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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...

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...

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...

  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...

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...