First Parent-Child Meetings in International Adoptions: A Qualitative Study

International adoptions involve approximately 30000 children worldwide each year. Nearly all of the adoptive parents travel to the child's country of birth to meet them and bring them home. The objective of this study is to analyze the adoptive parents' account of their first meetings with their child. The study includes 46 parents who adopted one or more children internationally. Each parent participated in a semi-structured interview, focused on these first parent-child meetings. The interviews were analyzed according to a qualitative phenomenological method, Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis. The principal themes that emerged from the analysis of the interviews were: the scene when the child is entrusted to the parents, the discovery of the child's body, and the first parent-child interaction. Within these three principal themes, several subthemes dealt with difficult experiences: moments of solitude and anxiety, shocking images of the children's living conditions, lack of preparation and of information about the child, poor health, parental reactions of rejection, worry about the child's body, aggressive reactions by the child, worry about the child's reactions, and contrast with the expected interaction. Thirty-two interviews included at least one of these subthemes. At the structural level of the discourse; the characteristics of 33 interviews are those described in the literature as significantly more frequent in traumatized than in non-traumatized subjects. These results raise questions about the consequences of difficult, possibly traumatic experiences, at the moment of meeting the child, and they underline the need for work on preparation and prevention before the parents leave on their journey.