Audio Transcript

Chris writes: “Dear Pastor John, my wife and I adopted our youngest son from Ethiopia just over a year ago. What a gift he’s been to us! He’s a toddler now, and beautiful differences in our skin color and hair type will stand out to him soon, if not already. The question we wrestle with is: How soon do we start the discussion of his adoption with him?”

That’s a great question. I am glad it was asked, and I pulled Noël and Talitha together last night to ask them these questions. Talitha is adopted. She is now 18. She remembers a lot about how we did this, and so we asked her how she felt about it. So what I am about to say is coming with both of their input — not just me. In fact, Talitha said that the thing she appreciated and values and remembers might not always work with all her friends that she knows who have been adopted. So I don’t want anybody to say we have got the last word here, and that every family is the same; it is not.

Talk Openly About Adoption

Our conviction is that from the very beginning — I mean, as soon as this kid can hear you talk — adoption should be a reality spoken of in the same way birth and eating and playing and sleeping and all other ordinary realities of life are talked about; you just talk about it: there is adoption. So your two-year-old hears you talking about children getting adopted and children being born. And he doesn’t know what either of those mean. He doesn’t know the word “adopted.” He doesn’t know the word “born” yet. He is just hearing you talk about it. But little by little, understanding dawns, and with every new perceived growth in understanding Mom and Dad fill in more and more of the missing pieces. In other words, you are never hiding from this child that he is adopted, and you are never hiding the concept of adoption, and they grow organically together.

Get good children’s picture books: I am talking about a picture book that a kid eats, the board kind that they don’t know what you are doing — they just chew it. Get those, and when they are six months old, nine months old, eighteen months old — whatever will work — set those books in front of them, with kids of different color. And some of these books are about adoption and some not about adoption. They are about the whole range of kids growing up together. And some are about transracial adoptions. There are a lot of good books out there for this. Find them and make sure you are just reading about it and talking about it, quite apart from applying it to your own kid. This is reality. So the books grow with the child. They have board books at the beginning that they chew on, and then they get more sophisticated books. And very soon this kid is going to have some questions, and then you are just going to answer those questions.

Talitha remembers from very early a book about hair. It was just about hair and the African-American experience of hair. And she didn’t have any self-consciousness at the time for being African American at all. But she says she can remember this. So she was probably three years old at the time. I don’t remember exactly. But she learned about different kinds of hair, which was helpful.

No Magic Moment

You don’t wait until a magic moment to say you were adopted. This is spoken from the beginning — like, you have five toes, and you have eyes, and some kids have brown eyes, and some have blue eyes. You have brown eyes. Some kids are adopted. Some kids come another way. You came by adoption. And they will be so confused — but they are happy. They are happy.

Here is an illustration: Talitha was maybe two or three. We were at a pro-life march. Every year we were marching with several thousand people. And they’ve got these big pictures of these babies. And of course, some of them are horrible pictures, and you probably shield your little one from that. But there were beautiful pictures of babies. And Talitha said to Noël, “Baby — baby was born. Baby was born” — or something like that. And Noël said, “Yes, and you were born.” And Talitha said, “No, I wasn’t born; I was adopted.”

So up until that time she was hearing the language that some children are born, and some are adopted, and that is the way she put it together: “I am the adopted kind.” And so over the next half hour, and by the time that was done, she and Noël had made a little progress in sorting out how adopted kids are also born.

‘We Wanted You’

And now, of course, that is going to raise a whole slew of questions, like: Did I come from you or somebody else? And kids ask questions very early before they are ready for answers. And the Lord gives you wisdom to know the kinds of helpful thing to say that gives them just enough of what they need to run off and be happy with their friends, before you give them a big lecture that they weren’t even intending to ask about.

Of course, you need answers ready when the hard questions come: Why did my Mommy give me away? You need an answer for that. Who is my Daddy? Why didn’t he stay around? Why don’t we know who he is? Did he not care about me? I mean, those are the questions for which there are Christian answers. And mainly, you try to discern, at those moments, where the child is, and what they really want to know, and you massively affirm that you have chosen them. You care for them. You are Mommy and Daddy. They are loved by you. And then you provide them whatever you can about the hardship that Mom and Dad were going through that made it very hard for them to love you the way they wanted to and — you know, something like that.

So the principle is: adoption is normal and wonderful and a perfectly natural process of life. Speak of it that way from the very beginning: God adopted us. Lots of kids and children are adopted. There are a lot of adoptive families. We chose you. We wanted you. You are very precious to us. You are here and I am your daddy, and I will always be here for you. You are safe.