TAPLINK

Support for
Pennsylvania
Adoptive & Foster Families

Taproot issue 43 - October 2002

HELPING THE LEARNING DISABLED CHILD UNDERSTAND ADOPTION

Adopted children, including those adopted in infancy, appear to be at higher risk for a variety of learning disabilities. If the learning disabilities affect the child’s ability to process and comprehend information, the child may misperceive and distort information about his/her adoption, according to David Brodzinsky and Cynthia Steiger in an article in the “Journal of Learning Disabilities”. When this is the case, parents have to become creative in explaining adopting, using methods geared to the child’s manner of learning.

In 1991, Brodzinsky and Steiger surveyed public and private schools in New Jersey and found that 6.7 percent of the students who were neurologically impaired and 5.4 percent of those who were perceptually impaired were adoptees, even though only 1.9 percent of New Jersey children were estimated to have been adopted.

Older children and special needs placements could not account for these results. The majority of adoptees in the study were adopted before the age of one.

Since the specific causes of learning disabilities are still unclear, it’s difficult to know why adoptees are at higher risk. In general, learning disabilities are believed to be caused by abnormalities or malfunctioning of the brain. Heredity may play a role, as many prenatal and perinatal circumstances.

Learning disabilities in adoptees may also result from poor prenatal care, prenatal drug or alcohol exposure, or complications at birth stemming from the youth of the birth mother. It doesn’t appear, however, that the experience of being adopted causes learning disabilities.

Regardless of the cause, parents need to understand that when children have difficulty taking in, processing, storing, retrieving, and expressing information in the classroom, they may have similar difficulties with information about adoption.

Before parents can help their child learn about adoption, they need to understand not only how their child doesn’t learn, but also the learning techniques that do work for the child. Martin Kaufman, a Rochester, New York therapist with 15 years of experience treating adoptees, recommends that parents have their child thoroughly evaluated by a psycho- educational specialist in order to get a clear picture of how their child learns.

Children who can picture things in words have highly developed auditory skills, can write, can reason logically and clearly, and have good abstract thinking ability, tend to learn in a variety of ways, and often do well in U.S. schools which are geared to that kind of learning style. Other children, says Dae Leckie, a therapist in southern California who specializes in adoption issues, learn things kinesthetically, i.e., through their bodies. They learn by movement and by imitating people. Children with this pattern of learning understand adoption by acting out roles in the adoption story. As they plan the story, they learn the roles played by the social worker and the judge.

Some learning difficulties make it difficult for children to think in abstract terms, to generalize form specific examples to similar situations, to visualize events in sequence, or to perceive subtle differences. For this reason, Leckie and others recommend breaking the adoption story into small, manageable pieces, being as concrete as possible, repeating the information in a variety of ways, and being alert to signs the child is taking what is said too literally.

Because the term birth mother might be confusing to a child who has difficulty making fine linguistic distinctions, Leckie suggests using the birth parents’ real names, if known. Parents should be aware that a child who doesn’t know his/her birth mother but knows her name is Susan may think every Susan is his/her birth mother. Children with learning disabilities take longer to understand that being adopted wasn’t their fault, Leckie says. It isn’t unusual for adoptees to sometimes feel rejected by their birth parents. If having learning disabilities makes them feel “stupid” or awkward, they may conclude that his is why their birth parents placed them for adoption.

Adoptive parents need to find concrete ways to let the child know that while they wish learning were easier for him/her, they still value and love him/her.

Adopted Child Vol. 13, No. 9, September 1994