow the child to control.

In Search of Stones: a pilgrimage of faith, reason and discovery    M. Scott Peck, Hyperion, 1995, 149, 151,152,159

Speaking of his own parenting, M. Scott Peck is very clear that, psychotherapist aside, he and his wife “did not know at all what it would be like to be parents”…. But they were “glad for the learning”. Scott says, “If you seriously want to learn about life, having and raising children is probably the single best way” …. He says he was not sure “how fully I could have joined in the human race…without being a father struggling to fulfill at least the minimum responsibilities of parenthood”. And in the spirt of good enough, Scott firmly states: “Parents should not be the center of their children’s lives”.

“We need to reassert a healthy masculinity”  “We need to reassert a healthy masculinity” Jonathan Keeperman and Michael Shellenberger Feb. 17, 2025 https://www.public.news/p/jonathan-keeperman-we-need-to-reassert

Summary

While this is an article in response to the anger against President Trump concerning a perceived lack of empathy and kindness, there are points here to consider regarding good enough parenting.  Others suggest the empathy and caring practices Trump appears to be dismantling seemed to enable rather that reduce the problems of the homeless etc.

A similar story can be told about many other social problems. Psychologists, including Jonathan Haidt, have found that coddling children results in them being discouraged more easily when they encounter problems…. In fact, argues … Jonathan Keeperman, … there has been a “remarkable overcorrection of the last two generations toward social norms centering feminine needs and feminine methods for controlling, directing, and modeling behavior” …. “The most important feature of the Longhouse [the metaphor of the indigenous Longhouse], and why it makes such a resonant (and controversial) symbol of our current circumstances, is the ubiquitous rule of the Den Mother,” he writes…. Keeperman … is not saying that women are bad or that feminine values of empathy, caring, and compassion are worse than masculine values of assertiveness, aggression, and action. Rather, he argues that Western cultures have become unbalanced toward feminine values…. Without feminine values, our societies would be far harsher and crueler places, but we also need healthy masculinity.… the best approach is often tough love, since that’s what allows people, and nations, to mobilize their internal resources and fortitude to mature and develop.

Ivy League psychologist shares the common mistake she made raising her 3 kids: ‘I wish I had never been that parent’      Tom Huddleston Jr.   Oct 19 2024  https://www.cnbc.com/2024/10/19/ivy-league-parenting-expert-on-how-to-handle-yelling-at-kids.html

There’s no such thing as a perfect parent, says Tovah Klein, director of the Barnard College Center for Toddler Development.

“Fortunately, making mistakes and owning up to them is one way that parents can actually help teach their kids how to become healthy, successful adults”.  Klien includes herself, admitting she too has yelled at her kids. The thing is she admitted it and apologized to her children, saying something like, “I’m sorry I yelled,” or, “I apologize. I shouldn’t have done that”, thereby modelling the kind of realistic and healthy behaviour children need to see.

What You Can Change … and What You Can’t*: the complete guide to successful self-improvement    Martin E.P. Seligman, PhD.    Vintage Books, 2007, 211, 243

All the usual predictors offering a good life to a child, do not always produce that success: good mothering, high childhood experience, not coming from a multiproblem family, high IQ, good education…. Like the title says, Marting Seligman tells us that the ‘why’ of human behaviour may not yet be well understood, but when there are problems with behavior we do know that we can make changes. “So even if why we are what we are is a mystery, how to change ourselves is not.”

Despite good parenting, some kids go bad – it may be genetic: research on chemical in brain adds to nature-nurture debate  Melissa Healy   Vancouver Sun,  October 6, 2011, B4

The article asks: why do some kids with bad parents turn out fine and some kids with good parents, turn out not so nice? The answer offered: “The answer may lie in the genes. Specifically, the almost famous 5-HTTLPR serotonin transporter-promoter gene, which governs the activity of the mood chemical serotonin in the brain”. The upshot suggested: while four out of five kids are “impervious to the quality of the parenting they get”, that one of the five kids who was born with a variant may turn out sensitive to the impact of the parenting. Being careful though, the article warns us not to dismiss the environment/setting for this set in parenting.

Scientific Parenting: what science reveals about parental influence   Dr. Nicole Letourneau with Justin Joschko    Dundern, 2013, 182, 226, 236

Here’s some encouragement.

“Therefore, it should come as no surprise that when we engage in something as evolutionarily beneficial as motherhood our brains praise our noble behaviour with a burst of mood-enhancing hormones. Oxytocin is one of them. Dopamine is another”.

“You are going to get a lot of help [parenting your child]. Not from professionals or parenting experts, but from your child”.

“But what do we mean when we say support? What is it that successful parents provide to their children? Is it attention? Encouragement? Discipline? Education? To a certain extent, yes. But what really matters is relationships. Children need to forge tangible emotional connections to their adult caregivers.”

And as for D.W. Winnicott’s statement that ‘there is no such thing as a baby without someone else’, Letourneau and Joschko say Winnnicott “means that babies do not become distinct individuals immediately after birth. They wade into personhood gradually, buoyed by the calm and protective waters of family”.

Hold on to Your Kids: why parents need to matter more than peers    Gordon Neufeld, PhD. and Gabor Mate, M.D.   Vintage Canada, 2004, 54, 215

Gordon Neufeld and Gabor Mate tell us “It takes three ingredients to make parenting work: a dependent being in need of being taken care of, an adult willing to assume responsibility, and a good working attachment from the child to the adult”.

“…Parenting is above all a relationship, and relationships don’t lend themselves to strategies… We do not require skills or strategies but compassion, principles, and insight. The rest will come naturally – although I’m not saying it will come easily…. [W]e may have to struggle with feelings of futility.  Very few parents come ready-made. Parents are begotten out of attachment and adaptation…. We must, however, let ourselves feel the sadness and disappointment when we have a sense of failure”.

The Myth of Normal: trauma, illness & healing in a toxic culture    Gabor Maté and Daniel Maté    Knopf Canada, 2022, 179,180

Gabor Maté continues the message of Hold On to Your Kids with a quote from James Gabarino from 1995: “We need to put aside blaming parents and take a good hard look at the challenge of raising children in a socially toxic environment”. For as I noted in earlier posts, Gabor Maté reminds us that “Yes, parents are responsible for their children; no, they did not create the world in which they must parent them.”

A Good Enough Mother: a novel     Bev Thomas   Pamela Dorman Books, 2019, 119

When one character, at hearing the suggestion to consider the idea of D.W. Winnicott’s ‘good enough’ as an approach to consider, groans, “Sounds like a way of letting yourself off the hook if you mess up. An excuse for mediocrity”. [The narrator, a psychotherapist] shook [her] head. “It‘s become oversimplified. The original meaning’s got lost. It’s about the fact that maternal limitations play an essential role in separation and the child’s developmental process.”

In Search of the “Good Enough” Mother: how to honor the complexity of motherhood  Jennifer L. Kunst, Ph.D.,  May 9, 2012  https://www.psychologytoday.com/intl/blog/headshrinkers-guide-the-galaxy/201205/in-search-the-good-enough-mother

Summary

Jennifer Kunst begins by drawing our attention to how far from reality Mother’s Day cards are which is why D.W. Winnicott “came to believe that the way to be a good mother is to be a good enough mother” because a caring mother “provides a holding environment” * and “[w]hen she fails, she tries again”.

Kunst goes on to affirm that “[i]t takes an imperfect mother to raise a child well. You see, children need to learn about life through real experiences”.  * ‘a holding environment’ is a Winnicott term

Unbroken Brain: a revolutionary new way of understanding addiction    Maia Szalavitz    St. Martin’s Press, 2016, 165-166

Talking about a similarity between parenting and addiction, Maia Szalavitz offers three comparisons: “Even normal parenting, for example, involves a touch of OCD. Parents notoriously become obsessed with the safety of their children and ways of protecting them” …. “Another crucial aspect of learning in early parenthood, of course, is learning to bond with your particular baby.  Contrary to popular belief, parental love is not always “instant” …. But just like in addiction, it takes repeated exposure and repeated engagement …nothing is actually “instantly addictive” …. And babies, thankfully, come equipped with features that make them addictive to adults…The fact that addictions can be built on the same system is not an insult to parents or to the meaning of love – but a testament to their strength and power”. 

Old-School Traditions Modern Families Are Leaving Behind    Zayda Slabbekoorn Dec 23, 2024  https://www.yourtango.com/family/old-school-traditions-modern-families-are-leaving-behind

Summary

Each of us must make our own decisions of how many of these traditions apply today, how much is mythology, how many add value to our family’s life, and how many have actually been left behind and why.

We are apparently relegating the following to the dustbin “to save time, money, and space”: bedtime stories, heirlooms, photo albums, ‘family style’ dinners, cards and non-digital letters, family time without technology, family recipes.

According to research … the average American family only spends around 6 hours of time together weekly, compared to an average of between 12 and 20 hours in the 1990s.

Yet, usually due to financial issues, “surveys from the Pew Research Center have reported…. More than 88% of young adults aged 18 to 29-years-old are still living with a parent today, compared to an average one-third in the 1990s”.

‘Lighthouse Parents’ Have More Confident Children And Here’s How To Be One 

 Trine Jensen  https://everymum.ie/my-family/lighthouse-parents-have-more-confident-children-and-heres-how-to-be-one/

Summary

Because parents “…all want to raise confident children,” Trine Jensen, thinks it best to leave her children to figure things out for themselves rather than “micromanaging” their lives, saying, “Sometimes the best thing parents can do is to do nothing at all”.  Jensen turns to “an essay for The Atlantic, parent and educator Russel Shaw”.  

Shaw says, “Too often, I watch parents over-functioning – depriving their kids of the confidence that comes from struggling and persevering, and exhausting themselves in the process”, leaving the child to wonder if he or she might be incapable of taking care of him- or herself.

Shaw encourages parents to step back more and more as the children mature, instead learning to be there as a listener, guide and support but leaving the children to it.

Helicopter? Free-range? Concierge? What kind of parent are you?: How do you parent? There’s a meme for that amid the modern obsession with dissecting and defining parenting styles   The Irish Times DAC Jul 18, 2023 https://www.proquest.com/central/docview/2838432152/3D22720E0AA34700PQ/10?accountid=48753&sourcetype=Newspapers

Summary

The writer of this article seems a bit boggled by the plethora of labels in parenting styles that have been spawned from the original three- authoritarian, authoritative and permissive and the later added, neglectful parenting.

But for whatever style we choose to align with in our parenting, “ultimately, [O’Malley] believes, we revert to ourselves”. Furthermore, and I think this is a needed balloon buster, to the parenting style we chose for child number one, O’Malley says, ‘“Then you think you’ve got it sussed – until the second arrives and you realise everything you knew is wrong.” With the rise in one-child families, those parents can propagate the idea that a certain type of parenting works, she says, because in their case the fallacy of that will never be put to the test.”’  O’Malley goes further: ‘”We have really undermined our instinctive parenting,” she argues. As a result, “there is a vibe of cluelessness … and a general culture of denigrating parents that we all collude in”. In tandem with that undermining has come greater demands for parental responsibility.”’

And then the article ends with ‘Good Enough’ parenting, noting that 70 years after Donald Winnicott provided the label, this style still makes sense for “most children basically just need well-intentioned, half-competent parents who show them wholehearted love”.

FAFO parenting is the trendy way to let kids ‘find out’ consequences. But is it cruel to let them fail?   Natalie Stechyson  February 21, 2025

https://www.cbc.ca/amp/1.7462555?utm_source=snews&utm_medium=referral

FAFO stands for ‘fool around and find out’ … except it’s the other F-word…with the idea that the approach teaches kids natural consequences to their actions…. as a counterpoint to some of the more modern parenting styles, like the constantly hovering helicopter parents, or gentle parenting, the extremely popular modern style that centres on acknowledging a child’s feelings and the motivations behind challenging behaviours…. [FAFO] also aligns with the trendy “let them” theory of parenting.

the good mother myth: redefining motherhood to fit reality    ed. by Avital Norman Nathman     Seal Press, 2014,34, 35  “The Unapologetic No”    Soraya Chemaly

I fast became the quintessential not-only-can-you-have-it-all-but-also-you-must-have-it-all mother…. I spent years grappling with the expectation that I would just do – mother, work, food, volunteer, more mothering, more work, more food, more volunteering. And that there was no compensation other than the idea that somewhere, somehow, there would be a tacit seal of “good mother” approval.  

The Attachment Effect: exploring the powerful ways our earliest bond shapes our relationships and lives   Peter Lovenheim    TarcherPerigee, 2018, 112,115, 119

Summary                

Peter Lovenheim tells a story of a mother who is considered to be successfully securing attachment with her child through her parenting. Yet, she says, “I fail at [attachment parenting] on a daily basis,”. Fail how?  [Lovenheim] asked. “I have days when I get frustrated,” she said, “and react to Wyatt in a way that I look back on later and say, “Well, that really wasn’t great.’ I mean there’s so little time and only so much you can do. I have to make dinner, do laundry, go to class, clean house.” Yet she considers the idea of good enough parenting half-assed.

But… she is not against babysitters or daycare. She knows “many experts…seem confident that daycare for toddlers and older children can be okay – even beneficial in promoting development- as long as workers are of high quality…” etc.

How to Raise an Adult: break free of the over parenting trap and prepare your kid for success    Julie Lythcott-Haims    Pan Macmillan UK, 2015, 20

Our kids see the strain we’re under. Researcher Ellen Galinsky asked one thousand kids what they would most like to change about their parents’ schedules. “Few of them wanted more face time; the top wish was for mom and dad to be less tired and stressed.”

Adult children who had ‘good parents’ share what their parents did right   Annie Reneau

12.19.24  https://www.upworthy.com/adult-children-of-good-parents-share-what-they-did-right-current-parents-take-note

What well-raised adult children say their parents did right: “supported their kids’ interests without judgment, explained themselves to their kids, were fair-minded and taught fair-mindedness, taught by their own example, broke cycles of dysfunction, yet certainly weren’t perfect”. (abbreviated quoting)

The Gift of the Good Enough Mother

https://seleni.org/advice-support/2018/3/14/the-gift-of-the-good-enough-mother

Our kids need us to fail sometimes. Perfection is not an option.

‘Good enough’ parenting: Negotiating standards and stigma  kylie valentine, Ciara Smyth, Jamee Newland  June 2019,  International Journal of Drug Policy Volume 68, 117-123  https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S095539591830197X https://doi.org/10.1016/j.drugpo.2018.07.009

Summary

This article may address some of the issues at the heart of my personal search.

Here are relevant pieces taken from the article: Policy concern with families has led to the framing of ‘good parenting’ as a skill set that parents must acquire while ‘poor parenting’ is linked to a raft of social problems, including child maltreatment.

Becoming a parent involves new emotions and challenges, among them apparently near-universal feelings of anxiety and guilt. These emotions are especially true for mothers, where decisions around paid employment are freighted with guilt regardless of the outcome: for example, working mothers feel guilty for not spending enough time with their children, and conversely stay-at-home mothers for not earning additional income which could provide their children with more opportunities (Liss et al., 2012).

Impostor Syndrome and Parenting – What Is It and How to Overcome It –
YaeBin Kim, Heidi Peter Meier https://naes.agnt.unr.edu/PMS/Pubs/2023-5185.pdf

Summary

Impostor Syndrome and Parenting Impostor syndrome, also known as impostor
phenomenon or impostorism, involves feeling like a fraud despite one’s achievements and
worry someone will find out about it. It can cause feelings of anxiety and affect relationships…According to studies, 70% of adults experience imposter syndrome at least once in their life…

Causes of Impostor Syndrome:
“… personality traits, culture, family background and parenting style” … and confusing societal messages of praise or shame. Postpartum symptoms or quickly becoming aware of how little, in the reality of parenting, that you actually know about parenting or having too high parenting expectations contribute.

Symptoms of Parents’ Impostor Syndrome: Rigidity in daily routines, Black-and-white thinking,
Catastrophic thinking, Lack of sleep, Thinking too much about mistakes, Minimizing accomplishments, Negative self-talk

Some generate within themselves the impostor syndrome by judging themselves by the research they compulsively seek out, or by trying to be all things to all beings, or striving for perfection, or insisting on going it alone. The parent labelling his or herself an imposter is advised to talk with others, adjust expectations and stop comparing.

The Experience of Motherhood Imposter Syndrome and How to Overcome It   DECEMBER 14, 2020 https://theeverymom.com/imposter-syndrome-as-a-mom-how-to-overcome-it/

If you’re unfamiliar with imposter syndrome, it was originally identified in 1978 by psychologists Pauline Rose Clance and Suzane Imes and is the internalized feeling that your success is due to luck. Imposter syndrome can be experienced with feelings of doubt in your skills, talents, and/or accomplishments, with a fear that at any moment you might be exposed as a fraud.

Apparently, so many mothers experience this that it’s referred to as motherhood imposter syndrome or even as Psychology Today called it, “Momposter Syndrome.” And if you’ve ever questioned your parenting ability, you’re not the only one.

When putting all your supposed learnings into practice, you might realize that nothing can actually prepare you for the real thing. And when all your tricks seem to fail, the feelings of not being up for the job as a mom can creep in…. Take comfort knowing we’re all learning as we go.

Nothing but the Truth: a memoir    Marie Henein    print Penguin Random House audiobook McClelland & Stewart, 2021, 75, 232, 236

If you have developed imposter syndrome, this is a book you will find pragmatically helpful.

Marie Henein is “recognized as one of the Top 25 Most Influential Lawyers by Canadian Lawyer”.  Of her mother, she says: [My mother] Evelyn wasn’t the mushy bake-you-cookies-and-read-a bedtime story kind of mom. I didn’t know moms like that when I was growing up, and if she had been that kind of mother, I would not have been who I am. Yes I have taken this out of the context Marie Henein was focusing on, her mother’s sense of her personal strength as a human being, but I think it also speaks to the ‘good enough’ mother conflict.  Near the end of the book, Henein speaks further to this conflict of women being questioned if they are both careerists and mothers.

Henein is often asked, “How do you balance work and family?”  [Her] answer is always the same: You do not. Because there is only one of you and you can only be in one place at one time. When you are at work, that is where your attention is, and sometimes your family suffers as a result. At times, it is your family that requires all of you, and your work must take a back seat. Maybe your partner or someone else has to lend a help hand so you can have the freedom – so you can be liberated from the delusion that it is possible to create and sustain this balance…”

If You Did These 10 Things, You Were A Better Parent Than Your Kids Give You Credit For:

There’s no such thing as a “perfect” parenting, there’s only trying your best, taking accountability, and making sacrifices. Zayda Slabbekoorn  Nov 06, 2024 https://www.yourtango.com/family/you-were-better-parent-kids-give-credit-for

When your children feel free to drag their toys out of their rooms to play in the living room, when they demonstrate independence, when you can talk with your kids and they feel they can talk with you because you are open about your own mistakes and when you want to know what made them laugh in their day rather than asking them to account for how they did at school you were good enough. When you see them as human beings whom you are committed to loving, understanding and supporting, when you can agree to disagree yet they still come to visit and may even ask for help, you have been good enough.

Parents Under the Influence: words of wisdom from a former bad mother   Cecile David-Weill     Other Press, 2020, 120

In a section titled,” The best parents are straightforward with their children”, Cecile David-Weill has found that “[e]xchanges in which we are being up front with our children give them a real chance to live a true and authentic bond with us, and to understand that fundamentally, life and love are about carrying on together amid the details and hardships of reality.

“Why is Dad so Mad: a father dares to explore his rage”    Daniel Engber The Atlantic    July/August, 2022, 87-89

Summary

Daniel Engber is reviewing Keith Gessen’s book, Raising Raffi: the first five years.  In an environment hyper-aware of ‘male toxicity’, Gessen shares his struggle with trying to figure out how to appropriately parent, how to appropriately deal with the frustration and anger he feels and the loss of control he acknowledges at times in dealing with his child. Daniel Engber stands with Gessen, also acknowledging, “But the anger would be coming just the same, as it does for every parent at some time.”  And so Engber seems to shrug or sigh a bit, as in a tenet of ‘good enough’ parenting, Engber quotes Gessan, “But you succeed when you make yourself irrelevant”.

When Parents Hurt: compassionate strategies when you and your grown child don’t get along    Joshua Coleman, PhD.   William Morrow Paperbacks, 2008

This book offers parenting principles, guidelines, advice and exercises to help a parent work through the turmoil of a difficult parent-adult child relationship, looking at the parent’s hopes, dreams, disappointments, emotions, and how parenting has affected the parent’s life.

TIME NOW FOR THE VINYL CAFÉ STORY EXCHANGE      Stuart McLean    “Learning to Skate”   Cheryl Glass, Pinehouse, Saskatchewan    Penguin Canada, 2013, 131

Cheryl Glass, who didn’t know how to skate, watched tensely as her young son struggled to learn to skate. But it didn’t deter him.

And that’s when I knew, watching him that night skating in the dark, that there are so many things my boys are going to need to learn that I won’t have a clue how to teach them. I’ll do my best to supply them with the tools and to introduce them to the folks who know the ropes. But then I’ll just have to stand by and watch through my fingers as they fall, pray that they will get back up again, and cheer when they do. I’ll have to learn to not interfere when they’re surrounded by those who are bigger, faster, and stronger. And let them go, even when every ounce of my being shouts at me to hold them close. I’ll have to stand by the side of the rink, and watch them skate.

Love Works Like This    Lauren Slater   Random House, 2002, 169

… I wish for the passion that transcends space. When I am with Eva [her baby], she is my heart. When I am gone from her, at work, or with a friend, she ceases to exist. 

Splinters: another kind of love story    Leslie Jamison   Little, Brown and Company, 2024, 138,139

Leslie Jamison and her father talked about their relationships near the end of her high school days. He told me, “At a certain point, when it was so difficult with you, I just said, Fuck it.”  … In time, I came to see that our difficult years were just that. Years. Neither more nor less. They weren’t everything. They were part of a longer story that we got to keep living.  This about a father who showed up at many of the most important or difficult years of her life.

Crooked Smile: what it took to escape a decade of homelessness, addictions & crime    Jared Klickstein, Bombardier Books, 2024, 186

My unreasonable expectations of life weren’t panning out exactly the way I wanted.  They never do, nor should they.  I’ve found that once I accepted this years later, life started to grow beyond what I imagined was even possible.

Fighting a Theological Monster     Wendell Krossa (my brother) Feb 13, 2025 http://www.wendellkrossa.com/?p=13104

Even Jesus, at least in the Gospel of Luke, says ‘good enough’ is good enough.

Luke offers a better version of this same message of Jesus because his wrap-up ending gets the spirit of Jesus right- i.e. “Be unconditionally merciful as your Father is unconditionally merciful”. Whereas Matthew, to the contrary, messes up by contradicting the very core of Jesus’ message with his ending statement of “Be perfect as your Father is perfect”.

“Immigrant Dad Talk Show” SNL   Jan 19’25

Two lousy parents, Dave Chappelle and Marcello Hernandez, and white guy Mikey Day who is into Communication, Compassion and Care, expose both parenting styles to laughter.

Specific To Adoption  

Parenting an adopted child 2^nd ed     Kathy Lancaster, Ph.D.    Barrons Educational Series, Inc., 2009, 13

As Kathy Lancaster writes, whatever our parenting styles and even if good enough is our common sense aim, we need as adoptive parents a baseline acknowledgement that “[a]doptive families are different than families built through birth…”. Whenever our relationship with our adopted child is strained or is going through a stretch of looking less like ‘happy families’ or worse, a tension will hover somewhere on the edges of our minds: “Is this problem about our parenting or is it about our child’s ‘bad blood’/genetics? “Is this normal or is this adoption?”

Lancaster advises, “Although adoptive parents will attest that the loving attachments are the same in adoption, practically everything else is not the same.

To help our children successfully adapt, we need to acknowledge the differences between adoptive and biological families and take positive steps to incorporate adoption education into our family system”.

Good enough adoptive parenting-the adopted child and selfobject relations

Dorit Noy-Sharav   Clinical Social Work Journal New York Vol. 30, Iss. 1,  (Spring 2002)

https://www.proquest.com/central/docview/227769260/44681D8C7DE74121PQ/8?accountid=48753&sourcetype=Scholarly%20Journals

Boy does this article pick away at the underlying realities of the message that adoption parenting is different from bio-parenting.  It is well worth reading the entire article.

Google provided definition of selfobject: a person or object that a person experiences as part of themselves, and that serves a function for the self.

Summary

The article, written to encourage assessment for adoption readiness,  … examines several conditions that may impair optimal selfobject relations between adoptive parents and their child, so that self-development and individuation of the adoptee will be at risk”.  These conditions, not always unlike the concerns of bio-parents, encompass the clinical and psychological impact of dealing with infertility, the absence of what the prenatal period engenders, and then the pre-adoption assessment process and working through becoming attached to someone else’s child, one that may not physically resemble the adoptive parents and does not carry the adoptive family genes.  And then there is the question, are the parents on the same page with regards to parenting? With that comes the adopted child’s need-to-know and even the child’s yearnings toward the bio-family, as well as, whatever physical and psychological impact from the bio-parents or caregivers marked the child before he or she was adopted. In order to avoid abandonment again, the child may seek to cover his or her real sense of self, the one that may have, at least in the child’s mind, led to the child’s being given up, to remain secure within the adoptive family and indeed the child may be swept up in a ‘search for self’ that may last a lifetime.  The sense of abandonment may also concern the adoptors, as well, for the child may want to reconnect later with the bio family.

Good enough parenting, to borrow Winnicott’s (1960) well-known idiom, demands that the parent be able to go beyond his own needs for selfobject relations. By being an adult, having a cohesive self, he is expected to be able to differentiate between his own needs for security, containment, control, continuity and the changing needs of his child; he should be able to view the child as a separate subject, with her own personality. Even more, in order to provide the child with a facilitating environment that enables an optimal development the parent often forgoes his own needs in order to serve as a reliable and attuned selfobject for the child, being not only parents, but possibly therapist for the child.

Sharing of an adoptive parent’s experience of key themes central to adoptions   Abba Specialist Adoption & Social Services     http://abbaadoptions.co.za/articles.html

Summary

Aiming for/settling for ‘good enough’ parenting may be a common sense target when parenting adopted children for as the children work through the normal developmental hurdles of growing up, they may have added hurdles: a sense of rejection or grief/loss of their bioparents leading to shame or guilt, an uncertainty of their personal identity and about the best way to express these feelings and to what degree they are safe to give themselves up to trusting the parents they have now.

Adoptive parents are encouraged to build a secure enough base for their children to find a way to articulate and work through these feelings.

Older Sister. Not Related: a memoir    Jenny Heijun Wills    McClelland & Stewart, 2019, 150

One of the questions that comes as an adoptee seeks balance in her relationships with her adoptive family and her birth family: “Why do [the adoptive parents] think their love is so good that it is all we’ll ever need?  How can anyone’s love be that good?” 

Why “Good Enough” Parenting is Better than Perfection. You can ditch the stress. Everything will be OK. Chris Prange-Morgan, M.A., MSW  August 1, 2022  https://www.psychologytoday.com/ca/blog/full-catastrophe-parenting/202208/why-good-enough-parenting-is-better-perfection

Summary

Chris Prange-Morgan asks how as an adoptive parent she, like many other adoptive parents, could be guilt free but still do parenting right for children who have often started life in a traumatic environment when trending parenting advice seems to push a parenting style hard to maintain in the vagaries of human experience. D.W. Winnicott made the point that “that striving to be the “perfect” or “best” mother can cause some unintended problems for parents and kids alike”, impacting , as research has shown, children’s “emotional growth and executive functioning, and it leads to anxiety, depression and feeling helpless”. Parents’ relationships with their children are also impacted when they are driven by the pressure to be whatever is currently the perfect parent.  And if imperfection is all parents can maintain, Prange-Morgan offers this: “Role modeling self-love and acceptance provides the best possible foundation for my children to venture out into the world, and to know they will be OK, even in the rocky patches”.

Parenting Adopted Teenagers: advice for the adolescent years    Rachel Staff, Jessica Kingsley Publishers, 2015, 31-32,89

Summary

Under a heading, “Understanding the relationship between the past and the present when providing support”, Rachel Staff talks to adoptive parents who may be struggling with a sense of guilt as their child is having difficulties in the teen years. Not easing the sense of guilt, the wider circle of professionals, who may be now involved with the teenager’s difficulties, may make assessments that start by questioning the parents’ parenting.

Yet that assessment must take a wider view, starting with a look at the stability of a delayed securing of attachment with “an adolescent brain, firing on all cylinders from the amygdala (the emotional brain) is also characterize by immature and poorly developed prefrontal functioning. They are without the benefits of this ‘top-down’ moderating influence on their emotional response; they are therefore experiencing a double whammy which is likely to make their emotional experience this stage even more ‘wobbly’”.

Living through the experience with the teenager, the adoptive parents may not be managing constantly perfect parenting either.

Adoption Unfiltered: revelations from adoptees, birth parents, adoptive parents, and allies    Sara Easterly, Kelsey Vander Vliet Ranyard, Lori Holden    Rowan & Littlefield Publishers, 2023,192,193

A key component to help repair a rupture is to offer a true apology for not knowing what we didn’t know [about the struggles of being adopted]. “Apologizing for some of the decisions we made when we didn’t have the understanding of adoptee loss can go a long way toward healing,” says Elizabeth. “It’s also helpful for struggling parents to find a community of other parents who get it and can sit with you as you wonder how things got to the point of estrangement. If we can acknowledge our role in the situation and not be so defensive about it, we might be able to shift the dynamic.”

… “It is not about blaming. It is about moving forward with new understandings…”

The Girl Behind the Door: a father’s quest to understand his daughter’s suicide    John Brooks    Scribner, 2016, 62-64

As time went on, parenting Casey often felt like breaking a wild stallion. They instinctively protect their space and dominate their handlers……There is no single method of training that works, because every stallion is different….

I wish I’d had a gift for understanding my own daughter. As infuriating as her behavior was, we had no reference point to determine if this was normal, because we had no other children. Instead we’d allowed our child to manipulate us into giving her whatever she wanted in order to avert her tears. It had to be us. We were incompetent parents. 

Seeking professional or otherwise advice did not help.  They tried the usual: time-outs, withholding privileges, rewarding good behavior and talking to her.

Feeling like miserable failures, Erika and I turned on each other. We came from very different parenting models.

Detachment: an adoption memoir   Maurice Mierau    Freehand Books, 2014, 152-4

Like Keith Gessan, Maurice Mierau is also conflicted by the frustrations of parenting, his image of what is appropriate and his reality when his parenting is challenged.  Yes his boys are adopted and likely have trust issues but it is worth noting that bio-child or adopted child, these men’s father struggles are similar.

Attaching in Adoption: practical tools for today’s parents     Deborah D. Gray    Perspectives Press, Inc., 2002, 58,97

Parents who are struggling with raising their children will question their parenting: “a sense of failure is normal. Parents are vulnerable to shame. They are sometimes too loyal to share their child’s history”.  Or they may feel they must be apologetic for their child’s behaviour.  They need “to develop a sturdy sense of self-esteem”.

The Boy Who Was Raised As A Dog And Other Stories from a Child Psychiatrist’s Notebook: what traumatized children can teach us about loss, love, and healing    Bruce D. Perry, MD, PhD, and Maia Szalavitz    Basic Books, 2017, 100-103

Bruce Perry offers suggestions for helping struggling children become secure and free to develop by telling us how Mama P. cares for the children she is parenting: hugging and loving them whether it appears age appropriate or not.

Explaining Parenting Stress among Adoptive Parents: The Contribution of Mindfulness, Psychological Flexibility, and Self-Compassion   Ana Luz Chorão, Maria Cristina Canavarro, Raquel Pires  Int J Environ Res Public Health 2022 Nov 5;19(21):14534. doi: 10.3390/ijerph192114534 https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9658673/

The conclusion of this study states:

Identifying and reducing the levels of parenting stress among adoptive parents is of the utmost importance, as it may lead to less emotional reactivity and, consequently, to more positive parenting practices, contributing to greater family harmony and healthier development of children. In turn, the innovative results of this study elucidate the importance that mindfulness, self-compassion, and psychological flexibility may have in reducing parenting stress and demonstrate the usefulness of cultivating them with (prospective and current) adoptive parents, particularly through their inclusion as target goals of psychological intervention both preventive and remedial.

adopting older children: a practical guide to adopting and parenting children over age four Stephanie Bosco-Ruggiero, MA, Gloria Russo Wassel, MS, LMHC, and Victor Groza, PhD.    New Horizon Press, 2014, 222,225-226

The advice: It is true, no one else is perfect and neither are you, but by providing a safe, permanent home and family to your child you are making a profound difference in his life. Some days you will doubt your ability to be an effective parent. On these days, give yourself permission to make mistakes. One day your child will hopefully understand that you’re not just Super Mom or Dad but a real human being with needs, fears and feelings too?

They quote one mother: I am an intelligent, articulate, confident woman and these little humans reduced me to a crying, irrational mess on more occasions than I care to admit…. I’m not sure how this is different from my bio-parent friends who go some level of crazy after bringing home their little bundles. I think we all share a similar challenge in that way.

Thicker than blood: adoptive parenting in the modern world    Marion Crook    Arsenal Pulp Press, 2016, 89

Instead of looking at raising children as a long-term war of wills, we can look at it as a long-term teaching project.

Environmental determinants of physiological reactivity to stress: The interacting effects of early life deprivation, caregiving quality, and stressful life events   Wade, Mark,  Sheridan, Margaret A,   Zeanah, Charles H,   Fox, Nathan A,   Nelson, Charles A   et al.

Cambridge Vol. 32, Iss. 5,  (Dec 2020): 1732-1742. DOI:10.1017/S0954579420001327 https://www.proquest.com/central/docview/2476511845/599377201D30433DPQ/3?accountid=48753&sourcetype=Scholarly%20Journals 

Summary 

Children who spend their early lives in institutions experience profound psychosocial deprivation [of parental care] that is associated with altered stress response system development… Early-life deprivation is associated with persistent blunting of stress response systems, but normalization may be achievable if SLEs [stressful life events] are limited following placement into enriched family-based care.

Most research has been with younger children so less is known about the impact on older children who have lived an institutionalized life though research has shown that there may be continued “blunted response” to “HPA-axis responses to social stress among post-institutionalized children … Similarly, production of oxytocin – a hormone that regulates stress responses”…. 

In this study, an adapted version of Coddington’s Child Life Events Scale was used. The study “showed that prolonged institutional deprivation early in life increases the risk of long-term blunting of stress reactivity,”.  Though, “Emerging evidence suggests that recalibration of the HPA-axis may occur after but not before puberty among those with a history of institutional care….”  ….  “In other words, it may be that positive caregiving alone is insufficient to foster recalibration, but that puberty opens a window for recalibration, possibly thorough a mechanism of increased responsiveness to environmental input”…. for “adolescence is a period of heightened neurobiological plasticity that may explain emerging individual differences in cognition, risk-taking, and psychopathology…”

“Thus, while early adversity has clear and long-lasting effects on psychobiological development, later experience may either mitigate or exacerbate the effects of early adversity, thus offering opportunities to intervene during this period of increased vulnerability in order to protect against the development of psychopathology”.  Despite the depravation pointed to in this study, I think the study is leaving the door of hope open for parents wanting to offer loving stability and support as part of the “offering opportunities to intervene”.

And then there is this

So … we moved irrevocably toward the teen years; we were now living in a rural community. Yasik’s most hopeful friend potential was a sort of eat-all-the-fun-food last ditch friend and I prayed for 14 year old boys who love soccer, basketball, paintball, hockey, mountain biking, snowboarding and computer games and guitar – not a book on the list.  My attitude at this point was: do what you can today and if you can’t try again tomorrow. Optimistic?  I actually wrote at the end of the 2004 journal: we have happy lives now which means no stories any more. Yet I also noted that while we have so much to live for, I carry a constant feeling of foreboding that something will hurt our happiness – it happens to others all the time.

At the time, I heard a guy on the phone one day at the library say, “So even if you get sick or your life falls apart you’re going to be there for me?” Initially it seemed an amazingly immature and self-oriented concern, and then my mind re-ran the phrase “life falls apart” and I started thinking about this concept. We see life as an entity that doesn’t include the things that made it fall apart. Life then must be when all is well – ordered, happy, secure.  If anything negative happens – that is not life. The hell it isn’t.

So the question: Good enough. Not good enough. Not good enough. Good enough.  Which is it?

Carl Jung asked: How can I be substantial if I fail to cast a shadow?  Amanda Montell in The Age of Magical Overthinking: notes on modern irrationality, (2024,148,149) quotes a study that concluded, “Individuals with a more nuanced approach – even a biased one- do better than the extremes.” …Wouldn’t we have less imposter syndrome and fewer actual imposters if we just lowered our standards a bit? …to embrace our ordinariness … wholeheartedly embrace our own lack of expertise, then we might have a far better chance of showing others the same grace.”, Montell wonders.

At the January 25, 2025 Golden Globe Awards, Demi Moore, as she accepted ‘Best Female Actor’ award, told that audience that she wondered at one point if she should continue to act because she had heard negative critiques of her acting.  She said, “At the time I made it mean…” that she was not good enough. I think it is important to note that she let the thought in.  Later, a woman said to her, “Just know you will never be enough but you can know the value of your worth if you just put down the measuring stick”.

Yet, according to adoption writers, for adoptive parents, doesn’t the question come down to whether or not the parenting style they choose to engage with helps the adoptee bridge the attachment gap sufficiently enough to support the adoptee into a stable adulthood?  Does this presume that ‘going beyond’ level parenting is demanded?

And the final word goes to Micheal Jordon, just cuz I like what he said: “If you run into a wall, don’t turn around and give up. Figure out how to climb it, go through it, or work around it.” A Coach’s Diary – “If you run into a wall, don’t turn… | Facebook