Diverse rewards

When Suzanne Philips decided to expand her family, she and her husband chose to do it differently - through adoption.

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When Suzanne Philips decided to expand her family, she and her husband chose to do it differently - through adoption

She has become a mother several times - in different ways. Come dinner time, the dining table at the Philips’ home looks like it could be small meeting of the UN in progress.

Suzanne Philips, a French Canadian, is married to a doctor and the couple have two children of their own. When the children wanted the family to be larger - both Suzanne and her husband come from large families - the couple decided to do something they had always wanted to: adopt.

Their first adopted child, a girl, Aniki, was from South Korea and subsequently the couple adopted two more girls from Vietnam, Alexiane and Elani.

Since the adoption process is never easy, they hadDiverse rewards to cross many bureaucratic hurdles before they could bring the children home.

“But the reward of having kids is worth all the effort,” Suzanne says. Today, her eldest adopted daughter, Aniki, has completed her IB (International Baccalaureate) from the Emirates International School, and is currently in Canada, pursuing higher education.

Apart from being a full-time mother to her children, Philips also pursues her professional interest in the emotional development of children. After a masters in Neurolinguistic Programming (NLP), she is now studying kinesiology, a related field.

Her studies have helped her talk to parents at the adoption support group here in Dubai and elsewhere about issues like primal wounds that adopted kids may have suffered in their infancy.

When Suzanne Philips decided to expand her family, she and her husband chose to do it differently - through adoption

She has become a mother several times - in different ways. Come dinner time, the dining table at the Philips’ home looks like it could be small meeting of the UN in progress.

Suzanne Philips, a French Canadian, is married to a doctor and the couple have two children of their own. When the children wanted the family to be larger - both Suzanne and her husband come from large families - the couple decided to do something they had always wanted to: adopt.

Their first adopted child, a girl, Aniki, was from South Korea and subsequently the couple adopted two more girls from Vietnam, Alexiane and Elani.

Since the adoption process is never easy, they hadDiverse rewards to cross many bureaucratic hurdles before they could bring the children home.

“But the reward of having kids is worth all the effort,” Suzanne says. Today, her eldest adopted daughter, Aniki, has completed her IB (International Baccalaureate) from the Emirates International School, and is currently in Canada, pursuing higher education.

Apart from being a full-time mother to her children, Philips also pursues her professional interest in the emotional development of children. After a masters in Neurolinguistic Programming (NLP), she is now studying kinesiology, a related field.

Her studies have helped her talk to parents at the adoption support group here in Dubai and elsewhere about issues like primal wounds that adopted kids may have suffered in their infancy.

On familiar issues like how to deal with an adopted child’s perceived notions of rejection by the biological parent, and the need to know about his/her origins, Suzanne advises parents who have adopted kids to get over their fear and insecurity of losing the child; instead, they should be as frank as possible because in most of the cases that she has observed, adopted kids have great curiosity about their origins, but once this curiosity is satisfied, they tend to move on with their lives.

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