The Impact of Children's Pre-Adoptive Traumatic Experiences on Parents.

Sara Skandrani,Mayssa’ El Husseini,Aurélie Harf

doi:10.3389/fpsyt.2019.00866

Abstract

For the last decade, children are adopted increasingly at an older age. Their pre-adoptive past can bare traumatic experiences consequent to abandonment, violence, or deprivation in birth family or orphanage. The objective of this study is to explore the impact of the child’s traumatic past on parental representations and subsequent parent-child interactions. The study includes 41 French parents who adopted one or more children internationally. Each parent participated to a semi-structured interview, focused on the choice of country, the trip to the child’s native country, the first interactions with the child, the knowledge of the child’s pre-adoptive history. The interviews were analyzed according to a qualitative phenomenological method, the Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis. Five themes emerged from this analysis: absence of affects in the narrative; denial of the significance of the child’s traumatic experiences; perceptions of the uncanny concerning the child; parental worry about traumatic repetition for the child; specific structure of the narrative. These extracted themes reveal a low parental reflective function when the child’s past is discussed. They highlight the impact of the child’s traumatic past on parents. Exploring the impact of the child’s traumatic experiences on adoptive parents enables professionals involved in adoption to provide an early support to these families and to do preventive work at the level of parental representations and family interactions.

Highlights

Before adoption, international adoptees often experience insufficient medical care, malnutrition, maternal separation, neglect, and abuse as well in orphanages as in their family of origin
The sample consisted of 41 adoptive parents who volunteered to participate in the study, 31 mothers and 10 fathers
Five themes emerged from the Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis method (IPA) analysis of the interviews: absence of affects in the narrative; denial of the significance of the child’s traumatic experiences; perceptions of the uncanny concerning the child; parental worry about traumatic repetition for the child; specific structure of the narrative

Summary

Introduction

International adoptees often experience insufficient medical care, malnutrition, maternal separation, neglect, and abuse as well in orphanages as in their family of origin. This risk to live traumatic experiences is even higher, when children are adopted at an older age. Adoptionresearch is interested in the impact of these adverse pre-adoption experiences on the children’s social and emotional development [1, 2], and on their family relations and the filiation process. A 50-year follow-up research—The British Chinese Adoption Study—gives as an example of good outcomes in psychological and social adjustment, despite early years of adversity. An important theme, that emerged from the analysis of the children’s adjustment, is trauma [8]

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Conclusion