Adoption & College PREP Parenting

Beyond the ACT, SAT and Financial Aid…

My 15 year old daughter from China attends a ferociously academic, heavily Asian, Midwestern public high school. Lily and her friends joke about the school’s secret GPA weapon (Asian Parents), but they accept Advanced Placement Classes, Symphony Orchestra and Extracurricular Leadership Opportunities as a matter of course. Lily’s friends are being groomed for Big League universities; her friends’ parents hail from China, Korea, India, Japan and Lebanon, and have firmly prepared their children for academic success on either of our coasts.

For Lily, high school has been an intriguing peek into what life would be like with a “real” Asian family. She’s grateful for my low-pressure, Caucasian mom approach (“Have fun at school today, hon!”), but she also holds herself to the pervasive academic expectations of her teachers, and especially, of her Asian cohorts.

This works for me! I rarely need to harp at my daughter to do her homework, or practice the viola, or volunteer for NHS--the stuff kids typically do in order to frontload a college admissions application. The academics and extras are just part of Lily’s social life, thanks to the high school’s high-achieving Asian milieu. I can parentally coast, expecting that my kid’s college prep grades and list of accomplishments will potentially channel her directly into a name brand university Out East, or even more wow-ing--Out West!

EXCEPT.

I would fail College Prep Parenting if I were to send this child off to school without clueing her into the true secret of her future collegiate success--and the secret has nothing to do with accomplishments or study habits. My parental coasting ends the minute we shine a light on adoption, and examine the effect my child’s past has on her reactions to minor changes and major transitions.

Since preschool, beginnings, endings and separations have triggered overwhelming feelings of loss for my daughter. An adopted child has experienced loss and understands the terror of vulnerability; she knows that change isn’t necessarily a positive event, and deeply fears that it could mean losing parents, friends and home. It has happened before.

A traumatic babyhood may have permanently marked my daughter’s response to change--but recognizing and acknowledging the reasons behind the triggers also equipped Lily with the tools to fight back. Openly talking about adoption loss and grief when Lily was young gave her the basis to create coping mechanisms to counteract the effects of change, separation and new situations. Together, we created middle steps that allowed Lily to ease into new activities and adventures. These three steps are easily personalized for use with families planning for college.

[CLICK HERE for 3 College Middle Step DETAILS]

Lily parlayed the talk, practice, support middle step coping tools throughout elementary, middle and high school, and is rarely ambushed in the comfort zones she has created at home, with friends and at school. However, going to college hundreds or thousands of miles away from home means an 18 year old is suddenly without familiar comfort zones--and without dependable, daily family support. Heaping change on an unsuspecting college freshman can make for a bumpy first semester. Heaping change (loss!) on an unsuspecting freshman-adoptee can propel a student into a tailspin, or even back to the safety zone of home.

The transitional rituals built into the senior year of high school are in place for a reason. Team banquets, class trips, scholarship ceremonies, honors convocation, graduation and graduation parties are formal middle steps that help both kids and parents process the looming life changes in a socially supportive, systemic manner. However, adoptees may need an extra layer of preparation in order to counter the cultural “growing up and leaving home for good” mentality built around going off to college.

Emotionally preparing our adopted children to make a positive move to school is just as important as mentally prepping for the ACT or SAT. We need to help our soon-to-be college kids create their own middle steps when necessary. We need to teach them how to create new support systems and healthy ways to reach out and connect, both to others and to us. We especially need to let our kids know that we acknowledge their extra challenges with separation--that we have faith in their coping abilities, and that we will continue to be truly available whenever, or wherever, they need us.

By Jean MacLeod
www.AdoptionToolbox.com

Copyright 2010, MacLeod, All Rights Reserved

NOTE: I figured out how to g-text my 20 year old's cell phone from my computer a couple of years ago -- she took the text and called me a google stalker! (I think this means I'm doing my job? Ahh, techno parents!). CLICK HERE for stalker parent parody.

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A WALK in JURASSIC PARK

My friend Krista is dropping her college freshman daughter off at school on Sunday. This highly competent, single working mom has been hit upside the head with a plank: her youngest child will be gone in four days, which means her own life is irrevocably changing. My friend dreads the emptiness she senses just past Sunday…she realizes the opportunities inherent in ‘change’ but Krista has been emotionally gobsmacked; she was not prepared to have to explore her past and present feelings, and she has been completely immobilized by the Big Dinosaur Sitting in her Living Room…

My lifelong friend, Suzanne, flew up from Texas to clean out the house her parents built and lived in for over 50 years. I lived eight houses down from Suzanne for most of my youth, and her parent’s home was as familiar to me as my own. Suzanne’s dad died several years ago, and her mom is now living in assisted living down in Texas. Halfway through the pack-up process, Suzanne tucked herself back into her old twin bed and simply refused to get up. It was a Dinosaur Crisis! Suzanne had stumbled into a pre-history ambush. Every photo, memento and 8mm movie spun Suzanne back to her childhood, and finally forced her to witness the changes in her family (and herself) that had occurred over the last twenty-five years.

Why do we adults believe that we can handle ‘change’ with shopping lists and a few packing boxes? Our adopted children may be on to something--their hypervigilant over-reaction to transition and change may provide them with more emotional preparation than our grown-up disregard for change’s profound effects will ever provide for us. As adoptive parents, we offer a sad or scared child a safe place to talk, grieve, celebrate and plan. Perhaps we need to recognize how change provokes these connective needs within ourselves, too.

Graduation parties, weddings, funerals, baby showers, ‘gotcha’ days, coming-of-age celebrations, even kindergarten round-up; these rituals help us structure our experiences, but don’t quite finish the job of processing. Immediately after my dad died a couple of years ago, a therapist friend gave me some meaningful advice. She said, “You need to take care of yourself right now, and for the months to come.” It was so simple--but it was the heads-up I needed to understand the physical, mental and emotional impact of the grieving-integrating process I was embarking on.

It took three of us to rent Suzanne a storage unit, move her boxes and get her out of bed. Maybe we all need to form posse’s to accompany friends through our personal Jurassic Parks, and help support each other’s encounters with past history and Big Changes.

Understanding the powerful, emotional ramifications of change, and why we trigger so profoundly over both the important and the mundane (old letters between our parents, a toy we gave our 18 year old when he was in first grade, family camping trip memorabilia), opens a door and helps us find a place to put our memories, or our remorse, or the overwhelming love for individuals who have ‘left’ us. Feeling the sting of personal change, transition, or loss may also help us generate more empathic responses for our adopted children when they express (or act out) bittersweet feelings over losing their entire first lives with other families.

Dinosaurs are scary symbols of what we need to either slay or befriend (there is no escaping Jurassic Park, or the previous life choices we have made). Understanding our deeply buried, ‘ancient’ connections to events occurring today, gives us a different perspective on our surprising over-reactions, and unfreezes our ability to act.

Last month, I took my kids back to Dinosaur Ridge outside of Denver, where we gazed at real footprints made by dinos about 150 million years ago during the Jurassic Period. I like the visual symbolism of the Stegosaurus, Apatosaurus, Diplodocus, and Allosaurus footprints we saw walking the ‘Dinosaur Highway’; they remind me that beings may be gone but never forgotten, that extinction--of anything--is a process, and that remains of the past are supposed to be witnessed, studied and touched…

Jean
www.AdoptionToolbox.com

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