I wish I had a nickel for every adoptive parent who emphatically stated their child came home and never exhibited the FIRST SIGN of attachment difficulties. I have heard this from parents who brought home infants under one year of age, all the way up to school age kids and teens. Occasionally I hear about a child who had only been in the orphanage for a few months, or a year, when he or she is sent to the US through a hosting program or adopted outright from the orphanage. Often these cases involve children whose parent recently died, necessitating the child’s placement in the orphanage. These kids might be ideal candidates for adoption, assuming they had any kind of healthy, reciprocal relationship with their recently deceased parent. Certainly these children would have experienced loss and would show symptoms of that loss. They would need to grieve those losses in a healthy way, ideally with an empathetic and understanding new mommy and/or daddy. But it would be entirely unrealistic to assume she would bounce into a new family, appreciate her gains, and forget her significant losses, including parents, culture, language and friends. However, it WOULD be realistic to hope that she could transfer her attachment to a new family. If she had healthy attachments to her family of origin, she would have the capacity to understand how a family works. She would not be afraid to love, once she accepted the potential risk of losing a loved one again. She would know that the risk was worth the gain… as opposed to a child who never had a healthy attachment and has no idea what the gains can be!


Just as parents would never assume their child is physically healthy without seeking the advice and evaluation of someone qualified to make that judgment, parents should not assume their child is emotionally healthy without checking with a mental health professional who knows what to look for. Having said that, however, do not assume that ALL mental health professionals know how to evaluate a child’s attachment, or even understand the rudiments of attachment, grief and loss and how they look in a foster child or a post-institutionalized child. Many, many mental health care providers only know how to treat HORSES--they don’t understand the complexities of zebras!