Learning - Older Adopted Children - Part 2

Note: I will be driving for the better part of today as we near our road trip destination.  As a result, I probably won't be able to respond to comments until tonight or tomorrow.  But please don't let this stop you...I welcome, crave even, your continued thoughts/insights/encouragement.

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A couple of days ago, I shared a post I'd written on a yahoo forum for parents of older adopted children, detailing a few of Seth's learning challenges.  This post is a follow-up to Part 1 on learning as it concerns older children of adoption, and there will be (at least) one more post coming on this subject as soon as I can finish putting it together.  Forgive my partially-thought-out words here...they are inadequate to convey the stuff swirling and whirling through my brain these days...why else would I be awake past 2am trying to put a few last commas and periods into place?

I'd like to break this post into three or four parts, and I'm afraid it will be a long one as I work these things through in my mind.  Obviously, skip this post if it's just too much!

Part 1:  The responses of parents to my yahoo forum post.
Part 2:  The different response of one parent and my reaction to her suggestion.
Part 3:  An additional response by another parent and the wheels that start clicking into place.
Part 4:  Final thoughts.

I have obtained permission from each person I quote here, whether I quote him/her directly or indirectly.

Part 1: The responses of parents to my yahoo forum post.

I have posted about Seth's learning challenges on two different yahoo forums, though the one I shared with you the other day was more detailed.  On both occasions, it seemed as if the topic was a very  welcome one and one that has not had a lot of air time.  It also seemed as if the issue was one that greatly perplexed many parents.  And on both occasions of posting, I received many responses from parents who have adopted older children...responses that were strikingly similar to what I experience at home.

I believe that all who talked about ongoing/lasting issues spoke of children who had been adopted at age 5+.  Again, this is consistent with our experience with Seth and Lizzie; although Lizzie manifested identical issues for many months, something changed early this year and she is now flourishing in her learning...even at age 4.

Frankly, it was a relief to read people's responses...I felt less alone.  Most of the parents gave examples of situations that seemed eerily familiar.  Many parents talked about their child's attempts to learn the names/sounds of letters; and many expressed the odd 'gaps' in their child's vocabulary and memory, etc.  Many (not all) of the responders also talked about their children's level of malnutrition upon coming home and many (not all) parents said that they had concluded that malnutrition or stress or recovery from trauma or some combination of these things were what influenced their children's learning.  We all shared a frustration that makes us feel like we're banging our heads against a wall.  Did I tell you that my hair stylist asked me a couple of weeks ago where all of my new grey hairs had come from?  Now you know the answer.

Snippets of parents' responses included these:

• "I spent two years completely perplexed as to why she could not learn her ABC's."
• "...called numerous neuropsychologist about testing (they all said it was too soon)."
• "Everyone says she is so smart (which she is) but in my opinion difficulty learning is a learning disability."
• "It took her 1 1/2 years to learn the alphabet!  But quick as a whip with other things."
• "I HAVE experienced this with my son who was also malnourished...he came home at 5.5....I totally understand your frustration."
• "I could have written your post."
• "Just yesterday the lead math tutor pulled me aside and explained how he seemed to grasp something in Math, did 3 more examples of it, then on the 4th problem seemed to be completely confused, almost like he'd never seen it before."
• "I, too, have lots of frustration linked to language and comprehension! One minute they sound like Einstein and the other, well, just plain DIM!"
• "I have decided that it is a combination of malnourishment, lack of exposure to certain stimuli, and lack of exposure to early academic learning."
• "I went to a....conference last weekend, and they mentioned the brain and higher level thinking being very affected by stress hormones."

These brief points give a good example of the kinds of responses.  I have received (many) other comments and emails and other anecdotal feedback that is entirely consistent with what I have posted here.

Part 2:  The different response of one parent and my reaction to her suggestion.

One parent responded entirely differently than the others before her; her words caught my attention and has held it for the past couple of weeks.

She said that malnutrition could not be the issue given that how people described the issues was common from one child to another.  She said that if different children, who experienced varying degrees of malnutrition (from extreme, as in our case, to not notable, in other cases) manifest the same issues, it's not an individual issue but rather an issue of how a particular language transfers to another.

Ahh, of course, was my first thought when reading that.  I had been troubled about this exact issue, given that the parents responding had reported such difference in their child's experience of malnutrition.

The same person suggested that, instead of malnutrition being the issue, what was being described sounded much more like a language acquisition issue.  She went on to say that it wasn't about memory as much as it was about application, that the ABC issue that parents described in common had more to do with a difficulty hearing the language differences rather than an inability to memorize a sound.  Huh.

Also, with regard to issues such as referring to jam as ketchup or toothpaste, she said that naming things is the lowest level of learning.  What would be a concern, she said, is if a child called something "jam" (the right name) but then tried to brush his teeth with it as though confusing the meaning of jam and toothpaste.  She said confusing the meaning of words would be an issue of real concern from a learning standpoint...but that if a child knows what to do with jam or ketchup that this is not a malnutrition or a memory issue; understanding that jam gets put on bread and toothpaste gets put onto a toothbrush is a higher order learning skill than simply memorizing the name of it.

I'll pause here to insert a couple of paragraphs from an article I came across just last week that, for me, gets at just how complicated it must be for a young child who has lost his first two languages to suddenly be faced with the prospect of learning a third language just in order to be able to survive...

The Acquisition of Language by Children
by Jenny R. Saffran, Ann Senghas, and John C. Trueswell

Imagine that you are faced with the following challenges. You must discover the internal structure of a system that contains tens of thousands of units, all generated from a small set of materials.  These units, in turn, can be assembled into an infinite number of combinations.  Although only a subset of those combinations is correct, the subset itself is for all practical purposes infinite.  Somehow you must converge on the structure of this system to use it to communicate. And you are a very young child.

The system is human language. The units are words, the materials are the small sets of sounds from which they are constructed, and the combinations are the sentences into which they can be assembled. Given the complexity of this system, it seems improbably that mere children could discover its underlying structure and use it to communicate. Yet most do so with eagerness and ease, all within the first few years of life.


A whole bunch of thoughts have been swirling through my head since that back-and-forth dialogue on the yahoo forum:

• It makes such sense to me that this is a language issue rather than a (mostly) malnutrition issue.  Seth knows exactly what to do with jam and that he wants ketchup on his pasta - he never confuses what to do with the things he has a hard time naming.  This is not a kid who is easily confused or side-tracked when it comes to knowing how to make use of things - he's a kid who wants to know everything and how it all works.  He's the kid who knows where everything is in the house (even if it's in my underwear drawer); he can't always name it but he describes it by how it's used.  "I need to put on dose tings we used last week when went to gym class," he might say in reference to needing to find his shoes before we leave for gym class.  His curiosity to know things is overwhelming at times.  In some ways he's such an old soul, given his life experiences.  In other ways, he's like a teeny little toddler who is just starting to learn about the world and who has to learn things that Matthew would have simply known from the age of a year onwards.

• It also makes sense, then, that kids who are older will tend to have these issues in common and to a greater degree...because they have been exposed to a different language(s) for much longer than the language of their adopted family and because it's the former language that retains a firm hold on the way sounds are made, even if the child can no longer speak it.  I see this difference in Seth and Lizzie.  Lizzie's acquisition of language is now considerably faster than Seth (in comprehension and speaking ability, as well as in use of grammar and in sentence structure), particularly when it comes to its finer points and nuances.  Seth understands things readily but appears to forget them very quickly when trying to speak or repeat them, and I see him struggling to put words to what is in his head.  That is a language issue.  I see it more and more now that I'm looking at it a bit differently.

• Dare I hope that, just maybe then, it's not a malnutrition issue??  If the poster is right that so many kids have the same issue despite a wide range of malnutrition exposure (from extreme, in our case, to hardly at all in other cases), malnutrition simply cannot be the cause.

• I am flooded with relief and skepticism and uncertainty.  Relief that this might (mostly) not be malnutrition.  Skepticism because I don't know if I dare believe it or if what the issue might actually be is better or worse than what I thought it was. Uncertainty because, even if it's not malnutrition, I don't know exactly what we're dealing with yet.

• If this is a language issue, then I have a different kind of work ahead of me in order to help Seth. In addition to giving him lots of time and ongoing exposure to language, I'm thinking that there are going to be very specific language acquisition and application methods that I'll need to teach him.  I have no idea what this might look like yet, but you can be sure I'll be learning whatever I can.

Part 3:  An additional response by another parent and the wheels that start clicking into place.

A different person responded afterwards with a post that was also very meaningful to me.  She said this:

"I am bilingual and sometimes automatically think in Spanish, but [the children who have been adopted] have had a link 'erased' [because they have lost their first languages] and do not have the outlet they used to have to make connections.  Basically starting from scratch at a later age, is hard.  They do not speak their home language anymore and even that was limiting, because there were many things that they did not have a word for anyway, things were just plain new.  They do not have years of connecting objects with a word, in just one language."

If I apply this wisdom, here is what I observe:

• Seth spoke first the language of his birth region - though not with mastery because he was so young.  He would have been limited in his use/comprehension of his first language just like kids born anywhere else are limited in vocabulary and comprehension when they're so young.  Then, being in an Amharic-only-speaking orphanage for ten months, he quickly picked up little bits of that language - but only enough to survive in an orphanage where many children arrived with different language origins and where caregivers undoubtedly used limited and repetitive words with small children who are learning a new language.  In those months in the orphanage he lost his first language almost entirely, so that he was no longer able to communicate with his birth father before we brought him to Canada.  How sad is that?

• He was virtually six by the time he came to Canada and was inundated with yet another new language.  He had no choice but to start here from scratch.  And it really would be learning  language (not just a language, but any language) from scratch because within a few short weeks of arriving in Canada he no longer had either of his first two languages.

• What I said before about him being like a teeny little toddler just starting to learn about the world is really true in this line of thinking - because he's like an eleven-month old (being eleven months home) learning how to connect objects with names. The challenge is that he's in a six-almost-seven-year-old body and the expectations that come with looking at a child of this age are radically different than if he were an eleven-month old looking at board books 20x in a row before he solidly connects the word "jam" with the jar of sticky red stuff sitting next to a piece of toast on the page...after which his parent can then run to the fridge and show him that we have that same sticky red stuff in our fridge and it's called jam just like in the book we've been reading over and over.  I would have done this kind of thing a thousand times with Matthew at eleven months of age.

• Because of his exposure to three different language in less than six years (and the absolute need for him to learn them in order to survive in a given context), Seth might like to think in Wolaytan or Amharic and that would have helped his transition to English, but that link has been 'erased.'  He simply does not have the ability to make connections.  As far as language is concerned, Seth is a six-year-old in a zero-year-old brain.

• He has had only eleven months (not almost seven years) of connecting objects with a word in just one language.

Part 4:  Final thoughts.

Even as I write these bullet points, things fall into place in my head.  It makes me want to sit with my head in my hands and just cry.  Cry for the little boy who works so hard at life and who is trying to desperately to survive in this third language of his life which is really like his first language.  Cry for the little boy whose mother has so often been impatient with his inability to remember the word jam because he's six and has lived eleven months in Canada and must surely know the word jam and a thousand others by now; for the little boy whose mother is so scared that if he can't remember the word jam or that a giraffe is not a cat, what does that mean about her son's ability to learn ten thousand other words?  I want to cry for the little boy whose little sister is catching on to things faster than he is for no reasons other than age differences and the fact that she's been exposed to much less conscious confusion (including language confusion) in her life; the irony of this is so profound to me, knowing how he has cared for his little sister in the most unimaginably difficult circumstances only to now be taken over by her when it comes to adapting and surviving in another new language.  I want to cry because of my relief that Seth's challenges may not be (entirely) malnutrition related and because I'm so unfair to be relieved about this when so many other children in the world are affected by such things or other so-much-worse things.

And, if I'm really honest, I want to cry because I still don't know what to do if this is a language acquisition issue.

Well, I do know what to do in one area.

If this is a language issue, and frankly even if it's not, then I need to do some evolution as a parent (see, even if I'm a creationist, I can still believe in evolution!).  Because, as someone said who emailed me yesterday on the subject of her child, I am not nearly as patient with Seth as I need to be.  Like the emailer of yesterday, I'm someone who has always found learning to be relatively easy, and I just can't get how he can't remember that the word backpack, which we've said repeatedly for many months because he loves his so much and which we've said about forty times in the twenty-four hours of getting ready for our road trip, isn't pronounced "pack-a-pack"...assuming that he can even remember the word at all and not call it a "suitcase" or "dat ting we use on airplane to go on trip" or something else.  I really can't comprehend how he can't equate the word jam with the sticky red stuff that he eats so often.  I hand-made 68 jars of that sticky red stuff last summer just so that boy could have it as much as he wants to.  So why can't he just remember the word?

Can you hear my annoyance, feel my tears, as I write those words?  Because I hear it, I feel it, just writing about it...and these are just two of a hundred everyday examples that drive me nuts.  I know that when we wake up in our hotel room tomorrow, another day will start of encountering that blank look when confronted with a word that he knew two minutes ago but doesn't any more.  And I get mad.

I know that this is not Seth's fault.  I do.  Or do I??  Maybe I think, deep down, that if he tried hard enough he just might be able to remember.  In my head I know this isn't true because mine is a boy who works hard at everything - everything warrants his intensity.  But why can't my knowledge seep down down down from my head clear through to my heart, from which gentleness and compassion and understanding come?

I look at this boy sleeping peacefully a few feet from where I sit and I love him.  This frustration of mine is not his fault and I need both of us to believe that.  He needs for me to believe that, for my belief to conform itself to my love for him.

As I sit and watch, Seth is moving about in his sleep.  His hands are gesturing and he occasionally mumbles noises.  He does this often.

What I am left thinking is this: how can he dream without a language? What words are he mumbling? Does he have gaps in his dreams?  How do I help him put words to his dreams, both these ones and the ones he will grow into as he gets older?

The only thing I know for sure is this:  I am the mother that he is glad is keeping him forever.  I will figure this out.