Adoptive parents make a lot of mistakes in parenting,
just the same as biological
parents do. Having a couple of children in each category
gives us room for equal
opportunity mistakes. Relative to adoption, one of the
things we did right was to
keep the conversation about the topic of adoption open and
ongoing, which gave
our adoptive kids a comfort level in talking about it.
During a recent conversation
with another parent, we realized that we have done exactly
the same thing in our
home with the topic of mental illness without ever realizing
it, and that has been a
good thing too.
Once we realized we had multiple members of the family
experiencing mental
illness, we took care to learn and regularly use
non-stigmatizing terms. Our
children are not bipolar, PTSD, OCD, and ADHD; they each
have different
combinations of those illnesses, and we taught them to speak
about it that way.
We removed words like crazy and insane and replaced them
with mental health
crisis.
We made treating our sons’ mental health part of our
everyday routines and
spoke about it in our everyday language. Eat your breakfast,
brush your teeth,
put away your shoes, take your medicine. When one of them
had a bad day or
had to be hospitalized, we talked about it openly and how it
affected the rest of
the family.
And what about when guests were over? We didn’t wear it
on our sleeves, but
we didn’t hide it either. We have several kids who need to
tend to their mental
health with testing, therapy, and medication on a regular
basis. If you happen to
be at our house when we have to tend to one of those needs;
take us as we are.
Did we succeed in keeping the conversation about mental
illness open all the
time? Did we erase stigma in everyone we know? No. But by
learning proper
terms and making it part of our everyday language; we
succeeded in taking the
stigma out of our own house. Talking about it and dealing
with it is just part of
how our household functions. As a result of keeping the
mental health
conversation easy and ongoing, our kids have a comfort level
with talking about
it, and that’s one parenting decision we got right.
