Adoption--parental obligations regarding child's native language
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Anonymous
| My child adopted as an infant has no desire to learn her native language. We tried many times. She is now almost 11. She has started learning a language though on her own - Italian. We are not Italian btw. |
Anonymous
That is HER choice. However, adopting an infant is different than parents who adopt children who are older and already speaking and make no effort for those children to maintain their language. |
Anonymous
I didn't pick anyone up, but even if I did, I would feel the same. All I do for my child is because I want to (beyond what I have mentioned), not because I feel obligated. |
Anonymous
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My kids (adopted at ages 9 and 12) stopped speaking their native language within a year of the adoption and have absolute no desire at this point to be forced into language school to maintain it. It was tough enough having to go to school all week in English, their new language---we weren't going to force them to then spend saturday mornings trying to keep up their birth language. (I've also observed that a time-honored American immigrant tradition is for the foreign born to send their first generation offspring trekking off to Saturday school for Greek/Chinese/Farsi [fill in the blank here] AND IT NEVER WORKS. The kids may learn to understand their parents' birth tongue, but they will revert to English as soon as possible---children just naturally gravitate to the dominant language.]
As for language immersion camp---my kids used to live in an orphanage and spent years longing to live in a family environment. Language camp is a little too close in feel to an unpleasant past. Our kids are proud of their country and heritage and we encourage that identity preservation. We always keep the option of language classes out there as an open invite. But we will not force it. My kids have enough to process right now without being made to feel guilty that they are somehow "failing" in not keeping up their original language. |
Anonymous
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My kids were adopted from China and we have gone to extensive lengths to make sure that they will be fluent in Mandarin. We think this is important.
On the other hand, Mandarin wasn't their first language. They both came from rural regions where we understand the most common language is the local dialect, which would be impossible to teach them and almost certainly useless for any purpose other than going back to visit their birth town. |
Anonymous
I think you completely misunderstood. Language attrition and the loss of the mother tongue is always viewed as a traumatic experience. Even if a kid stops talking and sounds like is fluent in the new language, there are a lot of idioms and sayings they do not fully understand for a long time. You should lok into what science says about the subject. Some elderly in frail care with dementia have stopped talking English and have reverted to their mother tongue |
Anonymous
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No, I do not misunderstand AT ALL. Certainly loss of native language is traumatic---I am not claiming that it isn't. But at this point, I am making a deliberate choice as a parent regarding family priorities. I would only be able to preserve my children's mother tongue by awakening them at 7 AM every saturday to drive 40 minutes to attend language school---and forcing them to forego team soccer---which they love and which gives them confidence---in order to do so. There may be people who believe than an internationally adopted child can only be truly emotionally healthy if their mother tongue is maintained. I think an adopted child's emotional health is a much more complicated calculus than that single lens view.
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Anonymous
You sound like a good mom. Congrats to you on your adoptions. |
Anonymous
+1 from an international adoptee. |
Anonymous
Just to clarify -- the language immersion camp I'm trying for my daughter is a day camp, not sleepaway. Less effective for learning the language, but also less likely to bring back memories of orphanage care. I do wonder what role, if any, a child's ethnicity & life experience play in the language decision? My daughter is Asian, Her appearance marks her as "foreign" to many Americans, and also makes her stand out within our family. She has always been more aware of ethnic difference than a lot of other kids her age. She also had a really wonderful foster family in her birth country, with whom we are still in contact. Even though she really doesn't remember it -- she was just a baby -- she has a sense of affection and nostalgia for the place where she was born. It makes sense to me that if she were more likely to be perceived as a native-born American, and if she held (understandably) negative associations regarding her birth country, retaining/learning the language would be a lower priority for her. |
Anonymous
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Our older adopted child lost her first language because she refused to speak it once she had been in the US for 6-8 weeks and knew enough English to talk and play with her new friends and siblings. OUR desire as her parents was for her to maintain contact with her first culture and first language. We love languages and believe that knowing 2 or more languages is important. We perceived her native language as a gift she had been given, a gift that we should do everything to maintain. We had a native speaker with her in person and another one on the phone daily, but she would not speak to either of those people in her first language. Her receptive language lasted much longer (and still is there to some extent), but her expressive native language disappeared because she refused to speak it. They would speak to her in her native language, and she would answer only in English.
Our daughter wanted NOTHING to do with anything related to her first seven years of her life. Her life had been so traumatic for her (years of neglect and deprivation ) that even the language itself triggered her. This was very unexpected and we did not anticipate this, as we intentionally set out to create a situation where she could maintain her first language. She was adamant that she wanted nothing to do with this. To date, she has shown no interest in connecting with friends she knew and remembers from the orphanage who have also been adopted. I maintain those connections with those adoptive families on her behalf, in case she decides one day that she wants to be in touch with the kids she lived with for all those years. Years have passed and our daughter is now a young adult. She has gone through many years of therapy and has gathered some perspective on her early life, and on the triggers for her ongoing PTSD. She has come to understand what happened, and how her early life was not her fault. She has come to gradually trust that her second family is here for her. She has grieved the loss of her first family, and that loss is very painful. I have journeyed with her in that grief, to the extent that she has confided in me, and I can say that there may be no more profound loss than the loss of one's birthmother and birth family, no matter how old you were when you lost them. It's a huge loss, and the grieving comes and goes in waves. If I could do one thing for her, it would be to connect her with her birth family so she could know that they love her and always loved her. They could not raise her, but they loved her. They gave her that first language. She heard that language in utero. They spoke that language to her, named her in that language. I would want her to meet them and hear them tell her how much they loved her in that language and, even if she needed an interpreter, she would know what they were saying. Those words can be conveyed across a language barrier. If I could do anything for my daughter, it would be for her to have that hole in her heart healed, to once again be held by the mother who gave birth to her, and not just me, the mother who is with her now. She has two mothers, and needs them both, in order to heal. Being an adoptive mother is one of the most helpless places to be, in many ways. You love this kid so much, and you know they are grieving, and you cannot ease that grief. The loss of language is part of that. But bigger than the loss of language is the loss of the PEOPLE who once spoke that language to my daughter. She can relearn the language itself, and she is now expressing some interest in that. Language itself can come back. But the PEOPLE who once loved you and spoke that first language to you cannot come back. And that to me is the deeper loss. |
Anonymous
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I'm 00:17 and could have written everything 23:55 just said. We have been fortunate, however, in that we are able to contact our children's extended family---who do love them, but were unable to raise them due to poverty and health issues. Every year I send photos and a letter, which I pay a translator to translate and deliver. The sense of peace my children derived from hearing that their bio-family never stopped thinking about them was palpable. I can never heal the loss caused by bio-mom's abandonment---but the knowledge that they are still loved by part of their bio-family helps to mitigate that.
As to language---someday they may elect to relearn it. However, I believe that their long-term interests as immigrants to this country are best served by my focusing their academic efforts on learning to speak and write English as fluently as possible, and letting them spend their Saturdays focusing on a sport that builds confidence and brings joy. Otherwise I will have done them a greater disservice by keeping them betwixt and between two languages---unable to speak and write either one to the level they need. Other adoptive parents may differ from that thinking---everyone needs to do what they think best for their particular child. |
Anonymous
I am not sure if you are spouting theory, or if you have actually gone through this experience. I esuspect that you are thorizing and speaking not from experience, otherwise you would not be so flippant. I am a new poster to this thread. My older child refused, absolutely refused to continue with his language of origin. Actually, his language at birth was unavailble to attain in this country. The language in his orphange (national language) was his second language and a language that could only be maintained at a weekly class. He refused to participate. So, I stopped wasting my money. |
Anonymous
+1 |
Anonymous
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International adoption is an enormous transition for an older child. It can have immense benefit for the child in the long term, but in the short term it's very hard for a child to leave everything they know, and to adjust to being part of a family where everything, including language, is new.
Many kids pour all their energy into learning the new language, understanding the meaning of being in a family, building relationships and adjusting to a new culture. They may find efforts to keep up their native language a reminder of their trauma, or they may simply not have the energy to do so. If feasible, parents should offer opportunities to maintain the language, but they should also realize that not every child is going to be receptive, and that their responsibility is to follow the lead of their own child, not to follow some prescription of what's best for a hypothetical child. |