Insiders Adoption Journal

Nature vs. nurture is a question that has been asked for decades.  Does your DNA or your life experience speak louder into who you grow up to be? The testing has been done and the results are in... yes, it is both; however, it STRONGLY leans toward nurture or environmental exposures as the greatest factor impacting the outcome on today's children. 

It is interesting that proponents of the argument for our biology being the strongest factor for childhood outcomes would point to adopted children as proof that the very DNA that adopted children were made up of would likely be the reason for difficult adoptee children in an otherwise "healthy" home. Studies have since shown that the very fact that these children NEEDED to be adopted led to one of the greatest trauma events any child could ever experience simply in needing to be separated from the biological mother.

As an adoptive mom to 11 children myself, I know adoption is a HUGE blessing. And yet I also know that it is...

Let's be honest mama, there are some seasons in our home in which we just aim to get through- to survive. We are simply trying to keep our house from burning down and our kids all alive! And in that process of just "getting by", we lose ourselves. We struggle to remember what it was like to have energy, to have a bounce in our step, and to look forward to something. We pour so much into the needs of everyone around us that we go to bed and wake up bankrupt inside, day after day. Can you feel me? 

This was the case for me in several seasons of my life as an adoptive mom to trauma exposed kids. They won. Their trauma perpetuated as trauma in my home and between their issues and the issues that they made my issues, I would crawl under the covers and dread having to come back out from them. There was one place in the whole house that felt safe, and it was my bed. I spent my day counting down the time until I could crawl back into my cocoon of safety. 

Since those days, I have...