Losing a Sibling: Helping Your Child Cope with Adoption Reversal

Adults hoping to become adoptive parents can experience with similar degrees of intensity three distinctly different losses related to an anticipated adoption that isn't completed ...

Miscarriage, stillbirth and other pre-placement deaths of a hoped-for baby happen in adoption at rates nearly identical to the pregnancy loss and neonatal death rates for the general population.

It has always been true that a high percentage of birthfamilies who explore and make tentative prenatal commitments to adoption have changes of heart before or just after giving birth to a child but before placing that child in an adopting family. In confidential adoption systems, adopters rarely knew about these changes of heart and so could not take them personally. However today's more open adoption means that prospective adopters are matched with women early in an untimely pregnancy and so are increasingly likely to experience not one, but several, pre-placement changes of heart before becoming parents.

By far the rarest, but probably the most emotionally wrenching, of pre-adoption losses is a reversal: the return to a birthfamily of a child whose adoption has not been finalized but who has already been placed with and cared for in a pre-adoptive family.

Each of these three differing kinds of adoption loss produces a similar process of grief for the adults in a family. Parents feel shock and denial, isolation, bargaining, anger, sadness and depression, and, finally, after much work, resolution. In an earlier article, "Losing an Adoption," (on this web site and in Adoptive Families' January/February 1997 issue) we offered advice to help adopting parents deal with their own grief and begin the process of moving forward after an uncompleted adoption.

For many families in such a situation, however, helping other children in the family understand and cope with the loss of a new baby may present more complex issues. Children in the adopting family most often experience these losses very differently than do their parents. The fact that children under ten are unable to think as abstractly as do adults most often means that, unless their parents went further in preparing them for a coming sibling than is recommended by most adoption educators, children will have invested little emotional energy in the "unknown quantity" of a "maybe" placement that never happened. That being the case, children are not likely to feel the same sense of personal intensity about non-placements as will their parents, even though they will nearly always be troubled by the grief they see their parents experiencing and will need support to understand that they are in no way responsible for their parents' sadness about a hoped-for placement that did not happen.

While non-placements may be primarily parental losses, adoption reversals are definitely a whole family loss, and helping parents deal with children's grief and loss about reversed placement is this article's focus. Occurring in what is anecdotally reported to be far less than 10% of placements in North America, post-placement reversals happen more often in the non-baby-centered-adoption states and provinces which have multi-week changes-of-heart statutes and/or among the clients of facilitators who are least conscientious and adept about providing pre and post adoption grief and loss counseling for clients dealing with an untimely pregnancy. But no matter how rare, reversals are the stuff of horror stories commonly shared with pre-adoptive couples. What's more, those who are among the small percentage of families who experience a reversal find little comfort in its statistical rarity.

The concrete reality of an actual placement that is reversed, so that a new baby brother or sister who has already arrived and taken up residence in home and crib and hearts and family is taken away, is almost guaranteed to produce some degree of personal trauma for children in the adopting home. Each individual in the family--mother, father, brother, sister-- will work through the normal steps of grief and loss at an individual pace after a reversed adoption.

Grieving parents may find it hard to trust that they know how to deal with their children's grief. There is, after all, no road map for this loss, and grief can be scary. Parents who've been there note that advice from others is often off target. In this parenting task, as in others, parents must learn to trust their instincts and their intimate knowledge of their children to see themselves as the experts on their own family's needs, despite what anyone else may suggest. Trial, error and adjustment are the norm for coping with this unique loss.

About three months after the loss of their baby, Terry, Wendy went in to check on her older son, Jamie, and found that he wasn't in his room. She found him in Terry's room, holding a pillow from the crib and rocking quietly in the dark, completely ignoring the piles of Christmas gifts that were "hidden" there in various stages of wrapping. When Wendy asked Jamie what he was doing, he began to cry. "I miss my baby, Terry." Resisting a first impulse to distract him and get him out of the room, Wendy took him on her lap. They stayed awhile and rocked and talked about Terry. A few minutes later he want back to bed quite willingly.

© Patricia Irwin Johnston, Wendy Williams

Credits: Perspectives Press