INDEX OF QUOTES
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Adolescents beginning to examine the reasons for placement often strenuously turn away from seeing parental limitations. In this process of denial, biological parents are often idealized while current parents are devalued ... According to Kagan (1978), one way to deal with uncertainty is to find a cause or an explanation for the uncertainty. When uncertainty is blamed on the self, depression results. The chronically restricted or depressed placed child has not moved from self-blame. When uncertainty can be blamed on another, anger results … This tendency to blame the current parents when faced with uncertainty about biological parents is not infrequent. The doubts of placed adolescents hurt, the hurt occurs in the presence of the current parents, and there is a human tendency to see two simultaneously occurring events as having a cause-and-effect relationship. Furthermore, there are no perfect parents, and an examination of any parent’s behavior will turn up poorly handled incidents. Such incidents fuel the placed adolescents’ beliefs that if they were only living with their biological parents, all would be well. This tendency to blame the current parents and to focus on their limitations is often simultaneously used by placed adolescents to negate biological parents’ failings: If all parents are bad, biological parents are not so bad. Again, this is an effort to deny the biological parents’ limitations. Sometimes this line of rationalization can lead to acting out designed to provoke rejection. |
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Kagan, J. (1978) The Growth of the Child. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, Inc.