Meeting the First Family: what are these AP's thinking?
⬤
public
I received an email expressing frustration and disgust over a developing trend in Adoptionland:
All the yahoo boards are lit up with APs on a frenzied search for the first mom, and jubilation on finding her. The APs want to financially support the first families (food, schooling, new home, $$$)....If the APs have met them, that has been the APs choice not the adoptee who is 6 years old. How freaking confusing for that child! If the first families are so freaking great and wonderful, why did they keep all the other 7 siblings and had more kids afterwards and somehow the first mom is still WITH the first dad and father of all these kids, yet "mysteriously" was out of the picture during the week of relinquishment??? DUH!I still wait for some AP to tell me how happy their child is after meeting the first family. I get that the child is still processing the trip.No shit Sherlock!If the family is not living in the dire poverty that was in the social worker, why is that? If the first family are so wonderful and the AP is sooo enamored of them, why is the child with the Afamily instead of with this wonderful family???
This notion that the APs are wanting to financially support the first family, and assist with food, schooling, new homes, and money reads not like good wholesome 'charity', but like guilt-spending to me. But let's discuss the nature of an ICA plan that takes a child away from a "great and wonderful" family-unit, and puts that child in a foreign country, with a foreign new family-unit, and then expects that child to adapt and assimilate.... and love both families! This is a complex process forced upon a very young child, all for what, and for whom? So four sets of adults can be happy and satisfied with themselves, and claim they did this so that chosen child will have a better future?
[This is, of course, is with the assumption that the chosen Afamily is NOT dysfunctional or abusive.]
Best interest of the child, or a bunch of shifty reasoning used to justify the strong desires held by adults? [Do these parents know a thing or two about identity and adoption issues the child must process?]
Any thoughts from others?