With children, the general assumption seems to be “the more hugs and attention, the better.” However, there is a category of families that will often tell you, “Please don’t hug my child,” and that is adoptive families.
Adoption is one of many options for creating or expanding a family. A young couple might decide to adopt instead of having biological children. An empty nester couple concludes that the best way to expand the family is to adopt a group of siblings close in age to their biological children. However, a couple struggling with infertility issues may decide that they are destined to adopt.
All children who were adopted are involved in a transition from the family, orphanage or group home where they live, to their new family. During that transition, and for months or even years afterward, the child deals with varying levels of hurt, loss, and trauma. Grief and loss due to separation from their previous family, and trauma due to the change in everything: caregivers, food, smells, clothing, or even language. Most of the children who were adopted also experienced trauma during those first few months or years of their lives. Children may have been neglected, verbally abused, starved, physically abused, or saddest, sexually abused. His trust in adults is shattered.
Parents of newborn biological children often spend little time reading about attachment and bonding: that close connection comes easily. These children were loved and nurtured well in the womb, and when they are born, they are held and fed, and have all their basic needs met quickly and regularly. They feel safe in their environment and trust the adults in their lives to take care of them.
Many adopted children, on the other hand, were abused even in the womb through drugs, alcohol, or physical abuse from their pregnant mother. This trauma is exacerbated by moves from foster family to foster family, or from birth parents to orphanages, or from birth parents to grandparents, to aunts, to foster homes. They don’t trust. They don’t feel safe.
Some adopted children move quickly through the transition to their permanent families and are able to adjust, trust, and love. Other adopted children struggle with attachment and bonding issues. They may be diagnosed with anxiety, depression, post-traumatic stress disorder, or reactive attachment disorder. They may not be able to trust their parents enough to love them. They may not be able to believe in the permanence of their adoptive family. They may cringe at the expectation of being hit, even if it never happens again. They may have trouble identifying which of their family members is the primary caregiver, as they have never lived in a family before.
It is the parents of these single children who will say, “Please don’t hug my son.” They are creating a comfortable environment around their child to help them identify with, trust, and eventually love their parents. Parents want to be the primary providers of everything in their children’s lives, to help re-create the security and trust they lost in their early years. They are training their child to trust that these new parents will provide everything the child needs: food, warmth, medical care, and most of all, love.
These distrustful and disengaged children can be difficult to resist. On the outside they look like any other child who deserves a hug. But because of their lack of trust and love for their parents, they seek inappropriate attention, both emotional and physical, from teachers, church members, the school receptionist, the person in the seat behind them on the plane, the woman who washes his hands in the public bathroom, and the young man who serves your ice cream cones. They smile, ask you to read them a book, and try to hold your hand. For the sake of the parents and the child, resist. Help parents nurture and love their adopted child so that he or she feels safe, cared for, and trusted.
The next time a parent asks you not to hug their child, don’t think of it as a petty or unusual request. Realize that this parent is doing all the right things to help their child bond and bond.