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Heartstrings, the journal of
Journeys Of The Heart Adoption Services, is published semi-annually.
Heartstrings Online features stories from recent editions.
Thoughts
On Naming Your Child
By Susan Tompkins, LCSW, and
Pamela B. Vergun, PhD, MPA
You may not think that naming an adopted child is
any different than naming a biological child. You may even resist the
idea that there is a difference between adopted and biological children.
Nevertheless, adopting a child is different in a number of ways than
having a biological child. Any adoption, by its very definition,
involves a child who was already connected to another family, his or her
birth family, before they came to us. A child who is ours through
adoption (whether through domestic or international adoption) may also
have a birth culture or community that they are moving away from. And,
they may already have a name.
Children who were adopted have many losses that
they have to cope with in their lifetime, most of them occurring at the
time of their adoption. Besides providing a loving and secure home for
our children, we must also find ways to minimize the losses and to honor
all that was in their past. In Raising Adopted Children: Practical
Reassuring Advice for Every Adoptive Parent, Lois Melina talks about how
grieving for these losses can arise years later and how parents need to
be mindful of this and prepare to help their child.
Adoptive families, especially those adopting a
child from a different ethnic group or country, can benefit from
celebrating their child’s birth culture. A name from their child’s birth
culture, and ideally spelled the way appropriate to that culture, is a
clear celebration of the parents’ respect and love for their child and
their culture. It sends a message to all those the child meets, even
those people who may never have occasion to learn more about the child’s
history, but who will know the child’s connection through their name.
(Also, as our society has become increasingly appreciative of the value
of diversity, a “different” name stands out less and less, so this
should be of less concern to parents than in previous decades.) Studies
clearly show that parents who are immersed in their child’s culture have
children with a stronger ethnic identity. And, the work of Beverly
Daniel Tatum and others also clearly demonstrates that adolescents (and
adults) of all races/ethnicities who have a positive ethnic identity
also have stronger self-esteem.
Another way to build your child’s self-esteem on a
secure foundation is to treat your relationship with your child’s birth
family with openness. For some families with very open adoptions this
may mean regular visits with the birth family, for others who adopted
from countries whose current laws and customs result in closed adoptions
(where not even the name of the birthparents is in the adoption
records), this means talking in general terms about the birth family
regularly with the child. Even for children coming from birth family
situations that were very troubled (such as children who were removed
from their biological homes by the state), honoring their birth family
through discussing the birth family with your children in a truthful yet
kind and empathetic way is important. This approach allows the child the
freedom to bring their birth family with them to their new home, at
least symbolically and emotionally. As Gail Steinberg and Beth Hall
write, “Whether you know your child’s birth family and have ongoing
contact or not, your children will have to resolve their dual family
membership to become healthy functioning adults… If birth parents are
not discussed openly, then children will assume that they shouldn’t be
spoken of. What will they do, then, with the questions that certainly
will arise? Your child will explore them apart from you and the family
unless you find a way to allow the process to unfold within the safety
of the family.” We want to honor their first family as much as we can
and allow them into our kinship network in whatever way we can. This
allows the child to freely have the connection that is rightly his or
hers and to know the love of all who have had a part in his or her life.
A very significant and easy way to minimize the
child’s losses is to keep the name that the child comes with. This does
several things—it honors her birth culture (if different than ours),
keeps her connection to it, and if her name came from her birth family,
it honors her birth family as well.
If your child’s birth family named her, there are
many positive reasons to keep these given names for your child. The
child’s name will probably be the only significant and highly symbolic
gift from the birth family that your child is able to keep her whole
life.
If you are able to develop a relationship with the
birth parent's) prior to or shortly after the birth of the child, try to
work out a name that you both like. This is a way of showing the birth
parents respect while building your relationship. This will be a
precious story to tell your child—how you and his birth parents together
chose his name.
As knowledge grows about the value of open
adoption and retaining connections to a child’s past, prospective birth
parents may be more likely to ask that the name they have chosen for the
child they are considering placing not be changed. Some birth mothers
(and fathers) will pull out of an adoption plan or cancel their plan to
place their child altogether if the family she chooses will not agree to
the name she wishes to give her child. Melina talks about how
prospective adoptive parents’ appreciation of the value of working as a
team with birth parents to choose a name can help to keep an open
adoption moving smoothly through the crucial initial stages. Although it
may not feel like it at times, a request such as this is an incredible
opportunity for the prospective adoptive parents to show their
sensitivity and caring for this child, the child’s past, and for the
birth parents.
If your child is coming to you with a name given
by the orphanage or foster care home where they lived, also consider
keeping it, at least as a middle name. When you keep this name from
their birth country as part of their official name, it honors your
child’s culture and shows your pride in their background.
When your child’s name comes from a different
language or culture, remember that spelling matters. Although in the
past many children (both adopted and remaining with their recently
immigrated birth family) had their name Americanized by family or
immigration agents, this is increasingly less common. Keeping the sound
of their name but changing the spelling (e.g., from Mei to May, from Lin
to Lynn, from Sofia to Sophia) is significant. It will matter to your
child, and to friends who may share their ethnicity. Steinberg and Hall
have a wonderful discussion of this in their book Inside Transracial
Adoption.
Names are a serious issue for adolescents and
adults who were adopted. Many adult adoptees speaking on panels, when
asked about their original names, end up sobbing as they tell the story
of the loss of their earlier name and what this additional loss has
meant to them.
As a result of the
research on adoption and on language and identity development more
generally, adoption experts and professionals (Fahlberg, Steinberg and
Hall, Melina, and many others) have learned that no child who knows his
or her name should have it changed. This is in part because changing the
name negates the child’s past. Keeping it allows at least one
thing—their name—to be constant when all else is changing around them.
Recent academic research dramatically supports this position, such as
the work by Dr. Heather Bortfeld at Texas A&M University. Dr. Bortfeld
found that recognition of names occurs often by 4 ½ months of age, and
an infant’s name provides a key to facilitate cognitive and linguistic
development:
Infants prefer to listen to their own names over another name by 4.5
months of age… Five-month-old infants can use their first name as a
‘foot-in-the-door.’… Apparently, infants’ recognition of their own names
helps them pull the word that follows it out of the speech stream… Not
only did five-month-old infants prefer to listen to the word paired with
their own names relative to the word paired with another name, but they
were not able to parse the word that followed another name out of the
speech stream. These findings indicate that infants’ recognition of
their names is a key tool they can use to break apart fluent speech
early on in development.
In the hope that it will help make your decision
of how to name your child an easier one and a joyful one, we would like
to share a few stories of how these thoughts on naming have played out
in our own families.
In the Tompkins family, we only have one child
whose birth mother gave him his name. He was complaining about it the
other day because it is different and people rarely get it right the
first time. “Why do I have this stupid name?” he asked. When I explained
to him that his birth mother gave him his name, that we love her and the
name she gave him, he got very quiet. After some time he said, “I like
it too.” He hasn’t complained since.
The Verguns have two children, one adopted
internationally, one domestically. Our oldest was named by her
birthparents and we became her parents when she was two going on three
months old. We kept her Marshallese first name, Miko. We added middle
names drawn from our family and her birthmother’s name and that reflect
her personality. When our son was born, we heard that his birthmother
had wanted to let us choose his name, but had been told she had to
choose one for the hospital records. She had chosen “Brian Michael,”
which seemed a variant of her own given names, “Barbara Michelle.”
Moreover, Michael was her father’s name. So, we told her we were
thinking of naming him “Isaac Brian Michael Vergun”. Our words seemed to
surprise and touch her, and she said, “The other names I was thinking of
were “Isaac” and “Isaiah.”
You have a wonderful process in front of you, the
naming of your child by adoption. If you do keep in some way their name
from their past, it will still be a gift you give them. How you go about
this naming process is up to you. The names you give your child will be
a powerful part of your child’s identity and can be a meaningful link to
their past. We hope you will find a way to keep this piece of their
heritage for them as an everyday symbol of your love and commitment to
them.
Rev. 4/5/06 |
