Message
Hi,
I just signed up as a member of DCUM and have to let all of those who have responded how grateful I am to be reading your responses: It is such a relief and a boon to see others instincts on this!!
So many of the responses resonated with what we are trying, and others just made me smile... (I love the Southern approach, though I cannot quite do it.)
We too try to restate the question in more adoption-positive language, and then just share with real openness and simplicity: "Yes, we do, and that is going to be so important to our son the more he ages." We hope the benefit of this is shifting the focus back onto our child's experience. The bummer is that it sometimes keeps people asking for more, making us feel rude when we try to shut it down.
The other one we dislike much is "Do you have any biological children?" for while it reflects a clarity on how one could refer to the differences, it reads like it is saying they would *really* be our children. There we feel much more clear about our reply: "No. And we feel so full of love for our child."
Trusting many people read Adoptive Family magazine: if not, we're grateful for the conversation rehearsals they offer as well as developmentally-appropriate ways of engaging our child himself.
I just signed up as a member of DCUM and have to let all of those who have responded how grateful I am to be reading your responses: It is such a relief and a boon to see others instincts on this!!
So many of the responses resonated with what we are trying, and others just made me smile... (I love the Southern approach, though I cannot quite do it.)
We too try to restate the question in more adoption-positive language, and then just share with real openness and simplicity: "Yes, we do, and that is going to be so important to our son the more he ages." We hope the benefit of this is shifting the focus back onto our child's experience. The bummer is that it sometimes keeps people asking for more, making us feel rude when we try to shut it down.
The other one we dislike much is "Do you have any biological children?" for while it reflects a clarity on how one could refer to the differences, it reads like it is saying they would *really* be our children. There we feel much more clear about our reply: "No. And we feel so full of love for our child."
Trusting many people read Adoptive Family magazine: if not, we're grateful for the conversation rehearsals they offer as well as developmentally-appropriate ways of engaging our child himself.
