Language--Talk about your rabbit holes. Example: think about "moonbeams." This word means "rays of light from the moon". But really, the moon does not give off light. It appears to do so because of the reflected light bouncing off of it from the sun. So moonbeams are "real," but they are not "Real." Or, the word "moonbeams" is a misnomer--We really mean "sunbeams." But we commonly assign to the moon the property, this action--"shining"--that is really only accomplished via the actions of another entity--the sun...
I think the term "adoptive parenting" is a similar phenomenon. So, continuing my exploration yesterday of metaphors and adjectives and problematizing common concepts used in family research, I turn to that here.
2) Adoptive Parenting.
The word parenting, if I remember my lessons from Mrs. Holloway's English class, is in the form of the part of speech called a gerund. That's when you take an ing-suffixed word and use it as a noun. So it's like a two-for-one: a noun that's active! A verb that names! A verbish noun and nounish verb!
Further defining parenting, however, is tricky. How do you recognize it? I suspect that we might paraphrase Forrest Gump for the answer: "Parenting is as parenting does." Parenting involves those activities that are performed by...parents. And a parent is pretty easy to identify, right? That's someone who creates a child, and/or who is rearing a child who is related to them biologically. A parent--here I am speaking from over four years of experiences--carries a being within her body (if the parent is female) and wipes runny noses and reads "Goodnight Moon" and makes sandwiches with the crust cut off and changes dirty diapers and pays for child care and picks up foot-maiming Happy Meal toys from the floor in the middle of the night and oh, so much more.
If a parent rears a biological child, an adoptive parent is someone rearing a child related to them via legal adoption. And thus adoptive parenting is...what exactly? Everything I just wrote about the things parents do are also applicable to adoptive parents. So is adding the adjective "adoptive" another way to say "less than" or "not really real" parenting? Some may think so, though I think not so much now as in past times. Certainly "adoptive" does not have the same cultural baggage as "step," for example. (Just think of all the fairy tales involving "wicked step-mothers" or the saying about being treated like a "bald-headed step-child"...)
I think in many research contexts the adoptive adjective is added for clarity: samples are reported as being composed of 100 biological and 100 adoptive parents.
But still, adoptive parenting?
The way this has been talked about in MTARP and other adoption research projects/writing is that there may be additional/different tasks associated with doing parenting when you are rearing a child who became part of your family through adoption. There may be different "mind sets" involved, too...maybe, too, different "pathways" or "trajectories" through the family life cycle. These "extras"--these things in addition to the wiping runny noses and forever stepping on pointy toys in bare feet and such--are made all the more interesting from a research perspective in that the environment in which this parenting takes place is not necessarily set up well to assist parents in accomplishing them.
One example: Many kids in school at some point do a "family tree" exercise. They may even be given paper with a pre-printed arboreal graphic, onto which they are to put the names of a mom and dad, two sets of grammas and grampas, and so on. One extra task that adoptive parenting involves--having to do with helping children integrate an identity that makes sense of two sets of parents--is not particularly well-supported by such an activity.
I have been fortunate in that the specific adoption research project in which I have been involved has taken a "strengths" perspective from the very beginning. I think it is easy for research on "other parenting" (adoptive, African American, gay and lesbian, single parent, etc) to take on a "moonbeam" quality: The parenting becomes illuminated only by the actions performed (and not performed) by "traditional" parents. Middle class White parents do parenting in a certain way? Then their way is labelled "X" and the ways low income and other parents do parenting are defined (often negatively) with the left over light.
Again, I think the deficit view of adoptive parenting is waning, if not pretty near extinct. Partly this may be a function of the greater realization (and this, partly due to research contributions) of the role that early, preadoption environment and genetics play in "shaping" the child--child outcomes (both positive and negative) are not all due to adoptive parenting. Maybe this has to do with the recognition of the great diversity of parenting done by a great diversity of parents and others.
But an interesting thing (and to me a more important research topic) happens when we bring the additional tasks of adoptive parenting (or any other kind of "other parenting") to light: We find similar tasks that many (if not all) parents could (or sometimes even should) do, but we never thought about it or noticed it because no-adjective-parenting is just so taken for granted and familiar to us. For example, when we research adoptive families and learn of the ingenious ways that some parents are able to incorporate unknowns, painful histories, and complexities into sensitive communication with their children, we can have models for how all parents can sensitively communicate mysteries, pain, and complexity to their children. Or, we find aspects of the environment that do not help with adoptive parenting that could be changed for the benefit of more or even all parents--from changes as simple as giving children blank paper to represent "their family" as they wish, to leave policies allowing people time from work to give birth, adopt, or care for an ailing family member of any age.
It could be that parenting as the default bio-adult in an environment that is set up specifically for you and your kind of parenting is not "real" parenting. Parenting that must be more intentional, more consistently and differently creative, and even a little subversive because the environment is not well matched to it--that kind of parenting may be the true parenting. (The sun and the moon, switched...)