{"id":23981,"date":"2019-06-05T10:20:33","date_gmt":"2019-06-05T10:20:33","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/adoption-2020.local\/picture-and-letter-correspondence-with-birth-parents\/"},"modified":"2020-12-16T05:58:27","modified_gmt":"2020-12-16T13:58:27","slug":"picture-and-letter-correspondence-with-birth-parents","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/adoptionnetwork.com\/picture-and-letter-correspondence-with-birth-parents\/","title":{"rendered":"Picture and Letter Correspondence With Birth Parents"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Adoptees have two sets of parents. This can be confusing to a young adoptee. An adoptive parent shares how her adopted son reacts to seeing pictures of his birth parents.<\/div>\n
At an early age, I introduced both of my kids to pictures of their birth parents. I talked about adoption at birth, but I held off on the pictures until they could hold on to them without damaging the pictures. My son is 19 months and I have shown him his pictures 3 times. The first two times he just stared and was mesmerized before trying to rip them. They were put away for a few months and then I tried again.<\/div>\n
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Excited To See Pictures Of His Birth Parents<\/div>\n
This time he was excited to look at them, and took time to carefully look at each picture. It was very cute and interesting to watch his face as he carefully examined each picture of his birth parents. I narrated each picture, \u201cThat is baby C with your birth mother K. That is you as a baby with your brother J. That is you as a baby with your brother J. L. That is your birth father, S, holding you as a baby.\u201d He sat still, but babbled away until we got to the picture of him with his birth father. He immediately started pointing at the picture and shouting, \u201cDaddy, Daddy, Daddy!\u201d I was shocked! I didn\u2019t tell him he was wrong, of course, because it is his biological dad. I just told him that S is his birth father. However, he was insistent on calling him \u201cDaddy\u201d and would not put that picture down. I was flabbergasted that he was making the connection at such a young age. After this, I continued showing him the rest of the pictures.<\/div>\n
The last picture included his birth parents, two of his half siblings, my daughter, my husband, my son, and me. I was holding my daughter. My son\u2019s birth mother was holding him. Upon seeing the picture, my son instantly pointed to me and shouted, \u201cMom!\u201d This made my heart swell! Then he slowly pointed to everyone else waiting for me to narrate. I was waiting for him to call his birth mother \u201cMom\u201d but surprisingly, he didn\u2019t. When I told him his birth mother\u2019s name, he responded with \u201cKeees,\u201d which is close enough for a child his age. When he came to my husband, he said, \u201cDaddy\u201d and \u201cNenna\u201d (what he calls his sister) for his sister. He waited with his finger pointed at his birth father for me to go on. It was almost like he was confused seeing both of his fathers in the same picture. He just kept pointing to his birth father but didn\u2019t call him \u201cDaddy\u201d in that particular picture. Then he quickly picked up the picture of himself and his birth father and again exclaimed, \u201cDaddy!\u201d He lay down on the floor with that picture and the one of both his birth and adoptive family. He laid there for about 5 minutes quietly staring at the pictures. How I wished I could\u2019ve heard his thoughts!<\/div>\n
Adoptees May Be Confused By Two Sets Of Parents<\/div>\n
As I thought about this, I realized that my son\u2019s confused expression when faced with both of his fathers in one picture probably illustrates how a lot of adoptees feel about having birth parents and adoptive parents: confused. I know many adoptees have told me that having two families can be confusing, and even painful, because they don\u2019t want one family to feel like they love the other family more. I don\u2019t want my kids to feel that way. It may be hard for us to hear our children call another \u201cMom\u201d or \u201cDad,\u201d titles that we hold so near and dear to our hearts. However, that is their right if they choose to do so. They have two sets of parents. They didn\u2019t ask for that, but that is what they were given.<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
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Adoptees have two sets of parents. This can be confusing to a young adoptee. An adoptive parent shares how her adopted son reacts to seeing pictures of his birth parents. At an early age, I introduced both of my kids to pictures of their birth parents. I talked about adoption at birth, but I held…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":10914,"featured_media":61524,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[637],"tags":[1102,1103,1104],"class_list":["post-23981","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-adoptees","tag-communicating-with-birthparents","tag-letters","tag-pictures-with-birth-parents"],"acf":[],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/adoptionnetwork.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23981","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/adoptionnetwork.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/adoptionnetwork.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/adoptionnetwork.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/10914"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/adoptionnetwork.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=23981"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/adoptionnetwork.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23981\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/adoptionnetwork.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/61524"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/adoptionnetwork.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=23981"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/adoptionnetwork.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=23981"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/adoptionnetwork.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=23981"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}