With my birthday coming up this weekend, I guess I had better uphold the tradition created over the past two years of writing a birthday blog (you can read the previous ones HERE and HERE). In the previous blogs, I discussed the many children who do not get to celebrate their birthday, either because they grow up in an institution where no one cares about it, or because they do not know when their birthday is because their birth was never registered. This year I want to look at the significance of birthday traditions.
Most children growing up in their families have traditions connected to birthday celebrations. This could be getting breakfast in bed, getting to sit at the head of the table, getting to choose what to have for dinner, getting to stay up late, having particular songs sung or activities done, getting cakes smeared on your face, or any number of other things. In themselves, these are all very small things, they gain significance because they become connected with a feeling of being valued, loved and celebrated by people who are important in your life.
While most children never really think very deeply about these things, they take them as a given, they are very attached to them. When a child is placed into an institution and suddenly all these things fall away, this comes as a really big blow. This is not hard to understand.
However, what many people underestimate is the impact on children who have been removed from their own family and placed in another family – through kinship care, foster care or adoption – where their birthday is still celebrated, but it is done differently. The family where the child has been placed will have their own birthday traditions and they will be excited to share them with the child. This is done out of love. What is being overlooked, however, is that to the child this can feel like ‘it is all wrong.’
To help a child integrate into a new family, it is helpful to talk to the child about the customs, rituals and traditions that she associates with her birthday and with other significant celebrations. Integrating some of these traditions and making them part of the new family’s new traditions, can really help a child feel accepted and give a sense of belonging. In cases of intercountry adoption, it might also be worth looking into cultural customs that might be significant to the child.
Feeling valued, loved, and seen are at the heart of the ‘special birthday feeling’. There are a lot of ways to achieve this. Listening to the child to find out what she feels is an essential part of the day and trying to provide that, will give her birthday an extra shine.
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