THE FEAR OF TELLING

Contrary to the old belief where the subject of adoption was kept under ‘lock and key’ for what was a variety of reasons, believing that the truth would never come out; the child would love the adoptive parents less; eventually leave the adoptive parents to go in search of birth parents and never come back again; hate the adoptive parents… the reasons boil down to one word. FEAR.

Telling your child he is adopted can set your heart racing, unless the child is adopted as an older child and he already knows this. Today we are informed about the ‘wrongness’ of keeping such a thing a secret but this still does not make it any easier. Remember though, that it can be devastating for a child, or an adult for that matter, to find out at a later stage of their lives that such a secret was kept from them!

The initial problem, however, rests with the ‘teller’. Having spoken to a large number of adopters, it appeared that their number one fear was “How are we going to tell our child that he is adopted?” With those words came a look of nervousness, uncertainty and helplessness.

So, I feel we need to deal with this problem in segments. Here you will find some useful assistance in 6 parts. Read through them, and even if you don’t tackle the ‘telling’ as is suggested, you will find your own way of doing so. The key here though is … DO IT EARLY!

Firstly a brief Introduction to telling

The following links cover the how's, why's etc:- Telling Part 1 Telling Part 2 Telling Part 3 Telling Part 4 Telling Part 5 Telling Part 6