Adoption-competent therapy provides families with specialized support to navigate the unique emotions and experiences adoption can bring. Read our guide to learn how this approach can strengthen family connections and help children thrive.
Adoption-competent therapy is a specialized form of support designed for families built through adoption. While many therapists can help with parenting stress or behavioral concerns, adoption-competent therapists bring a deeper understanding of how early experiences and loss can shape the parent–child relationship.
This work is often relationship and attachment focused, helping families build trust, strengthen connection and grow together. Below are some of the many ways this kind of support can help your family thrive.
1. Helping Parents Understand What’s “Typical” in Adoption
Adoptive parents may wonder whether the issues they’re facing are related to adoption or simply part of typical childhood development. Adoption-competent therapy offers a space to explore those questions with someone who understands.
How a problem is defined shapes how it’s addressed. What may seem like misbehavior could instead reflect a developmental need or be rooted in your child’s early experiences, such as prenatal substance exposure or a difficult home life prior to placement. Knowing what is typical can feel validating and help parents find solutions that truly support their child’s growth.
2. Coaching Parents Through Emotional Complexity
Adoption can be challenging not just for children, but for parents as well. The home study process can be emotional and overwhelming. Parents may have layered feelings of joy, guilt, sadness, relief and unmet expectations. Past experiences with infertility or struggles with attachment can add to these complex feelings, and post-adoption depression is not uncommon. Adoption-competent therapy can help parents process without judgement.
Parent coaching is often a key part of adoption-competent therapy, giving parents a space to reflect on their own experiences and expectations. Many parents come into adoption with ideas about how attachment or family life will look, only to find that the reality of parenting feels different. Exploring how their parenting and attachment history influences their relationship with their child can help parents begin to foster a more secure and connected family bond.
3. Strengthening Attachment
Many adoption-competent therapy sessions focus on building connection between parent and child. Creative and fun methods are often used, including play and art therapy. These approaches help parents better understand how their child communicates their needs and how to respond in attuned, supportive ways.
4. Giving Kids Tools to Express What They Feel
While adoption is mostly a happy story for parents, it can be more complicated for children, whose stories start with loss. Adoption-competent therapy can give them age-appropriate ways to process their grief with a support system that understands what they have been through. It can help children understand their story, navigate questions about identity and race, build self-esteem, and develop effective ways of communicating.
5. Navigating Open Adoption
Relationships with a child’s birth family can be meaningful and supportive of healthy identity development, but they can also present unique questions and challenges. Even when there isn’t ongoing contact, feelings about the birth family can play a major role in children’s lives. Kids may wonder why their birth parents couldn’t parent them, especially if circumstances have changed. Adoption-competent therapists can guide families through these sensitive conversations, helping children find their voice and helping parents support them without minimizing their feelings.
6. Building a Family Culture of Communication and Support
An adoption-competent therapist can do more than help address specific issues. They can help families create a foundation of positive communication, emotional support and attachment. Even when therapy focuses on one family member, such as individual counseling for a teenager who was adopted, the goal remains to strengthen communication and the overall family system. When families can talk openly about adoption and understand each person’s experiences, it fosters a sense of safety, belonging and identity that helps children who were adopted feel seen, supported and deeply connected.
When to Seek Support
Many parents wait for issues to become visible before seeking help, but proactive support before issues arise can make a meaningful difference. You may also consider periodic “tune-up” sessions during times of significant stress or change, such as a transition to middle school, leaving home or encountering learning challenges.
The Cradle is here to serve anyone touched by adoption, whether the adoption was through The Cradle or not, and however the placement was made: through agencies, attorneys, foster care or kinship. We offer in-person and telehealth sessions. Click here to inquire about counseling.
