Bonding and Attachment

We went to an excellent workshop last night though our adoption agency.  It was on Attachment and Bonding, and was presented by our social worker, Stefani, who is a wealth of information and has incredible passion for the subject.  We learned so much and we and couldn’t stop talking about it on the way home and as we fell asleep last night.   Some of the ideas are somewhat new to us, and some felt sort of like common sense.  The bottom line though, is that when a child is adopted, regardless of the age of the child, there is some serious work to do to ensure strong, positive attachments and bonding to the new parents and family.  She talked about the three main goals or principals for all caregivers in relation to new children and attachment.  The first being that we all want the very best for our children, regardless of how they came to be a part of our family.  Second, the first moments, days, weeks, months, and years are critical times for forming attachments.  Third, strong positive attachments set the stage for all future relationships and interactions.  So, the work that we’ll need to do to securely attach us to our new baby and our new baby to us will be vital.   I guess I never thought about bonding with a child to be “work”.  In my job, I’m forming relationships with kids all of the time.  Granted, the attachments I have to the kids I care for is very different and can’t even compare to the attachment between parent and child, but I guess I assumed that you get a newborn, and you just naturally bond.  Why wouldn’t you, after all?  Babies are cute and sweet and relatively unaware of their surroundings as long as their basic needs are being met, right?  Wrong.  This post is going to either be really long, or a multi-chapter post, so I apologize right now for that.  I just feel like I want to share all we learned. It’s intriguing to me, and it’ll probably affect each of you as you’re a part of our life, and will ultimately be a part of the baby’s life.

I’ve worked with families around issues of grief and loss for many, many years now.  I know what it’s like to sit with a parent or a sibling who’s grieving the loss of a child.  I know what it’s like to sit with a child who’s grieving for their health, or their hair that’s fallen out, or a leg that’s been amputated.  I know what it’s like to attend a funeral.  I’ve done that way too many times.  But, what about a newborn who’s experiencing grief and loss?  I have never, not once, thought about a newborn baby being able to feel emotions such as grief and loss.  I know all about how babies can pick up on the emotions of their caregivers.  I know that they experience physical pain.  But, until last night, I did not think that a baby could really grieve.  Apparently, they do.  It makes sense when you think about it.   As we discussed last night, the physiological as well as psychological bond between mother and child is happening while the child is in utero. They’ve got 9 months to bond and attach to each other.  We’ve all heard of studies that show that newborns recognize their parents voices and can recognize their scent and their face only moments after birth.  Right?  How many people read to their babies while they’re still in the womb?  Why?  Because we know that the baby can hear us, and we know that they’ll have a sense of recognition when they’re born.  We play music to our bellies during pregnancy, and the baby calms to that same music after they’re born.  They recognize it.  So, what happens when we take away those things?  We take away the voices, the scents, the sounds that are recognizable and calming to a newborn.  The baby grieves.  Because they can’t tell us how they feel in words, we don’t take the time to recognize or acknowledge this emotion in a newborn, but that doesn’t mean it’s not there.  Our job, as adoptive parents, will be to help ease those feelings of grief and loss, to acknowledge that they exist and work extra hard to help the baby form a safe and secure attachment to us.  I think this whole concept is a little hard to swallow, and I now feel the need to do some extra research on it, but I think overall, it makes sense to me.  It’ll just take some time to absorb all we learned and begin to incorporate it into the way we think and the way we act on a daily basis, especially once the baby arrives.  We’re ready for the challenge.  We welcome it.  We are more anxious for this to happen than we have ever been for anything else in our  entire lives.