” The leavers” was written by Lisa Ko is following the life of Deming Guo through several periods that from his mother leave him without any information to he was adopted by an American family and finally got in touch with his biological mother again. In the reading, Deming Guo was really lucky since his adoptive parents love him and help him adapt to the new environment. As we know abandoning children happens all the time since the irresponsibility of their parents. Some abandoned kids will recover from that horrible experience soon when they are adopted by a new family. However, some abandoned children have a huge psychological impact on their entire lives.

Why so many kids are abandoned by their parents? I believe the main reason is that their parents can not afford them or too young to have a baby. “Primary causes of child abandonment have been found to be poverty or financial hardship, being a single parent, post-natal depression, mental illness, a lack of sexual health education”. This is more likely to happen in poor areas since in the case of poverty and hunger, most parents are not able to afford their kids and I believe that sexual education is not widely disseminated so that many people have a kid when they are really young and they don’t know how to deal with that kid so they just abandoned their children. However, some children are abandoned because of some irresistible factors like war and forced migration.

Many abandoned children will have a strong psychological shadow during their entire lives. “Abandonment leaves a child with a message that they are not valued, important, or loved. This has far-reaching psychological implications if not recognized and healed, and as an adult can result in symptoms like low moods, overanalyzing what others think of you and so on.” Many children will ascribe their parents’ reasons for abandoning them to their own faults. Like in the article, Deming believed that the reason why his mother left him was mainly because he didn’t behave well in the school and against his mother’s decision that moves to another city. Many kids who have the experience of being abandoned will develop many unsupportive beliefs. Like “Children who were abandoned by a parent or who went through the divorce of their parents may also reenact this experience in future relationships. They will often set themselves up to be abandoned or abused by seeking out friendships and romantic attachments in which they are destined to be left, discarded, or rejected.”(Bernstein) Those kinds of beliefs will cause a huge impact on their lives and they are easy to lose confidence in others in future interactions.

works sited:

Sheri Jacobson, “Abandonment issues – Are they your real problem?”, Heathy therapy, June 2, 2016,

harleytherapy.co.uk/counselling/abandonment-issues.htm.

The university of Nottingham, ” Child abandonment and its prevention”,

https://www.annualreviews.org/doi/pdf/10.1146/annurev-devpsych-121318-085142

Peter M. Bernstein, ” Traumatic Reenactment”, Aug 14, 2014.

www.bernsteininstitute.com/traumatic-reenactment/