Post #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]
Julie Lythcott-Haims, in How to Raise an Adult: break free from the overparenting trap and prepare your child for success, (Holt Paperbacks, 2016, 23,24), says
Sometimes kids are bullies….When bullying happens, kids need parents and other advocates to help them disentangle themselves from it and recover….
But as Susan Porter wrote in Bully Nation, in a lot of situation we parents label something a bully incident when it’s a normal passage through child development and socialization….Porter encourages parents and educators to avoid the bully label and instead help children develop the resilience needed to handle the harsh social challenges of life.
…True bullying — intentionally disempowering or isolating individuals and systematically demeaning and hurting them over a period of time.
(Incidentally, Alexander McCall Smith, in The Sweet Remnants of Summer, Chapter 8, offers a nice example for how to handle the tricky uncertainty of fault assignment in children’s squabbles.)
But then via bullying or not, if a sense of lessness becomes a worm embedding in a child’s already weak sense of self?
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 counseling and writer of Attaching in Adoption: practical tools for today’s parents calls this phase in childhood development, ‘Phase VI – joining in and finding my place’.[xlix] Children whose early years were well-nurtured, she says, now between the ages of six and eleven in this part of their journey toward personal identity, are interested in being part of a team or group, all the experiences Yasik, as noted in the Social section, was becoming part of.
A child raised in an orphanage, (see Orphanage Risk Factors) positively or otherwise, may move into this stage much earlier for the expectation of support from the child’s adult caregivers would too often have been thwarted. Peers as parents in early childhood is dealt with often in writing about institutionalized children. Bruce Perry, in The Boy Who Was Raised As A Dog provides an example in the story of Peter who spent the first three years of his life in an orphanage. The orphanage is described as a “baby warehouse”. In eight-hour shifts children received about 15 minutes of individual staff care.
With no one but each other to turn to, the children would reach their tiny hands through the bars in to the next crib, holding hands, babbling and playing patty-cake. In the absence of adults, they became parents to each other. Their interaction, as impoverished as it was, probably helped to mitigate some of damage such severe deprivation can cause.[l]
But then again, having only minutes with adults perhaps is why Yasik, like Maurice Mierau’s children, liked taking medicine or going to the doctor the few times he needed to go. Neither of Mierau’s children in Detachment: an adoption memoir resisted taking medications. “[Peter] and Bohdan both enjoyed taking medicine of any kind. In the orphanage, visits by the doctor had been one of the few times they got sustained individual attention from an adult. Both of them hugged and kissed me and Betsy when we administered routine cold remedies or children’s aspirin”.[li]
That little inserted bit is, of course, tongue in cheek. In harsh reality, lacking peers or unresponsive caregivers, what does the child do? Like many, many manuals state, we all find coping strategies for homeostasis. The first I noticed Yasik using adaptations was with his school work but later I realized he had adaptations from well before he came into our family. An unnurtured child will find ways to take care of his or her own nurture. Yasik would hum along to music or rock himself. Because he continued to rock himself for most of his first year in our family, we assume he developed rocking, as did many children in orphanage care for their early years, to self soothe.
These interactions become their expression of their understanding of parenting, developing out of whatever they can hobble together to cope with their emotions and desires. The adults are on the periphery like overseeing, but emotionally detached butlers to their needs.
The question then is to what extent does such parenting ‘mitigate some of the damage such severe deprivation can cause’?
Yasik was denied nurturing bonding with a special and consistent someone or someones in his infancy within his biological family’s home, in the hospital, as well as, in his orphanage. It is safe to assume, that Yasik too was prematurely turning to peers in the absence of adult interaction. Deborah Gray, in Attaching in Adoption, goes on to focus on what Phase VI may also mean for adoptees given that now children in general are seeking to fit in. In this phase they may want to separate themselves from the aspects of their person that make them different from their group. But what does that mean if a child has entered Phase VI prematurely as he or she has learned to turn for support to other children when looking to satisfy emotional needs and perceptions of the world? The child knows peer parenting or self-parenting or peripheral parenting that may have changed often as staff and children come and go from institutions. What understanding and expectations does the child now have for family and friends as he or she begins to branch out or widen his or her social circle? This is where most adoption studies look to explanations in studies based in Attachment Theory with its types of attachment.
Yasik, placed in kindergarten just weeks after becoming part of our family, soon made it known that he no longer wanted to look at pictures of his orphanage playmates, nor did he want to attend any more ‘Russian adoptee meet-ups’ arranged to continue contact with his first culture and identity. He did not want to be different. He wanted to fit in with the kids in his neighbourhood, school and on his sports’ teams as would fit right in with his age on a chart of child development.
According to the chart he should be, at the age of six, more interested in his peers, authority figures at school and on his teams than with his parents. Yasik seemed to be keeping in step with the stages of childhood development. Yet there he was, turning to his dad to be lifted into his arms and cry into his shoulder when struck by a ball while up at bat in T-ball. There he was, using soothing techniques like rocking himself to self soothe, and there he was, as his teachers informed us, more often playing at recess with younger children than those of his chronological age. Born for Love: why empathy is essential – and endangered notes, “…previously institutionalized or otherwise neglected children tend to bond better with younger boys and girls. Even though they can catch up surprisingly quickly in loving homes, they tend to seem younger than their chronological age”.[lii]
Spiritual: 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.