Crianças adotadas

: percurso desenvolvimental nos contextos de família, escola e comunidade

Abstract

This paper aims to demystify the negative perception about late adoption. Ispresented the professional practice with children and young people, as a teacher ofReligious and Catholic Moral Education, investment in training, and work experienceover eighteen years practice. Among the various issues monitored, contact withinstitutionalized and adopted children stands out, over which particular attention isdevoted.Throughout this work, in which a group of three biological sisters and the adoptivemother participated, we will perceive the challenges that adoption has made to emerge inthe family and how they adapted to this new reality without prior preparation, both on apsychological and emotional level, as well as in terms of management of all newsituations in their daily life. How they integrated with a new reality, quite different fromwhat they had before the integration in a new family, namely, how was the adaptation tothe nuclear family and what relationships did they establish with the extended family, aswell as the changes that took place in their school path.Adoptive families have specific characteristics and tasks that imply relating bothto the period prior to adoption (decision, waiting, experiences and transition to parenting/ affiliation), and to the later period (integration, adaptation, communication and thecreation of bonds) , with the adoption of older children, more specific characteristics andadditional challenges arise.We will see that, with all the challenges, anxieties, and doubts throughout theprocess, it is now considered that children, now young, are well-adapted. The collecteddata suggest important clues for the successful adoption of siblings at a late age, andreveals that the adjacent challenges can be overcome when the adoptive family aims thewell-being of the child that must be understood, as (Kickbusch, 2012) defined, forrealizing the person's potential through the development of the physical, emotional,mental and spiritual dimensions.

Date of Award	18 May 2021
Original language	Portuguese
Awarding Institution	Universidade Católica Portuguesa
Supervisor	Filomena Ermida Figueiredo Branco da Ponte (Supervisor)