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Counselling centre for adoptive families to be inaugurated today

By Our Staff Reporter

CHENNAI, MARCH 22. A counselling centre for adoptive families will be inaugurated in the city tomorrow. The centre, which will have professional psychiatrists and psychologists, will be run by the Voluntary Co-ordinating Agency for Child Adoption.

Andal Damodaran, chairperson of the Central Adoption Resource Agency, addressing a two-day orientation workshop on counselling for social work professionals, said adoption was a personal initiative by the giving and receiving parents. This called for more sensitivity and understanding on the part of the people involved. The child's right to information should also be kept in mind.

Ms. Damodaran said adoptive parents and children should feel that the agencies were part of the process. Placement agencies must keep in touch with the adoptive parents to maintain a link with the children. "Problems arise when the child is three or four and again during adolescence," she said. "The child may want to come back at 10 or 12" to the placement institution "to learn about its roots." The adoptive parents came with dreams of taking home a perfect child but often found it difficult to cope with its illnesses. They should be counselled so that they could accept the special needs of the child, she said.

Openness by the parents — both with the child and society — was necessary for complete acceptance of the child. She urged the social workers to listen more and to prevent a woman from giving away her child, since the best place for a child to grow up was its natural family.

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