Reply to Adoption--parental obligations regarding child's native language

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[quote=Anonymous]It is ridiculous to expect adoptive parents of older international adoptees to try to maintain the child's native language.  It is a losing battle.  Many immigrant communities have saturday "language schools" whereby parents try their hardest to get their kids to maintain the native language.  Almost without exception, the kids may retain the ability to understand, have some basic ability to speak, but will use English as their dominant language.  That's just the way America works---even for kids whose parents can speak the language to them at home.  Also, as the parent of children adopted at older ages through international adoption, I will also share that older adoptees may have no desire to maintain their  first language, or have a continued relationship with their country of birth---especially if their experiences in that country were traumatic and negative.   Neither of our children has any desire to relearn their native language although we offered the opportunity.  They wanted to learn English as fast as possible.  One child was curious to revisit the land of their birth, the other child (adopted at age 11 with lots of painful memories) recoils in horror at the idea of ever going back.  As a young adult, their comment was:  "There is nothing for me there."  The intl. adoption paradigm needs to be much more nuanced and child-specific with respect to what is considered "best practices" about retaining ties to birth country.[/quote]

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