[LEJ8]

Has anyone adopted or known someone who has adopted a child that is extremely quiet in her orphanage? The agency says she speaks to her friends quite well, but is extremely quiet with all adults, even the care givers. Is this normal? I would think something is wrong, but they said she does communicate and play with friends....

[sak9645]

An orphanage is a very unnatural place for a child. The behaviors that you see there may be very different from those that you will see elsewhere.

You do not say how long the child has been at the orphanage. If she has not been there long, she may still be grieving the loss of her birthparents and fearful of or unhappy about bonding to other adults. This is very normal.

You also do not say anything about the reason for her placement in the orphanage. If a child came from a setting where abuse or neglect was a factor, she could be fearful of speaking to adults. Or she simply may have come from a home with quiet adults.

Or, sometimes, the orphanage staff may describe a child inaccurately to the adoption agency or prospective parents. The staff are busy people who may not know a given child all that well. They may also tell the agency or parents what they think they want to hear, such as, "This child is very quiet and well behaved".

When I met my daughter in China, the caregiver stated that "she does not play; she just watches everyone else play." In fact, my daughter turned out to be an immensely social child.

She was quite shut down with grief and shock, in part because it appears that she was with her birth family for 9.5 months prior to abandonment, and got a lot of love from them. Her next 9 months in the orphanage must have been quite painful for her, and she may have blossomed into a social butterfly only once she was back in a family, with a loving Mom.

The caregiver also told me that my daughter "could eat anything." While that may have been true, since she had ten teeth and was on table food, she ate almost nothing. She was the pickiest child you can imagine, and had a hard time gaining weight at first. I am not sure whether the caregiver was simply misinformed about my obviously underweight child (17 lb at 18.5 mo.), or whether she was trying to tell me that while she COULD eat almost anything, she didn't.

While certain behaviors can be red flags for issues such as attachment disorders or fetal alcohol syndrome or an unrevealed history of sexual abuse, quietness around adults isn't usually one of those red flags. I would be more worried about the child who ran up to strangers and gave them hugs (possible attachment disorder), who engaged in impulsive and risky behavior (possible fetal alcohol syndrome), or who made gestures or walked in ways that suggested inappropriate introduction to sexuality.

If the child speaks in a reasonably age-appropriate way -- some delays are to be expected -- when she does talk, I wouldn't worry a whole lot about her quietness around adults.

Sharon

[MenloAve]

Our child only spoke maybe a total of 10 words when we met her and that was after spending four days with her and trying to pry it out of her. She is 3.5. We have now coming to the end of 3 weeks of bonding and she has roughly a 50 word vocab that we can understand in her language and 10 or so in english. We ran into one of the orphanage workers in the market and they were very surprised to see her sitting in her stroller singing as we walked through. They said she didn't talk at all much less sing. So it is possible that it is just the environment.