What Can A Tiny Baby Know?
What can a tiny baby know? Verrier
In her preface, Nancy Newton Verrier, author of The Primal Wound, states her naivety when adopting her daughter. She was like most others; undermining and discounting the very child that she was promising to love and care for. She believed that her own adoptive daughter would never know or be negatively impacted by being adopted. After all, what can a tiny baby know? They are too young to remember any of it. They just need love.
Admittedly, I too, even as an adoptee, thought this way. It was my perception that adoption does not have much of an impact on those adopted at infancy because, what does a baby know. Though I personally have spent a lifetime dealing with depression, fears of abandonment, relationship struggles, anger, low self-esteem, somatic complications and a myriad of other issues, I never related them back to being adopted. I just thought I was not very valuable or worthy, but didn’t see the link. I didn’t see what now seems so obvious.
Babies already know about adoption. It happened to them. Verrier
As a result of my research, I, among other scholars in this relatively new field of attention to the psychological and physiological impact of adoption, will argue that the relinquishment or separation of child from her birth mother is a traumatic event that deeply impacts the adoptee creating special needs that must be addressed throughout the adoptee’s life. I will often use relinquishment and adoption in somewhat synonymous terms. Understanding there are definite differences between the two, I will continue to refer to adoption as a trauma recognizing the true trauma is at the point of relinquishment. However, subsequent actions do have the potential to exacerbate that trauma experienced.
Adoption is a trauma that happens to a child. The child is torn away from her biological mother, placed in the arms of strangers and is left with questions, doubts, fears and anxiety with no way to verbalize, express, mourn or contextualize those feelings. Though the common misconception is that a child won’t remember any of it many psychologists believe, with some evidence to support, that children remember their birth and the following events, including relinquishment and adoption up to the age of three.
One definition of psychological trauma is an experience that is sudden, unexpected, abnormal. It exceeds the individual’s ability to meet its demands. It disrupts one’s sense of self and identity; it threatens one’s psychological core. I define trauma as any event where the nervous system isn’t able to understand, contextualize and respond to the event and the persons safety and life are perceived to be at risk.
At this age the only tools a child has to deal with this trauma is through crying or reaction to physical touch and anger. These tools can manifest in overt expression or a marked lack of expression. A baby may cry in response or rarely cry and be perceived as a good and peaceful baby, when in reality she is hurting. She may respond by recoiling from human touch or may become too attached to the sensation and have difficulty learning boundaries. A child may express her anger through yelling, kicking, screaming, crying or withholding emotional expression.
Every adopted child, allow me to reiterate, every adopted child falls into one of two categories. She either acts out and is difficult or is quiet, adaptable and compliant. Of course the degree to which each adoptee acts out or becomes compliant is individual. Some who act out will go to the extreme of running away from home, threatening their adoptive parents, rebel academically and even attempt suicide. Studies show that of teens in grades 7 through 12, 7.6% of adopted teens had attempted suicide compared with 3% among their non-adopted peers. The compliant child may become a model citizen in school as well at home or she may just kind of fade into the background, trying not to be noticed or cause trouble. Either way they are both reactions to the trauma of being adopted.
The child who acts out, is, in essence, attempting to initiate some form of rejection from parents, teachers, peers and others in order to prove that she is unlovable or she finds herself rejecting these same people prior to being rejected by them. This type of child is obviously troubled and it is easy to identify as needing help, ideally through adoption therapy. However, parents and therapists often try to counsel the child into acting more appropriately, instilling tough love or even unknowingly furthering the child’s abandonment issues by sending them to boarding school, camp or other such institutions. Rarely do adoptive parents and counselors see this behavior as a reaction to her adoption trauma. They are never truly treating the source of the wound.
For the compliant child the situation can actually be much more devastating. As a compliant child who is either not causing problems or actually well engaged and visibly successful, she is not seen as having any problems at all. Parents see this child as well adjusted to life, including being adopted, and with no outwardly troubling signs of concern, this child is often overlooked and not given any form of adoption therapy, counseling or assistance in dealing with life. It is difficult for anyone to see that the child who is often referred to as, “mature for her age” or “pleasant and articulate,” is actually in equal distress to the child who is acting out. Both are hurting, both are devastated by the trauma of relinquishment and both have no way to articulate, understand, contextualize or grieve the loss they have endured.
These two behavior types may present themselves at any age though adolescence is the most common time for them to reach their strongest levels. Additionally, some may actually experience both behavior types switching from one to the other depending on their environment or transition back and forth throughout maturity. Also noteworthy is that no matter the age of adoption, infant through teen, all adoptees essentially suffer from the same issues born of this attachment break.
Relinquishment in the adoption process is a traumatic experience to a child. I am working with the definition of trauma as defined by the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders where a person experienced an event that threatened their physical well being and that person responded to that event with fear, helplessness or horror. It is important to recognize that in adoption the birth family and the adoptive family are allowed to choose, however to the child adoption is something that happened to them.
Adoption, considered by many to be merely a concept, is, in fact, a traumatic experience of the adoptee. It begins with the separation from his biological mother and ends with his living with strangers. Most of his life he may have denied or repressed his feelings about this experience, having had no sense that they would be acknowledged or validated. He may, instead, have been made to feel as if he should be grateful for this monumental manipulation of his destiny. Somewhere within him, however, he does have feelings about this traumatic experience, and having these feelings does not mean that he is abnormal, sick, or crazy. It means that he is wounded as a result of having suffered a devastating loss and that his feelings about this are legitimate and need to be acknowledged, rather than ignored or challenged.
When I shared with my adoptive mother that I was studying adoption and its related impact, along with her warmth, support and encouragement came the words I knew she thought, but never thought I would hear. She said, “What does a baby know?”
She had spent some time talking about my adoption and sharing a little bit of added information I don’t recall previously knowing. After being relinquished I lived in a foster home with an elderly couple for two weeks prior to my being placed. I had yet another piece of the puzzle and another incident of attachment and abandonment in my life. She went on to say how she didn’t think a baby would know any better and that all I needed was a loving home. “What does a baby know?” Of course, this belief was not only held by my parents, but many people. This was the prevalent school of thought regarding adoption and was widely professed by the “experts” of the time.
In speaking with friends and acquaintances alike about my studies I find I am often challenged in the legitimacy of my work. I share my findings regarding the two behavioral patterns and am met with the challenge that, “every kid goes through that.” I am met the resistance from people claiming that I am finding an excuse to be a victim and dismiss ownership of my behaviors. Explaining about the bonding of mother and child on a cellular level and the evidence of an infant recognizing its own mother at birth, I am challenged with skepticism and, as if we have all learned the same response, “What does a baby know?”
Research shows that, at birth, a baby is able to recognize her mother’s voice. Within a few days of birth she will recognize familiar faces, voices and smells and be drawn to them. With research showing that babies do have a memory, in contradiction to long held beliefs, it becomes unreasonable to assume that a baby would not remember or recognize (at a visceral and thus imprinting level) the loss of her mother upon separation.
I have not undertaken an exhaustive study in the area of what newborn babies are aware of immediately following and the days after birth. To avoid being entrenched in a battle for the validity to study the impact of adoption, I will not try to answer, “What does a baby know?” However I will answer, “What does an adopted baby know?” She knows her mother, she knows her loss, sadness and hurt, she knows that those who hold her today may be gone tomorrow and that she will be the only one left to pick up the pieces that no one seems to think are broken.
This blog is a repost of an article originally written by Karl Stenske, LMFT and Adoption Specialist in 2011. This article has been reprinted in adoption and clinical magazine around the world. Much more research has been done since 2011 and the discussion of the impact of adoption and separation from birth mother is becoming ever more mainstream. Thanks to many adoptees, adoptive parents, birth mothers, triad members and professionals who are sharing their stories and research. However, there is still societal narrative that is relegating the voice of the child, the one being adopted to fit a story that largely overlooks the challenges and pain of adoption. This is a disservice, certainly, to the adoptee, but also the the adoptive family who ends up on the front lines of this immense pain, trying to navigate what they never saw coming.
I mention in this article the importance of getting help for adopted children and if you need referrals for your child, please reach. But most important is for the parents to get into adoption therapy with a specialist. It is much easier to help your child, after and while you are helping yourself. If you are an adoptive parent, or adoptee and would like to explore your experience, I encourage you to reach out to me or someone who is educated specifically in adoption for support.