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 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. 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 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, being faced with shorter life expectancy and 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 out weighed 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”. 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’ plus ‘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.
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 was sent to 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. Inside we passed 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. That is focus or loyalty to work or something. 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 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 (152), 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 of 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. It was happening so quickly of course. My next memory is of him in Dave’s arms and me seeing, not him, but Dave’s face for Yasik was turned into his shoulder. 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.
-As she watched her about-to-be son being born she writes: “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 is fearful, even as she and her husband drive 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 gives 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? 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. None of this willy-nilly result of a happy night of lusty sex stirring up a random mix of sperm with an available egg. 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 provided 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 child 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).
Entry #6 Orphanage Risks
I regularly ask myself why I am writing in such detail about a ten-day adoption process from as faraway 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)
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. There is now much information for adoptors to draw on as they begin the adoption process.
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. This little shopping trip included taking Yasik to a passport office for a picture before returning him to the orphanage.
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 he peeked 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
I 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, but 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. Stray threads caught and carried by a little bird to build a nest must be a joy to find. Stray threads may be what adopters find to build their nests. But just as nature’s provision of twigs and grass, stray threads can do just fine in 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 would be 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, 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 along side 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 travelling 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 through out 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 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 versus 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 can not 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. 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 our 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. 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 staff at the orphanage told us not to feed him for he would vomit yet Alexi and Tatiana gave him 3 bananas and a candy. Dave worried that in mere hours we were undoing all the orphanage niceness and order.
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. 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. 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 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 our day. 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 awhile, 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 we were 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. 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 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 a host of 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 all Dave’s mother’s children, 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 third 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, my self, 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 were held open for us, but they would have resisted little of our inclinations, other than what was ‘evidently’ evil. Mini skirts made Dad squirm; drugs freaked him out. Moving into our twenties these struggles got sorted. 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 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. I was not 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.
Yasik 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 13th 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 10th 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 have 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, “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 20th 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- that it says in the notes that he likes to do the following suggests these activities were offered: to draw or work with clay modelling, construct houses, play with cars, learns poems by heart, 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 to develop mastery.
Here an index finger might stab the air: 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 ?!?
This was his first week with us and kindergarten had not yet become a consideration. 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 first post-adoption report put our early days with Yasik in social workese,”[Yasik] likes to have structure”.
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 ‘rehoming’s 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 create 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 noticed 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”.
It does bring to mind Lord of The Flies.
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” with a diagnosis of R.A.D. or autism particularly 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 to 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 parent 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):
sometimes 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
- Mercer, Jean. Understanding Attachment: parenting, child care, and emotional development. Praeger, 2006, 33-34.
- 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.
- 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
- 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.
- https://www.healthline.com/health/why-cant-i-remember-my-childhood
- Szalavitz, Maia, and Bruce D. Perry, M.D., Ph.D. Born for Love: why empathy is essential and endangered. William Morrow, 2010, 312.
- Structural characteristics of the institutional environment for young children. Developmental Psychology, Volume #9, 2016.
- https://www.adoptionchoices.org/bonding-with-your-adopted-child/
- 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.
- 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 is not noted here and I am tired of dealing with the footnotes. It is another Perry and Szalavitz whose work I obviously value.
- 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.
- 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.
- Brooks, John. The Girl Behind The Door: a father’s quest to understand his daughter’s suicide. Scribner,2016, 183.
- 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.
- 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.
- Neufeld, Gordon, PH.D. and Gabor Mate, M.D. Hold On To Your Kids:why parents need to matter more than peers. Vintage Canada, 2005, 33 & 65.
- 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 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 established. 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?
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? Is 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 you are dreaming of or questions you have about the connection between nature and nurture which leads you 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 testng 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 though 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 #12A Set and Setting
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 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 or combine fruit gathering or job hunting 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 we would more easily recognize that we do indeed parent like our parents at times if we see categories of parenting.[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; 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 impacts the development of the adoptee’s ‘mindset’: social, cultural, historical, political, physical, economic and spiritual environment that impacts 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 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.
To have a good trip both mindset and setting must be taken into account. 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# 12D
Entry #12B 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 Mate, 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:
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 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 some where 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 12D
Entry #12C Set and Setting
The Physical Environment: 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 backyard smaller 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.
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 affect 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: 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, most adoptees quickly slip into their new language. Hidden Potenial: 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 convulute 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, ‘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 an undefined 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 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. 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 #12D
Entry #12D Set and Setting
Social: 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 (not sure what that means) 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 3rd 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 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 that is 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- see my psych section) on child development registers, parents get to be the issue only 9% of the time).[xlv] But then, if it becomes a worm embedding in a child’s already weak sense of self?
(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.)
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. 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: 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 counselling 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: 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] Mate, Gabor with Daniel Mate. The Myth of Normal: trauma, illness & healing in a toxic culture. Knopf
Canada, 2022, 164.
[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,2nd 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] Mate, 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, 2nd 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, 3rd 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, 3rd 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 A, 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 Mate 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, …” Mate 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 begins 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 Mate 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 Mate 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 ThecIrish 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] Mate, Gabor MD and Daniel Mate 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 Mate, 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] Mate, Gabor with Daniel Mate. 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 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
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. Maybe ‘happy families ‘ is code for unhapy families…. 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 maybe 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 on P. 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, couldn’t buy that he would have talked like that.
So 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 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 1st and 2nd 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.
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/
What do my collection of the experts say?
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, 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 (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 (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 (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 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, but 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
- 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.
- Mierau, Maurice. Detachment: an adoption memoir 152-4
Peter who is 8 and Bohdan who is 7 had been adopted by Maurice and Betsy Mierau three years earlier. The Mireau’s 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, P. 216, 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 life was 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. 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,
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 5th 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. 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]
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. For children whose attachments are being secured from day one, 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.
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]
Gordon Neufeld, PhD. and Gabor Mate, M.D in their book Hold On To Your Kids: why parents need to matter more peers 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”.
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
What do my collection of the experts say?
Born for Love: why empathy is essential – and endangered. 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]
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
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 Mate, 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 Mate, 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
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.
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]:
What do my collection of the experts say?
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]
- The parent’s own fear of not being loved!
- The parent’s own existential fear of being restricted and losing freedom
- 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] 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.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.