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| |    Talking with a School-Age Child about Her Adoption by Dr. Benjamin Spock reviewed by Robert Needlman, M.D., F.A.A.P. Children who have been adopted at an older age will need a different approach than that used with preschoolers who were brought home as infants. They may have memories of their biological and foster parents. Agencies should help both the child and the new parents to handle this. It is important to realize that questions will surface repeatedly during different stages of this child's life. They should be answered as simply and honestly as possible. Parents should allow the child to freely express her feelings and fears. Many adopted people are naturally intensely curious about their biological parents. In former times, adoption agencies told adopting parents only the vaguest generalities about the physical and mental health of the biological parents. Their identities were completely concealed. This was partly to make it easy for the adopting parents to answer "I don't know" to the extremely difficult questions a child would ask about her origin and about why she was relinquished. And it was even more to protect the privacy of the biological parents who, in most cases, were unmarried and who, in their subsequent separate lives, may have kept the early pregnancy a secret. If more is known about the biological parents, it's probably best to share this information with the child in response to her specific questions, trusting the child to ask what she needs to know at the time. The adoptive parents might feel threatened by the child's interest in her biological roots, but they should not. In times of anger, an adopted child may claim that the adoptive parents are not her "real" parents. As hurtful as that may be, the parents have to resist any temptation, ever, to agree; they must maintain that they are real parents because of their love and commitment. The fact that there may be biological parents out there does not diminish the adoptive parents at all.
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