Adoption and the Psychological Impact of Entitlement

Each day, single men and women are making the life impacting choice to adopt a child. Raising an adopted child, often, poses many new exciting challenges from emotional to financial to physical. With the added dynamic of single parenting, adoption can be one of the most challenging life experiences a single adult take on in their lifetime, even more complex and rewarding than any academic or social achievement.

One such challenge to any adoption is this feeling of entitlement. For two-parent families, the entitlement feeling is often picked up by one parent or the other, if not by both. However, for single adopting parents, learning to engage and nurture the feeling of entitlement is crucial to the emotional growth and security of the parent-child relationship as well as the adopted child's own personal emotional growth.

For the adopting parents, oftentimes, the emotional and psychological connection to an adopted child begins during the paper tedious adoption process. With the adoption process comes the focus upon the connection to the child and the feeling, within the adopting parent, that the child is truly yours and belongs to you, unconditionally. However, as a single adopting parent, it is equally important that the adopted child also make this same entitlement connection to the adopting parent; that they are entitled to the parent and the unconditional love that comes with the parent as if it were their own biological parent.

Entitlement, in the single parent adopting family, is not an emotional and spiritual connection that occurs overnight. In fact, the depth to which entitlement is bonded, between a single parent and adopted child, is a lifelong process. Oftentimes, unfortunately, this feeling of entitlement, by either the parent or the adopted child, may wane during periods of adverse activity or when family relationships are strained. For this reason, especially for single parents who are adopting a child, maintaining the emotional connection to the adopted child is crucially important especially when times are hard or may not be smooth. In other words, always maintaining that feeling of entitlement is necessary to the well being and emotional health of the adopted child, especially in periods when relationships or family issues may be adverse.

To strengthen psychological and emotional entitlement within the adopted child, child psychologists commonly recommend a variety of issues to be addressed, depending on the age at which the child was adopted. First, if the child was adopted at a time other than infancy, the feeling of intimacy or connecting with another human being may be challenging primarily due to the initial intimacy bond, associated with birth, which may have been broken abruptly. For this reason, it is important, to build a child's entitlement emotions and psyche slowly, to create a sense of an intimate connection as only parent and child can make.

With this loss of intimacy at a young age, many adopted children will also suffer from some degree of grief and loss over the removal from the biological parent or family. For an adopting single parent to gain the strength of an entitlement bond with the adopted child, this grief and loss, associated with separation from the biological family, should be assessed and diligently worked on within a professional and non-confrontation psychological session, preferably with a child psychologist who specializes in adoption transitions.

As with any adoption process, the time and commitment will begin as soon as the inquiry is made with the adoption agency. From this time, many single adopting parents begin to create this feeling of entitlement even before they have met or been introduced to the child they will adopt. Remember, however, this feeling of entitlement may not be mutual with the child, at first, but can be fostered over many months and years of love and commitment between adopting parent and adopted child.