[sallyshore]

Angelkisses -- Your posting is SO important! Thank you for writing it. I will never forget going to a training to become a foster/adoptive parent 12 years ago (I already had three kids) and being told this story by one of the leaders: He explained how he had started adopting teen boys many years before. His first boy was driving him nuts: stealing, lying, fire setting, etc. so he was directed to join an adoptive parent group, which he happily did. After many weeks of sharing similar stories about the difficulties all these parents were having with their adopted kids, the group leader asked the parents to each tell their adoption story for the benefit of the newer members of the group. He was shocked when each of the parents talked about adopting their children as INFANTS, not teens as he had, yet they were all experiencing the same problems -- stealing, lying, fire-setting, etc.

At that time my children were relatively young, but his story was an eye opener for me -- my adopted son who I had gotten at just 5 days old was driving me nuts and yet no one had ever suggested he might be having attachment problems. My children who were placed with me at much older ages came to me diagnosed and were in therapy, and we worked super hard at attachment -- those children are actually better than the ones I adopted at younger ages but before I knew anything about attachment!

I believe, (after studying about this, doing attachment therapy and parenting, going to lots of workshops and trainings, and experiencing the various levels of attachment problems for many years now) that some children are just less prone to attachment problems for reasons we will probably never know. Some children experienced in utero problems that we will never know about or understand that had a huge effect on them. Some children respond much more strongly than others to being taken from their birth mothers at birth, as the parents in that support group had found out. In those days very few people knew much at all about attachment and attachment parenting wasn't really invented yet. My teens might be very different people now if I had known what I know now. It is SO important that people adopting today know as much as possible about attachment and do whatever they can to prevent or circumvent the deep attachment problems -- I'm not sure that all attachment problems can be overcome, but that's just part of adoption, I think. It's the level of the problem that is so important here.

sally