Archive for the ‘adoptee’ Category
Top tips for a tip top festive season!
I’ve just finished a teleseminar discussing some things to think about over the festive season.
You can listen to the replay on the event page and here’s a quick run through of what was covered…
Things to think about:
- Expectations: ours’, children’s, family & friends’
- Excitement and anticipation
- Overwhelm
- ‘if you’re good…’ or ‘if you don’t behave…’ messages
- Birth family: memories, contact
- Triggers
Some of the things that can help include managing expectations, not aiming for glossy mag perfection; using calendars, planners, albums and visual cues to help build a sense of what’s coming next…
and the Top tips:
- keep it simple
- talk about what’s happening next
- stick to the plan/routine if you can
- look behind the behaviour, think about what’s driving it
- aim for fun, not perfection…
Essentially, it’s all about understanding the potential triggers and things going on behind the scenes, and finding ways to manage expectations and feelings. Leave a comment with your survival tips for Christmas…
PS as mentioned on the call, here’s the link to the bbc news video where an adoptee discusses his feelings on his birthday…
Be my guest…
I’ve added a new section to feature guest blogs. Posts can be related to any aspect of adoption, it could be something you’ve already featured on your own blog, it can be anonymous or not. The first guest blog is an amazing story of adoption from Greg. Let me know if you’ve got a story you’d like to share…
Support for learning
The summary of a recent report concluded that children were being “wrongly labelled as having special educational needs”. This sparked a debate about the pros and cons of diagnoses and labels of special educational needs. Some parents felt that the right diagnosis meant that children received additional support, others that it limited expectations of children or that additional support was not always provided.
My own experience is that some children would do better with additional support in school but, without a formal recognition of need, the provision of additional support is dependent on individual teachers and resources.
In adoption, early trauma and neglect impact on a child’s development and can lead to the need for additional support with learning. Areas like language processing affect how well children understand instruction and can cause problems in all subject areas, even in games and P.E. Poor concentration, low self esteem and problems with social relationships all have a knock on effect on learning
What are your views… has your child had support for learning, has it helped? Do you think labels are helpful?
Adoption blog carnival…
I came across the idea of a blog carnival on a few other blogging networks and decided that I’d like to host an Adoption Blog Carnival for National Adoption Week…
And what is a blogging carnival, I hear you ask. Well, it’s just a way of linking together different posts on one topic. You email me details of a post you’ve written in relation to adoption and I write a carnival post and include links to the posts selected for the carnival…
I’m hoping to get posts from all perspectives in adoption – adoptee, adoptive parent, birth parent, prospective adopter, relative through adoption… and from all viewpoints-good/bad/indifferent…
If you’d like to contribute, email details of your post to fiona@adoptresources.co.uk by October 25th. You don’t have to write a post specifically for the carnival and it doesn’t have to be recent. If you’d like to submit something but don’t want to post it on your usual blog, email me the post and I can include it as a guest blog.
Looking forward to hearing from you…