Onion Slices

The adoption process is well on it's way, and Julie and I are really getting ready. One of the things that has been on my mind are all the little things that I wouldn't normally think about. When Julie and I started this process, we had to fill out a pretty thorough autobiography. In that document and in some of the subsequent classes that we took there was a lot of talk about how to discipline kids. The classes were focusing on dealing with kids who had been abused in the past, but I have been giving some thoughts about the simple things that we say, almost every day. When I was thinking about some of the non-physical methods of punishment, I was realizing that some of the things that can be said are potentially much more damaging than most physical methods. I was giving thought to a phrase I heard once, "we don't do that in our family." This got me thinking about the implicit threat that, "if you keep it up, you'll be kicked out of the family." That seems exactly the WRONG kind of message to anyone, especially an adopted child! I don't have any perfect answers yet, but I do know that I am going to have to think about the way that I think about things and how I say some things. I know that I have already been doing this for a while because of multi-cultural environment at work. I'll just have to keep refining what I think and how I say things.