Winnicott, D. W. “The Toddler, the Second Adoption, Telling Children about Adoption.” The Collected Works of D. W. Winnicott: Vol. 5, 1955–1959. Edited by Lesley Caldwell, et al. Oxford UP, 2017, pp 1

Summary:

The headnote for this essay says it comes from an undated ms, probably written during the time Winnicott was thinking about adoptive families in the mid-1950s. The short essay discusses whether—and how—adoptive parents decide to adopt a second child and how to tell their adopted child about their new sibling should they bring one home. The advice is—to explain and tell about the difference because the adopted person will sense the difference.

Thoughts:

I was a second adoption and experienced a second adoption when I was three. To be honest, I remember none of it. And frankly, I don’t remember the other sort of bringing more children into the family either: that is, I had friends whose mothers gave birth and pregnant teachers when I was old enough presumedly to know that this was going on. In Winnicott’s words: “When a mother conceives a second baby, the first child has the experience of mother growing larger over a period of months” (112)—but while this is factual, this is not necessarily true. That is, a child may experience this and may be encouraged to notice it variously in families with variously open ideas about pregnancy and childbirth (and, as Winnicott notices, this may “raise . . . problems of talking to the child about adults’ intercourse” [112]), but may also not notice this. Certainly I never did with those around me though I was a noticing kind of child. Winnicott is mistaken and is talking like an adult about what children naturally do.

What is natural in the families he is talking about isn’t necessarily “natural.” I know I am coming at this from a different generation and in a different critical position—I am not a psychologist or a social scientist—but it’s not necessarily natural for children to notice pregnancies—or for that matter anything an adult might think of as a bodily anomaly.

I also struggle to believe it’s true that what is unplanned is best because it’s the way things usually happen (why is “the usual” best? I struggle to understand this logic.). Winnicott laments that adoptive parents have to plan, which makes the “organic” (his word) building of a family impossible. “It is often easier in human affairs if things have a chance of happening ‘by accident’, although there can, of course be grave disadvantages in this” (111) – yes, thanks for that subordinate clause. But then, “easier” is not always better, and what Winnicott focuses on in the following paragraphs is adoptive parents’ having to sort through whether they have money and space for another child, whether they want a boy or a girl, what it might mean for schooling, and how their adopted child might respond (playmate or rival?) – all things I would want parents conceiving children to think about, wouldn’t you? But Winnicott starts this discussion in another place altogether, with a paragraph about the anxiety of selection that conceiving parents won’t face: adoptive parents “will be reminded of their anxieties about the selection process. . . . they will feel anxiety about further scrutiny and about being judged on their success with the first child” (112). Coupled with having to explain how babies are made, the adoptive parents’ infertility, and this—“the natural mothers and fathers from whom adopted babies are received,” Winnicott’s own anxieties for the surveillance of adoptive parents seems—like it ought to be a good thing. I read this and think about the difference adoption makes in making it harder to parent badly, making it so that prospective parents have to think before they parent, and making what seems natural and organic really more like tumbling into a terrible ravine with helpless babies in tow. I mean. In a sense, what Winnicott is saying (does he know this?) is that what adoption requires is harder, more deliberate and collaborative, and maybe—just maybe—means some children get better parenting.

I can see, by the way, how arguments like this one can be used against family separation and probably have. If it’s natural and organic to fall pregnant and oopsy your way to a family, and harder and embarrassing to make your family thoughtfully and in conversation about your readiness to do that, well of course all babies belong with the people who conceived them and no one else. Whatever were we doing?

I think this language of what’s natural is regressive and kneejerk and unthoughtful. Why should we do what’s natural just because it’s natural, and what the hell do we mean by that anyway?