An insightful article about adoptive parents and the hospital interval was a topic of conversation this morning at Adoption STAR’s staff meeting.
Every Tuesday at Adoption STAR begins with a staff meeting. After going through various updates from all of the agency’s departments, Birth Parent Department Supervisor Sue Shaw chimed in with the following statement:
“An Adoption STAR client recently posted an article on Adoption STAR’s Rochester Adoptive Families Facebook page. Did any of you see it? It’s amazing. It’s as if we wrote it. It says everything we tell adoptive families about the hospital interval all the time. I think we need to try to share it and make sure that everyone reads it. I shared it on my Facebook page.” Adoption STAR’s Adoptive Parent Coach and Mentor Sue Reardon also indicated that she had already shared it via her Facebook page.
Here’s a link to the article that Sue Shaw brought up for conversation:
5 Things Hopeful Adoptive Parents Should Never Do at the Hospital
We too have written blog posts about the hospital interval including, but not limited to, the following:
Adoptive Parents at the Hospital
Being Involved in the Expectant Family(‘s) Birth Plan as an Adoptive Parent
Here’s an excerpt from one of the aforementioned blog posts that adoptive parents should keep in mind. Not every birthmother is necessarily going to share this perspective, but they are certainly entitled to do so if they so choose:
“In a training video developed by Spaulding for Children for use in the federally-funded Infant Adoption Awareness Training Project (and its ‘Understanding Infant Adoption’ training), a birthmother talks about how after delivery she wanted to spend as much time with her baby as possible, while simultaneously having as much privacy as possible because, ‘those were my three days with him….those were the only three days he was going to be mine.’ How could anyone disagree? How could anyone work to deprive her of that time (and that privacy?)”
Prospective adoptive parents owe it to themselves to read about, discuss, and prepare for the hospital interval. It’s an emotionally tenuous time, and one that warrants forethought. All parties involved will benefit dramatically as a result.