International Adoption

When parents adopt internationally many times the country has already identified if the child has special needs or not. However, the child can also have secondary special needs that does not appear right away but sometimes later.  Some of the reasons are poverty, orphanages, lack of available health care, and other situations. Research from Pinderhuges, Matthews, Deoudes, and Perman in 2013 found that 71% of adoptive children were found to have special needs after coming home.

The parents need to prepare as much as they can for the unknown.  Many times, when special needs does appear it can be taken by surprise because it is much later from coming home.  Then the parents are not sure if it is related to the child’s home country experience or something else.

Most of the time it does not matter why except the parents need to work with the outcomes.  However, working with school systems can be extremely difficult. Many educators do not understand the experiences the international children experienced in their home country and all the impact it has on the development of the brain and the learning process.  Researchers Tirella, Tickle-Degnen, Miller, and Bedell (2012) have found little has been done preparing families for the issues that may come up after their child’s adoption.  Parents need to be an advocate for their children and explain their child’s adoption story so the educators may start to understand the child’s experiences.

Nevertheless, explaining to the teachers and administrators helps but does not always create understanding by the educator the development in learning and how that impacts the child’s development in school.   Our experience with our internationally adopted boys has come with resistance to understanding from the school system.  The public school system seems to believe they know better than the parents because they are professionals.  That is just not true.