The Toddler, the Second Adoption, Telling Children About Adoption
In this essay Winnicott discusses the psychology of adoption for parents and child. He writes that it is important to be truthful when talking to adopted children about where they come from, that the adoptive parents are not their biological parents, and that the child was made by nature, and not by magic. If the truth cannot be borne by the adoptive parents, it is very difficult for the adopted child to cope with it. He also considers that adoptive parents wanting a second adoption must go through the selection procedure and other anxieties about choosing to have the adoption, rather than being able to have a child, as it were, normally ‘by accident’. When a mother conceives a second baby, the first child has the experience of mother growing larger over a period of months unlike the case of a second adopted baby that just ‘appears’.