What Causes Trauma in Adoption?
Many adopted children have been traumatized by the people who gave them birth, or by others entrusted to care for them and love them. And many are traumatized in foster care systems because our culture values the genetic connection between parent and child over all other ties. In our society, parents may abuse or neglect their children repeatedly, but because they are “blood,” we trap them in foster care to try to maintain these relationships. This causes even more trauma for children. Other adopted children may experience trauma when they have the ability to understand what adoption means. Around age seven or eight, children begin to see that belonging to their adoptive family means they lost something very significant — their birth family. They may process adoption as: “My parents didn’t keep me. They didn’t want me. They hurt me.” Children often focus on their birth moms, asking, “Why didn’t she want me? I cried too much. I ate too much. I was worse than my brothers and sisters. Is
