Hi all
We have previously adopted 2 fantastic sons who are now teens and are trying to adopt for the 2nd time. We remember how difficult it was in the first few years particularly at school with nosy parents and gossipers asking personal questions about why are the children adopted?, and are they brothers?, our reaction was to say that it was personal and for us to know only. People used to get very offended as they were after information about the child and i'm sure some people didn't understand how sensitive these questions are. for the 2nd question we found also bad as it shouldn't matter to people whether they are full brothers or not. I wonder how other adoptive parents deal with this with friendship groups, and gossip. We were trained to protect their identity and past history as that is all the children have. And to exploit it would bring much gossip. We also used to get frustrated when we kept being asked the same questions by the same people on different occasions and had to train our adopted children how to deal with this. We found that being a gay couple actually held less stigma than the fact the children were adopted.
Please let me know what strategies you use to counter act this as it would be interesting to know. Now that we are hopefully adopting for the 2nd time, it's important for us to protect the next child.
