It seems to me that if parents spent less time researching negative and controversial issues they feel their adopted children possess and spent more time just parenting them as they would biological chidden, we’d all be a lot better off.

The amount of research parents do that pertains to adoption is simply astounding; when to tell them, how to tell them, attachment, non-attachment, race, keeping them in touch with their culture, blah blah blah...

Why can’t we simply parent our children and not focus on extraneous issues? If parents spent half as much time playing with your kids or reading to them or helping them do a puzzle, as they do on the internet nitpicking every little thing see as a *possible* problem or attachment issue, you’d likely not have said issue.

One of the basic tenets of life: You get back what you give.

Adoption is not a hobby. It is a means to an end.
It is a way to build a family. My grandma used to have 2 sayings that seem appropriate here:
1. enough of anything is enough
and
2. don’t make a mountain out of a mole hill.

God bless grandma and her simple wisdom.

Here is how dictionary.com defines “hobby”: An activity or interest pursued outside one's regular occupation and engaged in primarily for pleasure.

Here, according to thesaurus.com are some other words that have a similar meaning or meanings to “hobby”:
craze, distraction, diversion activity, endeavor, fanaticism, mania, obsession, pet topic, preoccupation, project, racket, scheme, task, undertaking, zealousness

The internet makes readily available to you, hundreds if not thousands, of miserable people who are willing to commiserate, to justify your inklings of problems, and to rationalize your fears with you. Misery does love company.

Why do parents fall in line with these special interest groups? Two reasons:
1. As previously stated; misery loves company and if you can find someone who “understands” how you feel and makes you feel like your not doing such a bad job, and they know how “really hard it is”..., well, that just makes us feel better, now doesn’t it?

2. If you read about someone who’s problems are bigger and more screwed up than your own, you can breathe a big sigh of relief, “phew... I may have issues, but thank god I have nothing like theirs”, and... well, that just makes us feel better, now doesn’t it?

I don’t belong to any special groups.
Its like this scene from Ghostbusters:

Ray: All right. I'm opening the trap now; don't look directly into the trap! (opens the trap)
Egon: (wide eyes) I looked at the trap, Ray.

We are drawn to what we know is not good for us.

Isn’t the point of adoption to build a family, not your own home science lab complete with guinea pig? Parenting is parenting. Issues surrounding adoption surface when the adoption processes are more important than the person you adopted. The most well adjusted adopted people I know are people who were parented, by their parents, without emphasis on adoption disorders and negative issues. I would never know they *were* adopted if I weren’t told so.

In fact, its remarkable how many adopted children physically look like their adoptive parents. Children do absorb more than we think from the people they are around. Attachment therapy proponents say adoptive children feel the loss and stress of losing a birth mother. By the same token, don’t you think they feel and can intuit the stress in an adoptive parent who is continually attempting to find something wrong with them or heal their losses or force them to attach?

My daughter Lola will only be 2 years old for 365 days and in those 365 days she will only be like she is today *this one time*. Buddhists say “you never step into the same river twice”, the same goes for children. She will grow, change and learn new things every day and it is my role to observe and guide. Any lost opportunity is *my loss*, not hers.

If you think your child needs therapy, I would recommend that the first thing you do is put yourself in therapy, and I don’t mean “attachment therapy”, I mean regular old, “hey what's wrong with me that I can’t be a good parent” therapy. Chances are, you’re the one with the problem. While children are not entirely blank slates, it is generally safe to say that *you* have many more strikes, erasures and restrikes on your slate than your child does, and you are either; the problem, or are magnifying and perpetuating their problem.

Would the world not be a better place if we as parents spent our time communing with our children and celebrating their personal differences instead of attempting to reshape square pegs to fit into societies round holes? Riddle me that...