NaviParent: Indiscriminate Friendliness in Adoption

This week’s blog will focus on how to talk to teachers about adoption.  We have two international adoption boys.  We adopted them when they were 23 months and 2 ½ years old. They are now 9 and 4 years of age.  So, this year was the first year they were both in school.  They were both in a new school.  This school is a private school because the public school truly did not understand the impact of adoption on our older son’s learning.  The public school wanted to force what they think on us without listening to the parent’s point of view.  So, we decided to place both our children in a private religious school.  The educators at the new school listen to our child’s needs and plan accordingly. 

Our older son has indiscriminate friendliness. The researcher has shown that usually if a baby does not have a bonding with a consistent adult in his/her can cause problems in their development.   

We believe he did have a consistent adult that he bonded with in his foster home while he was waiting to be adopted.  When we brought him home we worked very hard to connect and bond with our son. 

Our son is a very welcoming and naturally friendly person.  It becomes a problem when our son will say hello to everyone and anyone on the street or in the store or anywhere. He feels if he can have someone become his friend he will not feel that he will be abandoned because of his adoption.  We are concern because he does not discriminate between strangers and friends.  So we have been working hard to help him with his indiscriminate friendliness. 

Here are some of the things we have done that seems to help our son.

1. Start conversation about strangers.
2. Remind the child that everyone is not his friend
3. Ask questions about the person he met. Does he know their name or where they live
4. Discuss how he does not need to be friends with everyone
5. Talk about are true friends

His indiscriminate friendliness affects his education.  It is really training the teachers to understand what that means.  When he was in the public school he would get in trouble in class because he was always talking to make sure he had friends.  Now in this school he is more understood that fitting in which is more accepting of all differences. 

We continue to work with our older son on how to be a friend and what it means to be a friend. It will be a life time of working to understand indiscriminate friendliness and how to help our son deal with his feelings of needing to be friends with everyone.