No More Mistakes About Adoption

If we only knew.

I believe most parents love their children so much that they would do whatever it takes for them to be healthy and happy if they only knew what to do. Sometimes mistakes are made because a parent simply does not know any better.

I’ve already dealt with one of the misconceptions that all you need to do is shower your child with love. Love will take care of everything. So if you just love your children, it doesn’t matter where they came from, they will be well adapted and love you back. There will be no issues. That’s not true!

Sometimes you need more than love. You need special training and special help.

The other thing, and this gets into a mistake we made. I don’t know the perfect parent. I know as we raised our son, we were told, “you’re too strict, you’re too lenient, you’re failing your child.” We were doing our best. We just didn’t understand some of these things.

And so one of the mistakes I wish we could go back and correct is this. I wish we had know more about adoption trauma so that we could have addressed it sooner. It wasn’t our fault and we did the best we could with the information we had. But I want to share our story with you so you won’t make this same mistake we did.

And the other thing I want to share. And this is a mistake I think a lot of adoptive parents make. This one might surprise you, but when you’re parenting children of adoption trauma, and I can speak to this firsthand, a mistake my wife and I made was not taking care of ourselves. It’s so easy to get wrapped up in caring for your children and trying to find the help that they need, that you neglect you.

Regardless of whether what you try to do helps your child, and I believe people who adopt are going to do everything in their power to help their children, you’ve got to make sure you don’t neglect you. You have to be alright even if they aren’t.

My prayer is that with more education and more information that we all can be alright.

Thank you for following my journey in adoption story.

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