ABSTRACT
“Special needs” adoptions – of older children, sibling groups, or children with trauma-based impairments—present unique challenges for parents. Children in these adoptions often actively resist attachment to adoptive parents due to their traumatic past. This significantly disrupts family dynamics—creating tension between parents and children and between spouses. Additionally, there is intense cultural pressure placed on adoptive parents to perform an idyllic adoption narrative and present a public image of a perfect family. In this essay, we use our experiences as adoptive parents to uncover the struggles of parents like us. Parenting children who look differently than us and who publicly “act out” in disruptive ways forces us and those around us to uncomfortably confront cultural expectations surrounding what a family is and learn to make space for different experiences of parenting.
