As international adoptive parents, we're all well aware that our children are growing up differently than they would in their countries of birth. They're learning a different language, dressing differently, becoming accustomed to foods they well might otherwise never have come across in a lifetime, and learning to turn their noses up at things that might have been considered tasty treats ... fried spiders and frog-on-a-stick come to mind. They dress according to trends and climates they would not have experienced, listen to music that may not have been available, travel on eight-lane freeways and fly in planes.

One thing you may not realize, however, is that the list of differences is longer and more subtle than you can ever know without living for an extended period of time in the country your kids came from.

Much like the way we incorporate language into the essence of ourselves as children, observations made as children manifest as inherent behaviors later in life, and especially when we have kids of our own. So much of what we learn at mother's knee guides us without us even knowing we're acting out of habits we don't realize we have, and many of the lessons learned are culturally based.

Having traveled extensively, I thought I knew a lot about cultures outside my familiar, and in a scratch-the-surface sort of way I did. I learned long ago that it's considered horribly rude to touch the head of a Thai or Indonesian child, that baby's feet are never to make contact with the ground in Borneo before the first birthday, that certain gestures used without thought in the US convey the worst sort of insult in other places, and 'come closer' in some places looks like 'good-bye' to me.

I've been in Seychelles for over eleven years, and it wasn't until I was well entrenched that I started noticing the less obvious differences. I'm still discovering behaviors here that are strikingly, sometimes shockingly, dissimilar to those common in America.

Yes, an international adopted child faces a whole new bunch of habits, precautions and parental reflexes that might make no sense at all to the people where the little darling began.

More on this in the next post.