Blog

19 Mar

Great Book for Kids!

I discovered a wonderful children’s book about interracial adoption while cataloging it for the library where I work.  It is called My Adopted Child, There’s No One Like You by Dr. Kevin Leman and Kevin Leman II. It is a story of a young panda bear who was adopted by a family of brown bears.  Panda knows he is adopted and becomes very concerned when his teacher assigns a family tree project at school.  Panda doesn’t like the assignment because he knows his...

18 Mar

Pre-adoption Education

Many agencies require pre-adoptive parents to attend adoption education. This education can take many shapes. It can consist of self-paced education with videos and workbooks, to several weeks of weekly meetings to two-day workshops. Sometimes parents wonder if pre-adoption education is worth the time spent away from their current tasks and family. I believe that the pre-adoption education is well worth the time and effort. Just like pregnancy and birth education is a rite of passage for parents, adoptive parents should consider adoption...

12 Mar

Attachment 101

I am not an expert in attachment.  In fact I acknowledge I have much to learn.  Attachment was and is one of the most difficult pieces of the adoption process for me.  Like Heather, I like checklists because it gives me a sense of control: I collect documents, I mail them, we move to the next process of adoption.  But with attachment, the process is less predictable.  There are many opinions and good suggestions for fostering attachment.  Yet no two sets of parents and no...

10 Mar

Hurry Up and Wait

I’m a list-maker and I admit to it unabashedly. Highly motivated by intrinsic rewards, the euphoria of completing my To-Do’s is well worth the mockery I sometimes receive from my family. Not to mention that my list-making skills primed me for the paperchasing required by our adoption process!  The only downfall of living by the list is: What do you do when the list is done? And in our adoption process, that point came all...

07 Mar

Correcting kindly

  When we were in process for our first (international) adoption, our agency offered several hours of adoptive parent instruction.  We read about and discussed a variety of topics ranging from attachment to race and culture.  We talked about how our child might respond to us, how we might respond to our child, and also, how the people around might respond to a family like ours.    At the time, dealing with other people didn’t seem nearly as overwhelming as all the challenges...

05 Mar

Lots of questions, but not many answers

Some time ago I had a discussion about adoption with some friends.  They were looking at adoption, but running into some questions they couldn’t answer.  These were not questions about home studies, social workers, or dossiers.  These were very good and hard questions that may not have a "right" answer. They were questions like . . . If we really care about orphans around the world, why don’t we sponsor a child/family so that they can remain a family unit rather than adopting...

04 Mar

A mom by any name

In every adoption story, two mothers with very different perspectives and stories are intimately connected. One mother has made the most difficult choice imaginable. She has made the choice to relinquish her child to another mother. The other mother receives her child knowing that she isn’t the only mother to hold a deep connection to this child. When we brought our girls home from Ethiopia at ages four and one, we hadn’t discussed how...

26 Feb

Wonderfully Made

Telling the Truth To Your Adopted or Foster Child – Making Sense of the Past by Betsy Keefer and Jayne E Schooler  was recommended by my children’s social worker.  Almost all adopted children have difficult things in their pasts.   Loving parents naturally want to shield children from painful discussions and they may unintentionally make things worse.  Secrecy and withholding the truth can lead children to imagine a far worse scenario and/or feel shame about their past.  Adult adoptees...