FCYU-Feature Story

Building a Family
How counseling can help you adjust

By Tamara

Adoption can be a difficult adjustment, both for the child being adopted and for the people welcoming a new member into their family. But there are places you can go to talk about it.

The Center for Adoption Support and Education (C.A.S.E) in Maryland is a perfect example. C.A.S.E is a place where families who have adopted children can go for information and counseling. It helps both the family and child cope with problems they are having, whether right after the adoption or even years later. I spoke with Debbie Riley, executive director of C.A.S.E., to learn more.

Q: What does post-adoption counseling mean, and why is it important?

A: Post-adoption counseling can include any services provided once a child has been legally adopted into a family. Here at C.A.S.E. we have counseling sessions for families, and teen groups that bring together teens from all different kinds of adoption experiences [not just those adopted from foster care]. We also have parent groups, and workshops where younger adoptees can meet older adoptees.

It’s important for children and families to have a place to talk about things like how they’re adjusting, challenges around family members feeling connected to one another, identity issues related to integrating your birth family and adoptive family, and so on.

Q: Who is usually involved in the process?

A: Adoption is a family event. You don’t want to just treat the adopted child in isolation. So we usually work with the whole family—the adoptive child and parents, siblings, and sometimes birth parents, depending on the relationship. But it can involve anybody whose life is touched by the adoption.

Q: What are some of the common issues that come up for kids adopted from foster care?

A: There’s a lot of unresolved grief and loss, a lot of things in their lives that they are no longer connected to that they’ve never had the opportunity to grieve about. All adoptees, whether they were in foster care or placed [in an adoptive home] at birth, have lost connections with people, places and things—different family members, all the schools you transferred from every time you moved during foster care, teachers, coaches, friends, and so on.

Also, a lot of kids have experienced trauma and they need to work through it. Many children who came from foster care might have grown up in situations where there’s been abuse, neglect, deprivation of some kind or moving around a lot, and those things have affected them emotionally. That means they need longer-term support to help them once they get into a stable family.

Trust is a huge issue. Often they feel adults have not been there for them, have not been trustworthy. They have a deep desire to be part of a family, but at same time they’re scared to connect and attach and become dependent.

Q: What are some of the issues that parents deal with?

A: Adoptive parents are struggling, too, because they don’t always know how to deal with the issues their kids are bringing. They often need help understanding the impact of trauma and neglect on their child, and learning different kinds of parenting strategies that best fit children coming from [difficult] beginnings. They need to learn how to give permission for children to talk about the past without feeling threatened by that.

Q: Do adopted teens have special counseling needs that are different from younger children?

A: Counseling needs for teens are more complicated. Most teens struggle sometime during their adolescence, but the complexities of adoption can make the task really challenging. Adolescence is a time when you try to figure out who you are and where you came from and try to learn about your identity. Adopted adolescents often have to figure this out without having a lot of information. They also have to figure this out in relationship to two sets of parents, biological and adoptive.

During adolescence you start thinking about things very differently than when you were little. So teens start thinking about why they were adopted and begin to have more questions. Sometimes they’re afraid to ask, and at times people are reluctant to answer their questions because some answers are really hard and painful. They may wonder why their birth parents made certain decisions, and they sometimes worry that it was their fault.

All of these thoughts and feelings are really normal, and it’s okay to talk about it with someone. They don’t need to work through this all on their own.

Q: When should families get counseling, and how do you decide when it’s finished?

A: Post-adoption counseling came out of a belief that adoption is a lifelong process, that it doesn’t begin and end at the time of placement. What we see here at CASE is that kids and families come in at different times in their lives when they need support.

We might not see kids right when they get placed. In a lot of families it’s several years after the adoption has been finalized that the families are coming back in; often it’s when the kids have reached their teen years.

Our end date is when families and children feel they are ready to leave, when they’ve accomplished the goals that we’ve set forth together.

Q: Where can you get counseling, and how can you get help paying for it?

A: The child welfare agency that handled your adoption may have information about finding someone who specializes in this kind of counseling. You can also get in touch with the North American Council on Adoptable Children (www.nacac.org). Each state has an adoption manager, too, so that’s another way to track down qualified counselors and other resources.

If you can’t afford to pay for counseling, you might be able to get funding from your agency, too. There are some counties and states that have set aside money for this, but it’s not equal across the country.

Q: What needs to be done to increase support?

A: As an adoption community, we have to pull together and spread the word that these services are so, so important. Studies show that these services work, not only in preventing adoption failures, but in helping young people to achieve success. But these services aren’t yet available everywhere. There are very few accessible centers, and many people can’t afford these services. We also need more training for mental health providers, because there are not many people who specialize in this work.

Since the Adoption and Safe Families Act passed in 1997, more and more children are being adopted from foster care. But we know that children adopted from foster care are at greater risk for mental health problems, and parents need help with that. So we’ve got to have specialized services in place.

We’re hoping that one day there may be dedicated federal funding for post-adoption services for foster children, beyond just placement, to ensure that people have a truly permanent family.

For more information about C.A.S.E. and its services, visit their website at: www.adoptionsupport.org