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A policeman came to school last week for the “Don’t Talk To Strangers” talk. It’s an annual thing in our schools and nicely tailored to each age group, which means they add in tips about Internet strangers as the kids get older.
But as an adoptive mother, I keep feeling that one piece is missing from the talk. I mean, after all, 18 months ago, I was a total stranger to my younger son. And he was not only encouraged to talk to this stranger, he was told to take the stranger’s hand, leave the only place he had ever known, get on a plane and fly halfway around the world with her. So who’s a stranger now, and how do I make him understand that? Will it be clear if I group the world into good strangers and bad?
In the blogs about children who were adopted from Russia as toddlers, I often see reports that the child is wary of strangers, as Elle noted in a recent post on “Unexpected Miracles”. My older son, adopted at 18 months, took a long time to warm up to his uncles and grandfather.
But my younger son was nearly five when he came to America. And so I thought that, maybe before I think about how to help him distinguish a “stranger”, I need to understand what he understands by the word “Mom”. After all, that word might be equally incomprehensible to an adopted child–particularly one who has been in an orphanage his whole life.
Deborah wrote last month on “The Adoption Adventure” that one of her children was calling many adults at his preschool “Mama” and she worried about his attachment to her.
But “Mama” is just a sound until you attach some meaning to it. Maybe to an older adopted child, as he puzzles out the English language and his new life, “Mom” just means “lady” at first. Maybe he has expanded its meaning to “lady I don’t know who sounds different from the ladies I know now”. Under that scenario, it’s entirely plausible that “Mom” could then be applied to any woman speaking English. “Mom” makes and serves food, so what is it about this word that makes it different from “cook” or “waitress”? “Mom” puts on bandages, but how is she different from “nurse”?
When is it, and how is it, that this sound, “Mom”, comes to signify “somebody who will love me and care for me no matter what I do for the rest of my life”? When does “Mom” stop carrying a tinge of “stranger”?
I’ve set up a thread on the Russia forum called Talking About Strangers. I hope that we can start a conversation there about how you’ve talked about this important topic with the children you have adopted from Russia.
