Opinion – The Good Story Project

“What was the fault of these children and teachers? How do our schools survive post-pandemic?”

Gaurav Girija Shukla lives in a small town named Arang, 40 kms from Chhattisgarh’s capital Raipur. Nearly 20 years back, his parents opened a school in Arang. Over the years, the school has been providing affordable and quality education to underprivileged children living in nearby villages. The parents of these children belong to lower-middle income groups, Scheduled Castes, Scheduled Tribes, or are farmers and daily wagers. The founders even managed to open two additional branches in far-flung villages. And then came the prolonged pandemic. As of today, the small branches have shut, and the main branch is at the mercy of the personal savings of the founders. Hearts of hearts, they know it’s time to pack up. Shuklas are not alone. There are a little over four lakh low-cost private schools in the country. Due to the ongoing pandemic, tens of thousands of these budget schools have either shut or are on the verge of shutting. For schools in villages or small towns, the demise was slow and painful. In this first-person account, Shukla uses his school as a case study to give us a larger perspective.

Gaurav Girija Shukla

Case study 1

Kajal Chandrakar is presently studying in Class 8. Her family has always struggled to make ends meet. Her father is an alcoholic who often abuses his wife as well as Kajal and her younger brother Kundan. He creates a scene every time his wife spends money on books and notebooks. Kajal is a bright and enthusiastic student. She has to commute for an hour and change two buses to reach school, but she never complained.

Our school shut in 2020 after a nationwide lockdown was imposed. Kajal had to spend 24 hours in that toxic environment. In the absence of proper digital equipment, her education suffered. When the school reopened for a few days just before the second covid wave hit in 2021, she was very happy. However, we noticed that there was a significant dip in her grasping abilities. These children, whose parents are not educated, often gain from peer learning. Because of the long absence from the classroom, her enthusiasm level has gone down.

Case study 2

We had a teacher in our school named Gulshan Chandrakar. After completing his Engineering, he could not find a job. The financial condition of his family was not very stable, and he had old parents to look after. So, he accepted a job as a teacher at our school. Though he was not a trained teacher, he was good with children and taught them math in a very simple manner. Sincere and dedicated, he was with us for five years. Owing to many factors, which I shall write about in this story, we struggled to give salaries to our teachers regularly during the prolonged pandemic. He had no option but to move on and today he is working at a medical store.

**For years, the school has been providing affordable and quality education to underprivileged children**

While the above-mentioned case studies are from the school run by our family-owned non-profit Abhikalp Foundation at Arang, nearly 40 kms from Chhattisgarh’s capital Raipur, you will get to hear thousands of such stories from across India. The pandemic has managed to shake the foundations of our education system and the primary victims have been the budget or low-cost private schools (LCPS).

As per the National Independent School Alliance (NISA), there are over four lakh low-cost private schools in India spread across metros, Tier I and Tier II cities, districts, towns, and villages.

Besides, under the Right to Education Act, the government provides free and compulsory elementary education (Class I to 8) to all children. In 2020, there were 10.83 lakh government schools in the country. Parents who are not satisfied with the quality of education at these government schools, often enroll their children in budget or low-cost private schools. In small towns and villages, parents of children studying in such schools fall into the lower-middle class category. They mostly are farmers, daily wage earners, or those who do odd jobs for survival. For most, incomes are cyclic.

While it’s extremely satisfying to provide quality and affordable education to these underprivileged children, running these schools is challenging even under normal circumstances. The pandemic has dealt a massive blow and tens of thousands of such budget schools are on the verge of shutting down permanently. While one can never be prepared for an unprecedented and sudden event like a global pandemic, could we have done something differently to avoid the complete closure of so many low-cost private schools? Can we do something now?

I am not an expert in the field of education, so I won’t be able to comment on what the government should or should not have done. All I know is, for two decades, starting from 2003 until now, my parents – Girija Shukla and Dhruv Kumar Shukla — and I have put in all our efforts so that underprivileged children living in and around Arang could get quality education. This school caters to 30 villages nearby, and, for most children, this school is the only option. Our dream has crashed.

The school won’t survive for one more year unless some miracle happens. On most days, the dinner table conversations are about winding up and moving on. With an emotional heart, I urge you to read this piece. After all, it’s not just about our school. There are thousands of budget schools that have shut or will eventually shut.

**Before the pandemic, the school strength was 400. Today, less than 200 students are enrolled**

The collapse in a chronological order …

Lockdown confusion

The timing of the 2020 lockdown, which was announced in March, dealt a blow to us. Parents of most children studying in our school are not in a position to pay school fees (Rs 6,000-12,000 annually, excluding transport) at the start of the session or on a regular basis. We don’t insist. Most pay the fees at the end of the session before the final exams. Because of the lockdown, the exams could not take place and the school had to be shut down. So, parents could not pay the school fees. That was the beginning of the end.

In 2021, again, the timing of the second wave and the subsequent lockdown (March-April) coincided with the end of our session. Due to the second lockdown and the closure of the school, again, parents chose not to pay the fees. So, technically, we have not been able to collect 100% school fees from the 2019 session onwards.

It was a tricky situation. We could not pressurize or urge the parents to pay the fees as most of them had lost their jobs during the lockdowns or could not earn. So, though many of them chose not to pay the school fees due to the financial crunch, there was nothing we could do to make them pay.

Imagine our plight when the third wave hit in the beginning of 2022. We are nearing the end of yet another session and the schools have just reopened. For us, there is a lot of anxiety regarding school fees which takes care of a chunk of our expenses.

The digital divide

Here’s a harsh reality. In the Adivasi belt that we are functioning in, there are people who, with great difficulty, manage to buy one basic mobile. Smartphones are a luxury item. Families with two smartphones are almost non-existent. Parents of most of the students studying in our schools have one smartphone, the purpose of which is to send messages and make calls. Because of severe network issues, these smartphones are not used extensively. Most parents are not educated. They were not in a position to help children with online classes or help them with their homework. There was no one to help them resolve the technology and network-related issues.

Similarly, teachers in our school are not trained teachers. They don’t come from very affluent families, so they are in possession of basic gadgets. It was a struggle for them too to learn tasks like conducting classes on Zoom or Team Meet, sharing screens, uploading, and downloading documents or giving assignments and correcting homework online. It was next to impossible to teach all these things to children sitting in far-flung villages. Poor network was our biggest roadblock.

When they somehow managed to get hold of these things, the administration decided to allow teachers to come to school and conduct online classes. That posed newer challenges. When nothing seemed to be working, we even hired a few volunteers who taught different subjects to children, but it was, at best, a temporary solution.

Confusion regarding school fees

In April 2020, Bhupesh Baghel, the chief minister of Chhattisgarh, tweeted saying: “Many private schools are sending messages to students’ parents to deposit school fees. It is not appropriate to pressurize them for fees at such times. All schools have been instructed to postpone the recovery of fees during coronavirus lockdown in Chhattisgarh.”

After many small-scale schools reached out to the administration complaining that the school fee is their only means to pay the salaries of the teachers, the High Court, in July 2020, said the schools were allowed to collect only the tuition fees.

The financially stable private school welcomed the decision, but parents of children studying in schools like ours were not happy. They were of the view that since the school was not functioning and the online classes were proving to be too chaotic wherein children were not learning properly, they should be exempted from paying any fees at all. Even after reducing the fees to half, we could not convince them to pay up. In such a situation, we could not pay our teachers regularly.

Because of the fund crunch, our investments started taking a hit. Let me give you an example. Just before the lockdown, we had bought two school buses for the convenience of children living in faraway villages. That was a very big investment worth lakhs of rupees. We have hardly used the buses, but to date, we are paying the EMIs. The buses are just parked in the compound for the past two years, and that’s pinching us financially. Now we are using our personal savings to pay the EMIs. I know many instances wherein school buses owned by low-cost private schools have been seized by the finance companies because of their inability to pay up.

Students switching to government schools

Because the parents were not willing to or were not in a position to pay school fees, many of them withdrew the admission of their children from budget schools and enrolled them in government schools where there was no obligation to pay any fees. This rampant switch happened because for these parents who are not educated, educating their children is not a high priority, especially when there is a severe financial crunch and arranging for even two meals a day is a task.

As per the Annual Status of Education Report (ASER), 2021, which assessed enrolment patterns, tuition trends and smartphone access of children in rural areas, the government school enrolments had risen from 64.3% in 2018 to 70.3% in 2021. The corresponding decline in private school enrolments has been from 32.5% in 2018 to 24.4% in 2021. In Chhattisgarh, in the 6-14 age group, enrolment in government schools increased from 76.4% in 2018 to 82.9% in 2021.

In our school, before the lockdown, 400 students were enrolled. Today there are less than 200. The students who moved out had been with us from the beginning. We had invested our time, energy, and efforts in them. It was heartbreaking.

Confusion regarding transfer certificates

The shift from low-cost private schools to government schools began in 2020 itself and parents started approaching the schools to get transfer certificates. After some budget schools refused to hand over the transfer certificate saying the parents had to clear the dues first, the state administration intervened.

Soon after, the School Education Department sent a letter to all District Collectors and District Education Officers and urged them to ensure admission of all students leaving private schools. The letter mentioned that during the time of admission of these students, their transfer certificate or earlier class mark sheet should not be demanded. Now, the parents were not under any obligation to clear the dues before cancelling the admission. These flip-flops from the parents and the administration further complicated the situation for us.

Now, either the schools are shut, or half the students have moved out

Just after the second covid wave in 2021, at least 500 private budget schools in Chhattisgarh shut down. Most of these private schools were running in rented buildings and they had to wind up due to their inability to pay the rent. The school managers informed the education department of the state about the closure of their schools. Due to this, the future of about one lakh students who were studying in these schools, was in limbo.

It was unfortunate, but the schools that were running in rented buildings were not as unfortunate as us. Winding up was not difficult for them. In case we have to shut down, what will happen to the school buildings? The school buses? There is a playground and a small computer lab. What do we do with all this? The government guidelines say schools will have to follow proper covid protocols after the schools reopen. We don’t have the money to give salaries. How do we sanitize the whole building periodically?

Hence, at this stage, we don’t know if it makes sense to keep the school running for one more year, with half the student strength and teachers who have lost the enthusiasm and motivation.

Plight of children studying under the Right to Education Act

In Chhattisgarh, as many as 60 lakh students are enrolled in 57,000 private and government schools combined in an academic session. Around 15 lakh students are enrolled in 6,615 private schools of which 31,317 students are studying free of cost under RTE on 25% of the seats. Because of the closure of the private schools in such a large number, about 20,000 students who were studying free of cost in these schools under the RTE Act have also been deprived of free education.

In my school, most of the students who are still enrolled are RTE students. Briefly, the central government releases funds to the state government, the state government releases funds to the schools and that’s how the fee of these children gets paid. It’s a long-winding process. However, there has been a delay in the release of funds from the central government. It’s a double whammy. And, in case, if we have to shut our school, I have no idea what will happen to these children studying under the RTE.

No help from the government, no policy changes

India’s education sector has received a 11% hike in the 2022 Union Budget this year. Many interesting schemes have been rolled out. However, school managers like us, who were looking for specific measures to bring the education system back on track, are disappointed. We have many questions. Like, will individual schools get financial help? What happens to low-cost private schools? How do we sustain ourselves post pandemic? What about the students who have moved to government schools? Do these schools have the infrastructure to educate so many students? What if there is a fourth wave, and a fifth? What happens to the existing infrastructure if I have to shut down my school? Will I get some waiver on the school buses that have costed me lakhs? Lastly, what was the fault of these children and teachers? How do our schools survive post-pandemic?

Gaurav Girija Shukla is based in Raipur, Chhattisgarh. He is the owner of Sangyaa PR and Abhikalp Foundation, which runs the school in Arang.

This story is a joint effort between Shukla and The Good Story Project’s Swati Subhedar. While Shukla provided case studies, story material, and images, The Good Story Project was responsible for conceptualizing, writing, and structuring the story. Please note that images used in the graphics have been sourced from Abhikalp Foundation and have been used for representation purposes only. They have nothing to do with the data being provided in the graphics.

Also read: When these children living in Adivasi hamlets in Aarey, Mumbai, got smartphones, they danced with joy!

We do hope that you enjoy reading our stories. We are a very small team of two; with no funding or resources to back us, and your contributions will help us in keeping this platform free and accessible for everyone. If you wish to contribute, click here.

“When a five-year-old boy called my three-year-old son his enemy”

recalls Eisha Sarkar, a communications professional, and in this piece, she reflects on her journey as a parent and describes incidents, books and literature that helped her chart her own journey through motherhood.

This photograph, used for representative purposes is by William Fortunato from Pexels.com

“You said Ronnie is your enemy,” eight-year-old Rahul shouted to five-year-old Siddharth in Gujarati who was plucking mulberries for my three-year-old son, Ronnie. Siddharth handed over a ripe, black mulberry fruit to my toddler and then sat next to Rahul outside a bungalow’s gate. “Ronnie is my enemy, but his mother is standing here so I decided to help her get mulberries from the tree,” Siddharth told him. I opened my mouth to say something but then my little boy came running towards me giggling and we walked away from the two boys.

Three days before this particular exchange between Siddharth and Rahul, I watched in disbelief as Rahul pinned Ronnie to himself by grabbing his hands and Siddharth scared him by making monster faces. My son was getting very disturbed. I asked the boys to stop and let him go. They obeyed immediately. Why did kids as little as eight and five think curious toddlers were their enemies who needed to be punished or scared away just because they ran amok and touched or smiled at everyone? Did I attempt to explain to them that it was Ronnie’s way of getting to know people? No.

Usually, I don’t intervene when the children play. We don’t live in a gated colony in Vadodara but in a loosely formed society where there are more senior citizens than young children. With Covid 19 restrictions in place, schools, nurseries and playcentres shut, this is the only form of socialization I can offer to a curious toddler who wants to know the world around him. I want him to interact with children of all ages and different backgrounds. For most part of the half-hour of play, I am a bystander, watching him make his way through the pecking order. The older girls are very welcoming. The boys not so much. Some occasions require me to get in the middle of their play. When my toddler disrupts a game of cricket or badminton by running onto the ‘pitch’, I have to carry him off with him wailing and writhing in my arms or I have to step in when the kids play rough.

When I narrated these incidents to my mother, who has over a decade of experience as a schoolteacher in Mumbai, she warned me. “Don’t let the older children bully Ronnie. You must come to his rescue. Don’t stand there and wait until they push him or something. The moment you see them behave in a way that is disturbing him, act. Be involved. That’s what parenting is about.”

Parenting hasn’t been easy. During my child’s first eight months, I suffered from post-natal depression. Instead of counselling what I ended up with was streams of visitors, relatives and friends who would drop in to see my baby at any time of the day or night, often without asking me if I was okay with it. It drained my energy, along with long breastfeeding sessions and sleepless nights, to such an extent that I didn’t want to spend an hour a week talking to a therapist. Many people gifted and suggested books, right from Heidi Murkoff’s What to Expect When You Are Expecting during my pregnancy to Time Life’s Your Baby’s First Year to Skinny Bitch Bun in The Oven by Rory Freedman and Kim Barnouin to old copies of Reader’s Digest which had articles about babies and Tarla Dalal’s cookbooks. A zillion links to blogs and articles about parenting and babies were WhatsApped to me.

I read some of them and they did help me deal with issues of diapering, feeding, cleaning, nutrition, sickness, and exercise but I also needed a book that would guide me through the day-to-day conflicts of raising a multicultural child in a multicultural household. I am agnostic and Bengali by birth. I have no direct connection with Bengal, having lived my life in New Delhi, Pune, Mumbai, Brisbane, and Vadodara. I studied in Christian schools and colleges and have friends from diverse communities. My husband and his family are traditional, religious Nagar Brahmin Gujarati with roots that run deep in Saurashtra and Vadodara. Often, the conflicts at home revolved around food, language or how a sick child should be treated.

Thankfully, now a book like that is available. In Raising a Humanist, authors Manisha Pathak-Shelat and Kiran Vinod Bhatia write, “Accepting something that is ‘different’ is not always easy. We often look with suspicion at people who seem different, who (have) a different lifestyle or culture or who have a different way of seeing the world. Realizing that we – parents, teachers, family members, and other adults – are responsible for sowing seeds of bias and prejudice in the minds of young people can be unsettling, especially when we love them and care for them. As a result, most of us refuse to evaluate our stake in the process of raising children who are biased, intolerant, and scared of interacting with others who are different from themselves. Also, many of us are unaware of our own personal bias towards other individuals, belief systems, practices and processes.” While I believed that I was more secular and liberal than the Gujarati part of my family, after reading the book, I realised how haughty and prejudiced that assumption is. In order to bring up a child who accepts both cultures, I need to be less biased towards the other culture in my own household.

While leafing through the pages of the book, I revisited the play scenes in my head and discovered that, as the authoritative figure, I had left the field without telling two young children what they had done wrong, that they should have been gentler when they played with my toddler. The next day when Ronnie saw the boys coming towards him, he first got scared and then aggressive. I calmed him down by laughing and telling him that they were making monkey faces. Humour cuts where anger doesn’t. The word, ‘monkey’ did the trick. The boys stopped at once. Then Rahul tried to grab both Ronnie’s hands and pin him down. Gently, I asked him, “How would you feel if someone were to do that to you?” He immediately let Ronnie go. “Good!” He smiled at me and took Ronnie’s hand. For the next forty-five minutes, the three boys played with each other as if nothing had happened. That’s the beauty of childhood.

This incident also says something about the power and potential of books; of finding voices and approaches that help you in your journey as a parent. Sometimes, it could be just a line, other times, an entire book.

If I were to leave you with some of my personal favourites – books that resonated with me, and continue to do so as I grow as a mother, I would suggest looking up:

· Time Life’s Your Baby’s First Year, which is the most no-nonsense practical book you can find

· Becoming by Michelle Obama, if you want to learn how to strike work-life balance as a mother

· Tongue in Cheek – The Funny Side of Life by Khyrunnisa A., if humour is the antidote you need to alleviate your anxiety

Everyone approaches parenting differently and there is so much to learn and unlearn, and if you have curated a reading list on this topic, please feel free to write back to us with your thoughts.

(Names of all the children have been changed to protect their identity.)

Eisha Sarkar is a writer, educator, designer and peacebuilder based in Vadodara, Gujarat and has worked extensively in the fields of journalism, education, peacebuilding, design, documentation and international relations. She became a mother in 2018 and currently has the toughest job on her hands – trying to get her toddler to obey her instructions.

While the piece has been edited to suit our format, the views, thoughts, and opinions expressed in the account are Sarkar’s own.

“Disrupted adoptions have gone from being very rare to over 1,000 children in the past five years”

Says Sangitha Krishnamurthi, a special educator and adoptive parent. In this essay, she talks about some of the aspects that are often pushed under the carpet when talking about adoption and the need to move beyond a simplistic understanding of adoption to help avoid some of these disruptions.

Adoption is everywhere and it is nowhere, at the same time. The fairy tale of a child finding her family results in an ‘aww’ leading into a happily ever after.

The perception is that once a child is placed with his/her family, the job is done, and everyone lived happily ever after. In reality, the movie is just starting.

November is Adoption Awareness Month and I write this to talk about the lesser spoken aspects of adoption that we should be aware of.

And what are these? First, adoption is not charity, it is parenting. With that, this concept of being the same or different just dissolves. No two children are the same and that’s the whole point. Second, different isn’t a bad thing. Third, children know, and the body remembers, even when the mind is just developing. With these foundational principles, I wish we would all talk more about the following.

Parent preparation – it’s vital and it’s missing

In India, parent preparation is next to nil. It is not mandated by the government and even when it exists, the material is far from adequate. The approach usually is one of ‘not scaring away parents’ in order to ensure placement. Anyone who is going to get scared might not be a good family is a point to be considered.

Unfortunately, many parents who end up being ambassadors for adoption only speak from one point of view – the one they have seen parenting their one or two children. Many minimize the differences so that parents ‘won’t get scared.’ Professionals who are adoption-informed are few and far in between.

It would be good for aspiring parents to seek out resources on their own, read books like The Family of Adoption by Dr Joyce Maguire Pavao to learn about the adoption triad and speak to as many adoptive families and adoptees as they can so that they can learn and inform themselves.

Adoptive parenting has some twists and turns that anyone aspiring to adopt should be aware of. This starts from when the child comes home, taken away, yet again from everything they know. Adoption begins with grief and loss.

A mother and father lost out on parenting and a child was wrenched from his/her biological connection. The adoptive family stands on this foundation. This isn’t a question of good or bad, positive or negative. This start comes with several consequences that the adoptive family will have to recognize, accept, and accommodate in their parenting.

Other questions to consider include using positive language to talk about adoption, how to tell the child the facts of their adoption, how to handle societal stigma, what to share about the child and where, how to get ourselves to a point that we accept that the child is adopted, how to be secure as a parent so that one can take the teenage years with this added facet on top of expected turbulent times, what it means to not have even one biological relative (those of us who can trace back to our great-grandfathers will never know what this feels like!) and how to put our needs aside with the child in the center, however much that hurts at times.

Understanding birth trauma, attachment, and core issues in adoption

It is important for adoptive parents to be conversant with these concepts. Children born of well fed, middle to upper class families, with access to good health care at all times, start off with the advantage of the birth lottery. A large number of children who are placed in adoption start off premature and/or with low birth weight or ‘failure to thrive’ written in their medical records. This may impact parenting, schooling, and independence as an adult. None of these are likely to be major issues, if supported from a young age.

Children whose first attachment has been disrupted need that much more support when attaching another time with the adoptive family. In between, the child is in institutions, sometimes in foster care. At every point, when a bond is being formed or has formed, something changes, and the child is with a stranger yet again. A child is likely to be moved three times at a minimum and more times than that, in some cases. Science now tells us that secure attachment is critical to healthy development. When attachment is ambivalent, children internalize that change is bad, that they need to be on guard. This shows up in many ways and needs supportive parenting.

Research has found seven specific core issues that adoptees deal with through life. These are a sense of rejection, loss, grief, guilt/shame, control, identity, and intimacy. These are recurring strands through their lives and many adoptees have spoken of how it is only possible to mitigate the impact, never eliminate it.

The good news is that our brains are plastic and any changes that have been caused from traumatic incidents can also be significantly compensated for by a loving, caring and knowledgeable environment. As with everything, that first step of informing ourselves in order to understand and then adapt our parenting is critical.

Managing societal expectations and tackling biases and prejudices

Our society is strange. At the beginning, parents are idolized as heroes who ‘rescued’ a child who is ‘lucky’ to have found a family. Then, as issues surface from early childhood nutritional differences, the same family is blamed for not being strict enough or too strict.

With the whitewashing of the differences comes no understanding and support for the parents at the center. Our schools and teachers often have no idea and many times, mental health professionals have no clue.

Even very experienced psychiatrists and psychologists push back at adoptive parents, saying there is likely no impact from this aspect. That there is no need to tell the child about his/her adoption because “he/she is now home and being given all the love”.

Extended families may ask whether the child is of another religion and what we would do if ‘bad’ genes were to be in our child.

Many quasi-experts try to ‘normalize’ adoption. Adoption is not and should not be our norm. Making it normal in any way means accepting that we cannot support our families to stay and parent their kids. While their intentions are good in trying to destigmatize adoption, their efforts end up doing more harm than good in perpetuating this image of the model adoptee, achiever adoptee, no-step-put-wrong adoptee and this fairy tale family which lives happily ever after.

Schooling and different needs

Schools and society are cut from the same fabric, one influencing the other. So, we have teachers who will not intervene in bullying that tells an adoptee that his/her mother is probably a prostitute and that he/she was thrown in the garbage for being dark and ugly. All bullying hurts and then this hurts right to the core of the primal wound, one that formed from the separation from the birth mother.

Nutrition early in life is the foundation to significant parts of a child’s development. When this is hindered, one cannot know how these gaps in development will show up. Many children with this background may end up with issues in academics, behaviour, etc.

Children with trauma are overrepresented in several developmental differences including different learning needs. Many, many adoptees emerge with invisible wounds from schooling.

Our teachers may not know about the impact of trauma. Our attitude to differences in learning and behaviour as a society is judgmental. We need to work on changing this.

The point?

The point of this article is to say that despite all this, most adoptive parents would adopt again. And do. The intention is to be more informed in ways that matter in order to support our children.

We need to evolve beyond a simplistic understanding of adoption. We have a long line of aspiring parents waiting on lists for their children to be matched. We also have children being returned, based on policies that aren’t thought through. Disrupted adoptions have gone from being very rare to over 1,000 children in the past five years. One main reason is ‘adjustment issues’ with older children.

Experts tell us that we are looking at years to adjust and here, we have parents who entered into adoption thinking everything would sort itself out in weeks. Some children are placed again within a few months in another home, layering trauma upon existing trauma.

Adoption is a wonderful way of building a family. At one level, the parent needs to know that it is parenting, no more, no less. With attachment, separation trauma and core issues, the parent needs to embrace the difference and work with it. When teenage and its angst comes along, the same parent needs to see the ‘sameness’ with all children and recognize the differentness of the adoption strands that twang with hurt.

All children are our children, it is our responsibility as a collective to support everyone who needs it. Adoptive families need a level of informed care and support in order to emerge on the other side of their parenting.

You can read more of Krishnamurthi writing at www.lifeandtimesinbangalore.wordpress.com where she has been blogging at for the past 11 years now.