US News & World Report: Raising Both Biological and Adopted Children
Note from Carrie: I’m delighted to share my newest piece for US News and World Report: “Adoption creates its own lens through which a child filters her world and calibrates her sense of belonging. Adoptees may live with the innate fear that their parents love their biological children more. As a result, adoptees are primed to interpret parental responses to typical sibling interactions as confirmation of their status as the ‘less loved’ child.”
July 11, 2018, at 11:39 a.m.
IN EARLY JUNE, MY daughter’s birth mother “M” came to spend a week with us in our home. We kept counting the firsts as they piled up – M’s first airplane ride, M’s first time on a bike in 30 years, M’s first train ride – but the one that hit me the hardest was M’s first time tucking our daughter into bed. Almost 15 years old, my daughter had never slept in the same house as her birth mom until this visit.
Our two younger daughters, born to us four and seven years after we adopted our oldest, fully embraced M into the family. They bemoaned the unfairness of it all when we insisted that M be allowed to have nightly sleepovers with only their oldest sister.
It was their first experience feeling like they were the “others” in our home.
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