I'm Not Telling

I have shared a lot about what we might expect when bringing our kids home. But as the theoretic transitions to reality, my words will become more edited. I look forward to sharing their cute stories but I have no intentions of opening up their fears, hurts, and most personal information in such a public forum as a blog. If I knew someone who was considering adoption, I would certainly be willing to share more (on a one-on-one basis) in order to help them as others have helped me. I hope that I will be successful in finding this balance of helping other's learn, sharing my anticipation and joy, and respecting the privacy of our babies-to-be. I am so pleased that so many people are interested to follow our journey and I feel the need to explain why I would suddenly start holding back in how much I share.

This is part of an article that I recently read which I thought was very good:

Adoptive parents struggle with the public/private nature of adoption all the time. They are challenged to balance their family's sometimes obvious public status as an adoptive family with the privacy of the family's individuals. Most adoptive families are proud of their families and want to present a positive attitude about adoption to others, particularly their children. The precarious task for adoptive parents is to be open enough about adoption that their children don't see adoption as a secret or as something to be ashamed of, while at the same time taking care not to compromise the right to privacy of everyone involved. So, even as they're trying to protect their children's privacy, adoptive parents are also trying to normalize adoption for their children and for others around them.

An important reason that parents try to control the dissemination of their chldren's information has to do with the fact that the child himself, particularly a young child, often does not yet know all of his own personal information. Parents are responsible for safeguarding facts about the child's life for the child until he or she is of an appropriate age to hear it. If the child's information becomes too commonly known, adoptive parents risk the child hearing things before he or she is ready. One adoptive mother tells of her daughter learning she had biological siblings in a very abrupt way, when another sibling used it to wound her in an argument. The parent had intended to discuss this under gentler circumstances, and when she felt her daughter was ready to hear it. This mother wished she'd been more careful about sharing her daughter's personal information with others, even within her own family.

link to the full article