The younger the child, the more difficult it may be for parents to know just how a loss like this is affecting their child. Pre-school and early-elementary-school-aged children may be unable to clearly express fears or sadness about such an event. For some children this kind of traumatic loss during a period in their lives when they are simply not cognitively or verbally able to put these issues into words and discuss them can reverberate in future reactions to change and potential danger without anyone being aware that the adoption reversal is at the root of what could become a life-long a pattern of troubling reactions to loss or threat of loss.

It's important to remember that children are individuals, and so will find their own triggers to and pattern of grief. This means that some of the members of your family may be ready for laughter when others aren't, others may dissolve into tears with little warning. Encouraging full expression of feelings is invaluable. Parents whose own coping patterns tend toward silence may need to prompt themselves to establish verbal communication within the family about this shared pain. Parents should feel no discomfort about letting their children see them cry. Children need to see their parents' sadness, though they may need help in understanding that they are not responsible for it.

Children under ten think concretely, taking everything literally and personally. Often children suspect that their own feelings of ambivalence or jealousy about the arrival of a new sibling may have contributed in some way to the adoption's reversal. Rarely, however, will children bring this fear up for discussion on their own. Parents should consider introducing it. Alternatively, it is quite common for children to become fearful about their own adoption's permanency after the reversal of a younger sibling's adoption. These fears are more likely to be verbalized.

Grieving children need a safe, predictable, routine-filled environment and lots of family time. Their need for concreteness also makes it important that children have access to visible reminders of their lost sibling--a picture on the wall, toys or blankets in their own room, etc.--and that they have absolute control over what happens to these pieces of memorabilia, to whom they are shown and whether or not they are shared.

Though adults often internalize anger, in children anger is often dramatically externalized. After much second guessing about what was "right," Wendy and Rob Williams found it helpful after Terry's adoption was reversed to set limits that prevented his hurting himself or others and then to allow Jamie to scream and yell and trash his room with little reaction to these outbursts from his parents until after the anger had let up, at which time there were hugs and reassurances all around.

Because children often feel especially powerless and out of control in reaction to loss, it will be helpful to offer grieving children lots of both predictable structure and choices in their lives to show them that there are many things over which they can feel and have control, despite their powerlessness over the loss of their sibling or their parents' sadness. Being especially sensitive to this feeling of powerlessness in grief by offering structured, either-or choices about food, clothing, recreational options, etc. and by maintaining the familiar structure of bedtime rituals, day care, daily routines, etc. may be difficult for grieving parents, but is especially important for their children.

Children can find goodbye rituals as important in resolving loss as do adults, and may even develop their own. Rituals can be either formal or informal, conscious or unconscious. Children are often better than adults at developing rituals. Thumb sucking and security blankets are actually informal, unconscious rituals. Looking at photo albums, planting a tree in memory of the lost sibling, lighting candles are some options of formal, conscious rituals your family might consider.

Jamie Williams' grief and loss was eventually salved by his own unconscious ritual: soon after Terry moved he began asking his mother to sing the children's song "In a Cabin in the Woods" over and over. The song is about a hunter chasing a rabbit who is rescued by a man in a cabin. Jamie was insistent on the song, even though he cried nearly inconsolably as the hunter came near. Wendy trusted Jamie's need for the song and the tears. Eventually the ritual did its work: Jamie couldn't even force himself to cry and so began to laugh. The song became his own private joke and he still uses it as a release of both good and bad tension.

As with adults, the grief of children is often re-triggered by new insecurities, additional changes, or new experiences of unrelated loss, but families who are able to see their experience as the family's loss and to include their children in the grieving and the healing will find that the family becomes closer by having worked together on grief and loss.

While decorating for Christmas several months after Terry was returned to his birthmother, Jamie was thrilled and excited. He would hang one ornament and then run around the dining table for a while, blowing off steam, before rushing to find another bauble to hang. But taking the brass creche out of its box quieted Jamie. He played with it for a while, gently fingering the tiny baby lying in the hay, and finally tucked the baby gently back into the manger, asking him to "take our love to Baby Terry."

© Patricia Irwin Johnston, Wendy Williams

Credits: Perspectives Press