Jane Brown - Response to Executive Concerns
Hello David,
I would be more than happy to share more about what I am doing with Playshops-- my children's workshops, as you've requested. I would also be very happy to offer this in your area. If after you read through this, you have more questions, please do not hesitate to contact me for further information. If you know that you are interested in planning a Playshop event, it would probably be a good idea to propose several dates to me, as I am being invited to present them quite often and need advance notice to be able to make a committment to a group. To contact me directly, my telephone number is: (480) 451-9831.
For as long as I have been a part of the adoption community, adoptive parents have been building and participating in support groups. Although parents often discuss how they feel and think as members of adoptive families while they socialize with each other, their children rarely if ever talk with each other about adoption or growing up adopted on their own. They are extremely curious about what other adoptees think, feel, wonder about, etc.. but have no way to know and have no way to assess whether they are "normal". Thus, they can tend to feel isolated even if they have siblings who are also adopted. Most cope by suppressing and denying any interest in talking about adoption. Many adult adoptees have shared how lonely that was for them and how their way was fraught with feelings of sadness, differentness, anger, shame, and awkwardness because they were certain they were naughty and ungrateful for thinking about adoption. Most express the wish that they could have had the support of friends who had also joined their families by way of adoption so that they would have known that they were normal, healthy people who had a good future ahead. It was not enough for them to hear this from their parents because they knew that their parents had not grown up adopted or racially different from their parents, extended families, and most of their peers and really could not fully understand their issues and concerns.
Children learn well in groups-- and they start to draw closer and closer to their peers as they strive for more independence from their parents, so group educational experiences are a natural. That means that what they learn and teach each other in childrens' groups can reinforce what they are learning at home with their parents about what it means to be growing up adopted and what it is like to have been transracially and/or internationally adopted. Groups take the burden off of the individual child. He/she can hear what others have to say, choose to share or not share an individual experience or opinion, and participate regardless of whether choosing to speak or remain silent. It is much easier for a child to reveal feelings, especially difficult or confusing ones if someone else, similar in age and living with similar circumstances shares too. It is always comforting to have someone be able to empathize because they have "been there" --very different from only having others be able to sympathize.
With this in mind, I designed workshops-- actually Playshops-- to enable children to explore together what it means to grow up as adoptees and what it means to be a person of color in a mostly-caucasian oriented society. The Playshops are open to young adoptees whether they were adopted domestically or inernationally, into same-race families or transracially, and to their non-adopted siblings who also need help exploring what adoption is all about and what it means in their lives to be part of an adoptive family. While I did not originally intend specifically for the Playshops to be therapeutic, they are. They proactively teach children skills for dealing with societal misperceptions about adoption and race; and help them to better integrate what we need and want them to know or think and feel about being members of adoptive families. Those who attend seem to be able to transfer the skills they learn in Playshops to settings in which they are mostly with non-adopted peers. They also seem to be more open with their parents and to know better how to articulate their thoughts and feelings with their parents after having participated in these group experiences. The Playshops help adopted and non-adopted siblings to understand each other better and to have empathy with their sibling's sometimes complicated role as a member of their family.
The Playshop sessions are comprised of multi-sensory activities. We engage in creative movement, plays, drawing, writing, talking, tug-o-wars (tug-o-feelings). We pour water, we stick and unstick labels onto people. We work with all sorts of props-- from puppets, to jelly beans, to braiding yarn, to cups of water, to eggs (and all sorts of other things). That is how children take in and process information best-- through their senses. Different children learn in different ways, so the activities emcompass all sorts of sensory experiences that are fun and help them to access their creativity, plus broaden their knowlege.
I always ask support groups to help me to find a young adult adoptee to help facilitate the groups. Its terrific when we can match the adult adoptee to the children in terms of race and gender, but not absolutely necessary. It is,however, important to find an adoptee of color if the children or some of the children have been adopted transracially. The children learn a great deal from seeing, hearing from, and interacting with that individual. (i.e. Did you know that someone could be a grown-up and STILL be adopted???-- most children don't know that). Or I can spontaneously ask the young adult adoptee if she was asked questions about being adopted when she was young-- and whether people still ask, now that she is grown up. I interview the teen or adult adoptee to make sure that they are appropriate and positive role models for the children-- someone they can look up to and hope to be like when they are grown or nearly grown. Because our children cannot look to us for clues as to what they will be like when they are adults in exactly the same way that their non-adopted peers or siblings can look to their parents, our children really benefit from having these role models in their lives. Being amongst people with whom they share ethnicity is also important, but there is a special connection that children usually make with a teen/young adult adoptee that is magic!
There are several goals for the Playshops. One is to encourage the children to deepen their understanding of adoption amongst their adopted peers. Another is to offer them a model of an older person who grew up adopted and is happy, successful, and interesting-- but who is still thinking about being an adoptee sometimes. Another is to arm them with skills that they will need to contend with stereotypes about adoption or race in a mostly non-adopted and Caucasian-dominated society. Another is to build and utilize a network-- to talk and share with each other AND to talk more openly with their parents.
I have worked with adoption support groups designed to serve children who've come from the same country or with adoptive parent groups who have networked with other adoption support groups so that the children who attend the workshop are of many different races and ethnicities. Both types of groups work well. Children get different things from each of those types.
When all of the children are of one ethnicity or country, we focus in on what typically happens in adoptions from that country and issues pertaining specifically to that. We might, for example, in a group of Chinese-born children hint at gender issues in that we might practise becoming Junior Woman (peaceful)Warriors (although I have had groups of all girls with one or two boys and then need to modify). In a group of AA (mostly) transracially adopted children, we might focus in on transitions from birth families to foster homes to adoption and on the stereotypes people face over race.
When the group is mixed, we can look at different type of adoptions-- children who were in foster homes or orphanages, traditional adoptions or those in which children know their birth parents, adoptions in which some children know lots about their birth history and others know little or nothing. We can also explore diversity a bit differently.
I work with children who are age five and older. I divide the children in age appropriate groupings (varies from group to group. For example, when I worked with FCC in San Francisco, the oldest children were eight and nine and there were only three of four over the age of eight, but in Sacramento, there are children up to the age of twelve since their workshop was open to families who have adopted from a variety of countries). I try to keep the numbers down-- no more than fifteen to twenty in a group. Twenty five-year-olds are LOTS to manage-- and when the groups are too big, the children can't get as much out of them and I am less able to focus on individual children along with the group as a whole. I'd prefer to limit the five's to no more than fifteen to a group. If the group gets larger than that, I request that the adoptive family support group or agency find at least one more teen/adult adoptee to help. Twenty children age seven through nine or a few more than twenty children age ten+, though, is not a problem because their attention span is greater, their desire to be in close proximity to mom is not as great, and their interest level is high.
In the follow-up session, a Parents' Wrap-Up, I share what the specific activities were that the children had been engaged in, what parents might expect over the next few days and weeks as far as how much their children might tend to tell about what they did, and how parents can and should respond to encourage their children to keep talking. I do not, though, share about what individual children said or did during the sessions since I could not possibly remember what each said/did and the children need to know that they have a little privacy (that everything won't be reported). I do though, make sure I knew a child's name and find and talk to their parent, if I had a concern about a specific child. That has never happened, but there could always be a first time.
So far, wherever I have presented the Playshops, they have filled very quickly. There has always been a waiting list. The feedback has been overwhelmingly positive so that I have been asked to return to do more whenever I present the Playshops. Most of my adult workshops are now filled to capacity too because I think that groups are eager for educational experiences. I have been on the adoption speakers' circuit for many years, so I now have a pretty good idea what adoptive parents need and want to hear about, I think. It helps that I am an adoptive mom and understand adoption from that perspective. It also helps that I have had pretty broad experience in the adoption community, too. I've been blessed to have been in the right place at just the right time to be able to learn and understand the difference in perspective amongst the members of the adoption triad (adoptive parents-- birth parents-- adoptees).
When groups are interested in having me come, I help them consider how to make it possible. I consider that part of the job! My airfare and fee has to be covered, so I've worked out with groups how they can make sure that they can pay for these things, the room, any supplies (negligible in cost), etc. and come out at least a little ahead. I work with them on creating advertisement fliers, so that families understand what their children will get out of the experience. FCC-San Francisco and FCC-Portland, Oregon would be groups to contact to find out how they did this and whether it was worthwhile.
One of the best ways to make sure that expenses are covered and that there is adequate help to plan an event like this is to network with other adoptive parent support groups and to ask local agencies to help sponsor it. Also, adoption organizations like NACAC will often be willing to help sponsor educational events and some corporations (i.e. Toys "R Us) offer grants for parenting groups and organizations that would enable them to offer an educational event for parents. Some groups have successfully written grant proposals to obtain funding to be able to bring Playshops to their area. I work in many arenas in the adoption community. I have children who were born in Korea and China and have also adopted a teen through the U.S. Special Needs program. I have placed children from those countries and many others. I have worked in both international and U.S. adoption so agencies usually know that I can provide experiences for children no matter where they were born and adopted.
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Jane Brown is both an adoption social worker/educator and an adoptive & foster mother of nine children, some of whom are now grown. She lives and works in Arizona. She serves on the editorial board of Adoptive Families Magazine and writes a regular parenting column for the publication. She is the creator of Adoptive Playshops which is a series of workshops for adopted children age five+, their non-adopted siblings, and adoptive parents in which children are helped through playful, multisensory activities to explore growing up in an adoptive family and racial identity, plus develop skills for dealing with societal attitudes and beliefs about adoption and includes helping children resist and confront racism and bullying. She can be reached at: janebrown77@earthlink.net or at: (602) 690-5338.