Adoption and the Psychological Impact of Entitlement

Overcoming the Emotional and Psychological Impact of Adoption

Each day, single men and women are making the life impacting choice to adopt a child. Raising an adopted child, often, poses many new exciting challenges from emotional to financial to physical. With the added dynamic of single parenting, adoption can be one of the most challenging life experiences a single adult take on in their lifetime, even more complex and rewarding than any academic or social achievement.

One such challenge to any adoption is this feeling of entitlement. For two-parent families, the entitlement feeling is often picked up by one parent or the other, if not by both. However, for single adopting parents, learning to engage and nurture the feeling of entitlement is crucial to the emotional growth and security of the parent-child relationship as well as the adopted child's own personal emotional growth.

For the adopting parents, oftentimes, the emotional and psychological connection to an adopted child begins during the paper tedious adoption process. With the adoption process comes the focus upon the connection to the child and the feeling, within the adopting parent, that the child is truly yours and belongs to you, unconditionally. However, as a single adopting parent, it is equally important that the adopted child also make this same entitlement connection to the adopting parent; that they are entitled to the parent and the unconditional love that comes with the parent as if it were their own biological parent.