Blogger Jessica Pegis of O Solo Mama posted a fascinating interview with Dr. Jean Mercer, this week. Mercer is the author of Child Development: Myths and Misunderstandings and Understanding Attachment: Parenting, Child Care, and Emotional Development. In the course of the discussion, Mercer rejects a lot of the conventional wisdom on attachment in adoption, and questions the efficacy and practices of most attachment therapy.
On the concept of attachment, she says:
Attachment develops gradually and is certainly not present at birth. Babies don’t have a mysterious emotional connection to their birth mothers, although adoptees may later feel they’ve lost something and want to know their birth families...
There seem to be a lot of books out that claim that all children, however young they were at adoption, have a hidden grief for the birth family, but I consider that very questionable. When an adoptive family is preoccupied with a child’s invisible grief, I have to ask whether that grief is the parents’ own. Unresolved grief over infertility or deaths of children can certainly lead people to project their feelings onto the adoptee...
These remarks, and others questioning the concept of the adopted child's "primal wound," enraged a lot of O Solo Mama's readers, including many adult adoptees, who felt Mercer was denying their life experience. As an adoptive parent, however I found Mercer's position refreshing. Two of my children express few negative emotions about having been adopted; can I consider accepting that they are happy without worrying so much about their hidden grief?
On the adoption of older children, Mercer says:
As for adoption of older children, it’s unrealistic to think that they will be grateful or quickly become dependent and act “attached.” Why should they? We are all pleased with doing what we do well, and those children have been proud of their roles as good citizens of their institutions. They haven’t necessarily asked to be adopted or to have their whole lives turned upside down, even for a situation that we adults think must be a lot better for them... I doubt that many older adopted children feel an immediate sense of relief or gratitude [about being adopted] although they might eventually come to these feelings as they advance cognitively. One of the sad things about attachment is that children cling to abusive or neglectful adult caregivers and mourn for their loss just as they would do for good caregivers. We can’t assume that any child has unambivalently wanted to get away from their familiar contacts. Even children who have been sexually trafficked and exploited can miss some people or aspects of their lives. But if they do seem to feel the adoption is a relief, there’s no reason to declare that they are in denial.
As the mother of a child adopted at five and a half years of age, I found Mercer's empathy for the plight of older adoptees to be positive, particularly in the wake of recent media coverage following the Artyem Savelyev case. The inevitable adjustment challenges facing older children in a new cultural environments have, in my view, been excessively pathologized. Elsewhere in the interview, Mercer hints at the need for adoptive parents of older children to adjust their expectations about what the relationship between parent and child can and should be. Expecting instant attachment, obedience and gratitude is a recipe for disappointment and familial strife.
In her discussion of attachment therapy, Mercer points out that many of the common therapeutic practices out there are not backed by any kind of research. I was shocked to learn that many of the tips and tricks that had been offered to me in adoptive parenting classes and books through the years are meaningless at best, while others could be potentially harmful. For example, Mercer points out that:
The term “attachment therapy” has never been clearly defined, but many people, including the American Professional Society on the Abuse of Children 2006 task force on this topic, have equated it with “holding therapy.”
“Attachment therapy” (AT) defined in this way has several characteristics. One is that its proponents assume that just about all behaviour problems in children are due to difficulties with attachment, and that therapy should make the children attached to their caregivers; if they are attached, they will be obedient.
Another characteristic of AT is that practitioners assume that if we take an older child and treat him like a baby (e.g., lap, baby bottle) we can somehow re-enact the development of earlier years and walk the child through the attachment period, culminating in a secure attachment to the present adult caregiver. (There seems to be no reason to assume that this happens except for a sort of magical thinking.)
A third, and quite disturbing, AT characteristic is the assumption that attachment occurs when the child is impressed with an adult’s total authority and never questions it. AT practitioners act out this assumption by restraining the child physically, screaming at him, insisting that he reject the birth mother, telling him he is in danger of killing someone if he does not cooperate, and so on. They may also require the child to carry out tedious and pointless manual labor, to sit without moving, and to ask for any needed thing, like use of the toilet, rather than taking age-appropriate responsibility. It would be inaccurate for me to claim that all AT practitioners do all these things, and it can be hard to know who does what, but AT always has at least one of these characteristics and often has all of them. I should point out, by the way, that there is no acceptable research supporting the belief that AT methods are effective for treating any form of childhood mental illness.
As far as I can tell, work with parents in the AT situation seems to be limited to assuring them that they do not need to change.
I'd encourage you to read the complete interview, and the contentious comments that follow. For more with Dr. Jean Mercer, check out her blog, Child Myths.
