IT TAKES A SCHOOL TO HELP HEAL A WOUNDED CHILD

One of my chief tasks when working with children as a volunteer CASA (Court Appointed Special Advocate) was to prepare a comprehensive report about the children to whom I was assigned for court hearings. The report was addressed to the judge who would make critical and often difficult decisions about the children’s futures.   A CASA report is not meant to replace the reports of social workers, therapists, and others who worked with or represented the child but to give the judge an additional and independent source of information.

Preparing this report involved getting to know the children through regular visits to their homes.  It also required interviewing social workers, therapists, the children’s teachers, and anyone else who saw the children in question on some regular basis.

In my experience the most productive interviews were with teachers.  They were the best source of objective and accurate information about the children whose cases I was assigned.  That’s hardly surprising.  Apart from parents and foster parents, no one spends more time with children than their teachers.  They were keen observers.  They knew the children through the children’s behavior in their classrooms and when that was a problem, were usually aware that the child in question had a difficult home environment. 

In Children of the Manse I describe the contribution our school, a university teacher training school, made to our recovery from abuse, neglect, and two years in a county orphanage. Next to our home, Rufus Putnam School was the most important arena of our activity and our mother, herself a teacher, knew she had strong allies there in her campaign to restore our physical and emotional health.

Putnam teachers were observant witnesses of our behavior and development, a second opinion to our mother’s own of how we were doing. In the monthly written reports our teachers prepared, (Putnam did not give letter grades to elementary students) the four of us were often described as “easily over-stimulated,” even after we had made the initial adjustment to life in our new home.  At one time or another that first year, the reports described all of us as “tense.” “Mark is unable to lie still during midday rest periods. He plays with his hands and feet.” And of Janey, “She is gradually overcoming the tenseness she shows in all her work.”

Our teachers note that we were all abnormally self-critical and that I especially found failure difficult to accept. “He is likely to be discouraged when things do not work out the first time.  He needs to learn patience,” one teacher wrote of me. Mark’s teacher wrote of him, “Billy needs to develop more patience. He is so anxious in beginning  anything  that is new to him that he does not think as well as he can.” High levels of anxiety (clear evidence of a lack of confidence) as we undertook new tasks or projects were common to the four of us. We had other traits in common that were documented during our first years at Rufus Putnam.  Janey was the most difficult to understand but we all had speech problems. I wrote in the student’s section of a Putnam report, “I am trying to talk so people can understand me better.” Also, our ball handling skills were mediocre or worse because of the lack of any sports equipment at the orphanage. (That’s hard to believe, but true.) One playground supervisor at Putnam wrote of Mark, “He needs training in catching and pitching, and lacks coordination.”

But it was not just in observation that the teachers at Rufus Putnam contributed to our recovery.  We immediately responded to the emphasis at Rufus Putnam on the creative arts, none of which were given any attention at our former school near the orphanage.  We all responded to music in Ms. Morley’s twice weekly music classes after no music classes in our former school or at the orphanage.  “Janey is very musical,” Ms. Morley wrote. “Her dance interpretations are beautiful, graceful.” “Lewis is a good singer. He is much interested in all music activities.” “Mark works so hard in music and he is very musical.”

Of our fine Putnam teachers, my personal favorite was the art teacher, Mary Leonard, and her class my greatest delight. At that time I seemed to have more talent for art than anything else. Mary believed all children are natural creators, which is true, and that all children have artistic talent, which may be true.

Leonard exemplified a major John Dewey principle, building educational programs on the interests of the student.  Because she believed artistic creativity in the young was innate, it followed that the role of a good teacher, like that of a good coach, was to be an encourager and to create the conditions in which the student’s inherent talents could emerge. I believe Mary Leonard was one of the truly great elementary teachers of America.  She and all our Putnam teachers were talented educators and contributed much to building our confidence and restoring our mental health. 

ARE REUNIONS WITH BIOLOGICAL RELATIVES ALWAYS WISE?

Social and biological kinship; How do we know which is which or even which is more important?  Is it possible conventional families are more about social kinship than biological kinship?   Many of us make the assumption that the bonds and common behavioral patterns in good biological families are genetic.  We do not consider the possibility that some of those similarities that we think due to our genes could well be the result of many years of shared experience, especially shared emotional experience.   In my book Children of the Manse, I use the ties of marriage and the example of the Marines to make the point that non-biological relationships (the married are not normally biologically related to each other!) and the legendary brother bonds among Marines can be stronger than those between blood relations.     

Those of us who have lived with and remember our biological families, and are then adopted as older children into non-biological families, are able to compare the two.  I was eight years old when adopted with three younger siblings and had many memories of my biological relatives, most of them unhappy.  Once I felt safe and secure in my new family, I would not have welcomed the resumption of ties with biological relatives.  That was especially true after my adoptive mother loved me into opening my heart to a willingness to trust adults again.  In time she became my true and forever mother.  I had no interest in returning to a family that had wounded the four of us when we were very young. 

 

But two of my younger siblings, Janey and Michael, did not have memories of our biological family.  As adults they were influenced by the media’s presentation of reunions with biological mothers as wonderful, fulfilling events.  Michael’s therapist also favored such a meeting, perhaps influenced by one widely read writer on adoption issues who promoted the notion that adoptees could not possibly be whole human beings until they were united with their biological relatives and clan.

I advised against such a reunion, when Janey told me what she and Michael planned to do.  I said, without thinking,

“Don’t open doors you can’t close.” 

I was also concerned that such a reunion would hurt the feelings of the Luchs, who had given us so much.  But I was overseas at the time (I am a retired diplomat) and my counsel was ignored.

Rather than making Janey and Michael whole, the reunion turned out to be painful.    It isn’t pleasant to hear your biological mother spend most of the time during your first reunion blaming only your biological father.  Or hear her talk only about her second family and show no interest in learning about you and your children.  Or that she had never told the children of her second marriage that you exist.  That information was inadvertently disclosed many years later by an uncle. 

“It was all Me, Me, Me,” my sister later told me.  “She psychologically drove us out of the room.”   Michael left the luncheon table abruptly.  Janey followed Michael outside. 

“I had to get out of that room!” he explained.  “I’m so depressed.”

“So am I,” Janey said. 

Later Michael told me, “I wanted this woman to be interesting and there was no way I could make her interesting.” 

I am sure there are some happy reunions among those surrendered as infants who have lived for years with no knowledge of their biological relatives.  But, despite the way the media likes to present reunions with biological mothers, anecdotal evidence tells me most such events are disappointing.  And some are painful.    

STEVE JOBS, HERO AND FELLOW ADOPTEE

I don’t own an I-phone or an I-pod.  I am happy with my desktop computer which is not a Mac.  But I have for some time thought that Steve Jobs is a true hero that I would, in most respects, suggest my sons and grandchildren emulate.  We have too many false heroes in our society today who contribute little that is important or enduring.  Too many heroes that are the creation of publicists in Hollywood.  Too many immature and bad-acting celebrity athletes.  Too many drug addicted rock stars.  In brief, too many seriously flawed human beings we turn into celebrities in our popular culture.  

Much has been written recently about how Steve Jobs has made our lives better, how his imagination and drive have changed our world.   True enough in some degree. 

But I like his more modest impact of electronic technology on our lives:  “This stuff doesn’t change the world,” he said. “It really doesn’t.”   Which I take him to mean it does not change the fundamental human condition, which is also true.

Here are some of the reasons Steve Jobs is among my heroes:

----Because he had the courage to follow his vision.

----Because he was a true entrepreneur who created jobs and economic wealth for many.   

----Because he has added much to the positive side of our international trade balance.

----Because he proved that our ability to compete is sound and America’s future is still full of promise. 

Steve Jobs is also my hero because he was a mature human being.  I especially admire the manner in which he kept his private life private, mostly out of public view.  I only learned the day he died as did many others that Steve Jobs, like me, was an adoptee.  At the same time I learned that Jobs, also like me, had no interest in meeting his biological parents. He referred to his biological parents as his “sperm bank” and said that his adoptive parents were his parents 1000%.   That Jobs had no interest, with one important exception, in meeting with his “real family” just does not seem right to most Americans because most of us still believe that blood trumps the connections of the heart.  Adoptive relations, too many continue to think, cannot be as close or as intimate as biological relations.  The list of pejorative terms used over the decades to describe adoptive relations is long.  Among them are “legal fictions,” “unreal,”  “second best,”  “inferior.”  Twenty-five percent of Americans still believe it is more difficult to love a child that is not your own flesh and blood.  And nearly one third doubt that children can love adoptive parents as much as birth parents.  So we and the adoptive families we are a part of are not just different, which we certainly are.  Many Americans continue to see us as inferior to biological families, which we certainly are not.  I was old enough when adopted at the age of eight to have been attached to two members of my biological family, my father and a grandmother, and my experience is that my attachment to my adoptive mother became more powerful than any human relationship I had ever experienced before.     

The 70% of adoptees who show little interest in connecting with their biological relatives seem even odder to members of the adoptee search movement.  One leader of that movement claims that non-searchers, including Erik Erikson, the father of identity studies, are “repressed.”  In general she describes non-searchers as “less inquisitive, more passive and self-denigrating” than searchers.  What a bizarre and wrong-headed description of Steve Jobs!

I think we have to honor Steve Jobs by accepting as true exactly what he actually said, which is that his adoptive parents were the only real parents he had.  He even paid his adoptive father the ultimate compliment, saying that he wanted to be the father to his son that his adoptive father, Paul Jobs, had been for him.   When, near the end of Jobs’ life, his biological father publicly expressed an interest in a reunion, Jobs said:

“….I am not prepared, even if either of us was on our death beds, to pick up a phone to call him.” 

Though he did invite his biological mother to some events towards the end of his life, there is no evidence that they formed a close and loving relationship.   On the other hand, when 27 years old he connected with his biological sister, novelist Mona Simpson, of whom he said, “We’re family.  She is one of my best friends in the world.”  

The American bias for blood over heart is rather odd given our history as a nation. 

As a New Yorker commentary put it in l993:

“The United States might be said to have a special interest in the maintenance….of adoption: metaphorically, at least, adoption is what made America great, for America’s very nationhood is adoptive….and while we honor old ties, a substantial part of our very identity consist in the ability to transcend them with new ones….in the power that the heart has over blood.” 

            That’s it.  The power that the heart has over blood.  Love, not blood, is the most powerful reality in our human universe. That’s the way I see it and it is reasonable to think that’s the way Steve Jobs saw it.    

AS THE CHILD IS FED SO WILL SHE EAT

                                    AS THE CHILD IS FED SO WILL SHE EAT

We are reading a lot about obesity these days, especially and of most concern for our future, childhood obesity.  I owe normal weight without much effort and good health over a lifetime to the nutrition programs of my adoptive mother. 

Mom’s nutrition program was strict and specifically designed to restore the health of four children (me and my younger siblings) who had suffered neglect and abuse followed by two years in a county orphanage where the diet was mostly cheap carbohydrates and never included a fresh salad.   But much of her regime would be appropriate for any child today.  I describe some of that program in my book Children of the Manse.  Here is an excerpt:

“When it came to our health, our new parents spared no expense. On the other hand, carbonated soft drinks were never available in the manse. When we ate out, which we did rarely, hamburgers and French fries were not on “our” menu. Baloney sandwiches slathered with yellow mustard — the main course of school lunches at the children’s home — disappeared forever. The Luchs put baloney in the same category

as carbonated drinks and hamburgers and French fries. They were unhealthy and because they were unhealthy, they were not available.”  Yes, it was widely suspected in the l940s, seventy years ago, that many of what we now know as fast foods were unhealthy. 

The 1940s Department of Agriculture poster with the seven food groups was posted on our kitchen wall and we sometimes discussed it.  Mom’s health program was reinforced in a university sponsored elementary school I attended.  There we also discussed nutrition and the students, under adult guidance, took turns preparing a hot dish for lunch.  Over half a century later I sometimes make my favorite recipe from those days, a lima bean casserole.

I am an admirer of Warren Buffet but I wish he would sell the stock he has held for many years in Coca-cola.  Good investment?  Yes.  Good for the health of our nation?  No.   We have known for decades that sodas, especially in the Big Gulps that are drunk today, are not good for us.  As we grapple with obesity among our young, we will soon learn just how bad they are.    

A major emphasis of my adoptive mother’s diet for us was fresh fruits and vegetables.  A bowl for fruit in the kitchen was always full, mostly with oranges, bananas and apples.  Potato chips and other popular snacks were not available in the manse, but there was always a “relish” dish if we were hungry before dinner was served that included sliced carrots and celery and green peppers and, as a treat, ripe olives. 

Guess what my favorite snacks are today?  Fresh fruits and vegetables and a good salad of fresh vegetables I consider a necessary part of my every noon and evening meal.  I happen to live in the southern Willamette Valley of Oregon which grows a cornucopia of first quality organic produce of all kinds.  With the possible exception of France, I have never tasted better fresh vegetables anywhere.  If you want to hook your children on fresh vegetables, pay the extra to buy great tasting quality organic produce.  Their health over a lifetime is surely worth it. 

Well, you’re just lucky, you say?  Your good health is because of your genes.  Really?  I know of only two biological relatives amongst 25 or so that managed to live to the age of 80 and some, including my maternal grandmother, were obese.  It’s more likely I and my three siblings owe our normal weight without much effort and good health all through the years to my adoptive mother’s early nutrition program.  That program established food preferences and good habits that have lasted a lifetime.  We thank you, Mom!

ARE REUNIONS WITH BIOLOGICAL RELATIVES ALWAYS A GOOD IDEA?ON

           

Social and biological kinship; How do we know which is which or even which is more important?  Is it possible conventional families are more about social kinship than biological kinship?   Many of us make the assumption that the bonds and common behavioral patterns in good biological families are genetic.  We do not consider the possibility that some of those similarities that we think due to our genes could well be the result of many years of shared experience, especially shared emotional experience.   In my book Children of the Manse, I use the ties of marriage and the example of the Marines to make the point that non-biological relationships (the married are not normally biologically related to each other!) and the legendary brother bonds among Marines can be stronger than those between blood relations.     

Those of us who have lived with and remember our biological families, and are then adopted as older children into non-biological families, are able to compare the two.  I was eight years old when adopted with three younger siblings and had many memories of my biological relatives, most of them unhappy.  Once I felt safe and secure in my new family, I would not have welcomed the resumption of ties with biological relatives.  That was especially true after my adoptive mother loved me into opening my heart to a willingness to trust adults again.  In time she became my true and forever mother.  I had no interest in resuming relations with a family that had wounded the four of us when we were very young. 

 

But two of my younger siblings, Janey and Michael, did not have memories of our biological family.  As adults they were influenced by the media’s presentation of reunions with biological mothers as wonderful, fulfilling events.  Michael’s therapist also favored such a meeting, perhaps influenced by one widely read writer on adoption issues who promoted the notion that adoptees could not possibly be whole human beings until they were united with their biological relatives and clan.

I advised against such a reunion, when Janey told me what she and Michael planned to do.  I said, without thinking,

“Don’t open doors you can’t close.” 

I was also concerned that such a reunion would hurt the feelings of the Luchs, who had given us so much.  But I was overseas at the time (I am a retired diplomat) and my counsel was ignored.

Rather than making Janey and Michael whole, the reunion turned out to be painful.    It isn’t pleasant to hear your biological mother spent most of the time during your first reunion blaming only your biological father.  Or hear her talk only about her second family and show no interest in learning about you and your children.  Or learn that she had never told the children of her second marriage that you exist.  That information was inadvertently disclosed many years later by an uncle. 

“It was all Me, Me, Me,” my sister later told me.  “She psychologically drove us out of the room.”   Michael left the luncheon table abruptly.  Janey followed Michael outside. 

“I had to get out of that room!” he explained.  “I’m so depressed.”

“So am I,” Janey said. 

Later Michael told me, “I wanted this woman to be interesting and there was no way I could make her interesting.” 

I am sure there are some fulfilling reunions among those surrendered as infants who have lived for years with no knowledge of their biological relatives.  But despite the way the media likes to present reunions with biological mothers, anecdotal evidence tells me many such events are disappointing.  And some are painful.    

LISTENING TO A CHILD

My biological paternal grandfather lived next door to me and my brothers for three years and paid no attention to us at all.  I have not a single memory of him.  The same grandfather, known for his piety and daily Bible reading, had eight grandchildren in the local county orphanage five miles from his residence.  He did not visit even one of them once.   

Shortly after I became a fostered child at the age of eight, I and three siblings were taken by our new foster parents to visit maternal grandparents some 300 miles away.  I rose early in the farmhouse on the first morning after we arrived and my new grandfather invited me to walk with him half a mile or so to milk his cow.  I tell about that first morning in Children of the Manse.

“We walked side by side along the unpaved county road in a fog so dense it seemed like we were the last two human beings on earth.  At first I could hear only the scrunch of gravel under the boots he called artics, but soon we were talking with each other.  His voice was friendly.  He asked me about my school work and what I liked to do.  He didn't talk a lot about himself.  He asked me question after question.  He seemed to be listening closely to what I was telling him.  Being with him was like being with Lonnie (my much loved biological father) because Grandpa Coulter seemed to be genuinely interested in me and that made me happy.  I decided I wanted this new grandfather to like me.”

                         The Difference in Grandfathers

What a difference in grandfathers!!!  My biological grandfather who lived next door to me and my brothers took on interest in us at all.  My foster grandfather showed interest in us from the day he first met us.    

The two men otherwise had much in common.  They both began their adult lives as rural school teachers.  Both had raised families of six children, boys and girls.  Both were avid readers and both had active minds.   But one paid no attention to his biological grandchildren at all.  The other engaged his foster grandchildren at once and he  listened to them.       

Sadly, Grandpa Coulter died four years later.  But something strange happened.  We were with him for only a month each summer for four summers and yet he became, in my mind and in the minds of my siblings, the most important adult in our lives other than our adoptive father and mother.

Why?  I think mostly because Grandpa Coulter took an interest in us.  He taught us how to sharpen a scythe with a whetstone and how to build an outdoor fire place with cement and rocks from the river and how to repair a fence to keep our rented pony from escaping.  He took us to work with him, one by one, in his 1937 brown Chevy and shared with us his favorite brown sugar sandwiches.  He took all four of us at once twice a week to a power house on his property that pumped three modest oil wells. 

While pumping the wells, he explained how the gas engine machinery worked, and gave us the whole history of the great “oil excitement” that took place when he was a boy and oil derricks were so thick they replaced forests of trees in Clarion County, Pennsylvania.  Titusville, where oil was first pumped with steam technology, was less than 100 miles north of his farm.  He talked about Colonel Drake, usually credited with the first productive oil well, as if he was a friend.  He took down from a shelf in his power house a treasure, a small bottle of oil from that well.  But most of all he who had so much to teach us also listened to us.  That’s how he became our true and forever grandfather.      

BE GLAD YOU WERE ADOPTED

I’m glad I was adopted.  I wasn’t always glad I was adopted.   I did not like feeling different from my school friends, especially in my teens. But as I became an adult and developed self-confidence, I did not mind being different.  And then, later, I began to see some advantages in being adopted.  I’ll discuss two of those advantages in this blog and return to this important theme later. 

More Opportunities to Learn  

The first reason I’m glad I was adopted is that adopted children have more opportunities to learn.  They will even add points to their I.Q. in their new adoptive homes.  This is because the socioeconomic status of adoptive families is higher than non-adoptive families and even higher than the families from which most adoptees come.  Adoptive parents are likely to be better educated, more successful in their professional lives, and to provide better role models for their children.  Adoptive parents are also more likely to create a stimulating environment for their children and give more support to their children’s education. 

There were no college graduates in my biological father’s eastern Kentucky family.  He himself quit school in the 4^th grade.  My biological mother’s family was working class.  She quit school to marry in the l0th grade.  The social workers who handled our case feared I and my three younger siblings would be overwhelmed in our new adoptive environment.  But we thrived.   I was starved for books after two years in a county orphanage that had no books. One of my early impressions in my new adoptive home was the presence of books everywhere, on open shelves, behind glass cases, on tables, in boxes, and on desks.  My new home was two blocks from a university; we attended a university-sponsored elementary school, were read to most days, and were taken to concerts and given all the cultural advantages a small university town in southern Ohio could offer.

                          Intelligence and How to Get It

Richard E. Nisbett, Distinguished University Professor at Michigan in his 2009 book, Intelligence and How to Get It, concludes that being adopted adds 14 points on average to a child’s I.Q.  Those adopted into middle class families gain 16 points and those adopted into upper middle class families, 20 points. 

If Nisbett is right, I and my three siblings were 20 point winners.  The result is that three of us have college degrees and two of us earned graduate degrees.  My sister, whose IQ is equal to that of her brothers, did not finish college (it was the l950s!) only because she decided to marry instead.  Of our nine children, eight are college grads with degrees from Wesleyan, Cornell, Tufts, and the Air Force Academy.  Six earned graduate and professional degrees from Georgetown, Virginia, Texas, and Ohio State.  

The Example of Steve Jobs

The second reason I am glad I am an adoptee is that we try harder.  Most of us grow up feeling different and because we know that we are different from the norm, we feel -- or are made to feel-- inferior.   Adoptees are outsiders.  They are evidence of failure, a falling short of what our culture thinks is supposed to be.  They don’t quite belong. 

So to prove our worth, like Avis we try harder.  The result is that adoptees are often high achievers.  The incredible history of Steve Jobs is only the latest case in point.  I don’t wish to presume to analyze a complex and gifted man, but I’ll bet that at least some of the amazing Jobs focus and fierce drive came from the perception of himself as an adoptee who felt (or had been made to feel) different and  therefore, in the minds of some, inferior.  Feeling different is OK.  But being made to feel inferior is not OK.  My point is that many adoptees, probably including Steve Jobs, feel they have something to prove to the mainstream of American society.   Their worth.   

Steve Jobs had other qualities I admire.  He kept his private life private.  He refused to become a celebrity in an insanely celebrity-focused popular culture.  He spoke highly of his adoptive parents.  While he did form a bond with his biological sister, he did not seek relationships with his biological parents, insisting the parents who raised him through the years and loved him were his true mother and father.  That is not a reality many Americans are yet ready to accept, including some adoptees who argue that you cannot possibly be a whole human being without forming bonds with your biological family.  I especially liked that Jobs said he hoped he could be as good a father for his children as his adoptive father had been for him.  That’s the way I feel about my adoptive mother.

 Steve Jobs is not alone as a high achiever who happens to have been adopted.  So was the founder of Wendy’s fast food chain. So is the founder of Domino’s Pizza.  And so is Larry Ellison, co-founder and CEO of Oracle.   And many others. 

There are other reasons I am glad I was adopted.  I will discuss those in future blogs.