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Are you struggling with openness? Do you wish you could find out how someone else dealt with food and eating issues? Do you need to know more about making a cultural plan for your child? Our searchable articles database is a vast collection of outstanding adoption articles, offering expert opinion, real-life stories, and relevant articles on a huge range of adoption issues.
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Source: Focus on Adoption magazine
Cyberspace offers the adoption community both opportunities and risks--we need to prepare for both.Growing numbers of adoptive parents and adoptees use social networking to talk, to meet, to share, to find, and to learn.Thanks to social networking we are now all potential publishers—we can tell our stories, we can rant, we can chronicle, we can learn. Not only is our potential audience massive, what we write can be widely shared and distributed
Source: Focus on Adoption magazine
Am I ready to adopt?Before you decide, consider the following questions:Am I ready to love a child to whom I have not given birth?Have I stopped fertility treatment and committed to adoption?Am I comfortable accepting the fact that the birth family exists and will be important to the child, whether I know them or not?Am I prepared to meet the birth family and have some form of communication with them for my child’s sake?Will I support my child
Source: Focus on Adoption magazine
Mom Tanya describes how her family lost its privacy when she and her husband adopted transracially.Before we became a transracial family, we were accustomed to a certain degree of privacy; now, all that’s changed.We brought home Ellie, our first Haitian daughter, when she was two-years-old. Along with this adorable little one, came the reality of transracial adoption. The change was immediate and drastic. We became visible. Going to the grocery
Source: Focus on Adoption magazine
A new report reminds us of the challenges some adoptees have in forming their identity, and what could make it easier.A major new study finds adoption has a profound and enduring impact on the identity of adoptees. Based on input from the experts on the subject - adults who were adopted as children, the Evan B. Donaldson Adoption Institute released a major study on identity formation for adopted persons: Beyond Culture Camp: Promoting Healthy
Source: Focus on Adoption magazine
I am the Caucasian mother of a six-year-old African-American child. I am worried about explaining slavery to my daughter. Do you have any advice? Be the first person to explain slavery to her—before the subject is covered at school and before her classmates bring the topic up. Use books to help tell the story. Before you tackle the topic, talk about the many achievements and contributions to the world by African-Americans (or African-Canadians
Source: No source given.
By Joseph Crumbley, D.S.W.
“Each night, without fail, she prayed for blue eyes. Fervently, for a year, she had prayed. Although somewhat discouraged, she was not without hope. To have something as wonderful as that happen, would take a long time. Thrown, in this way, into the binding conviction that only a miracle could relieve her, she would never know her beauty. She would only see what there was to see: the eyes of other people.
Source: No source given.
By Sarah Armstrong & Lynelle Beveridge, 2002.
27 adoptees tell their stories.
Excerpt from Summary
“ The largest single factor in whether a transracial adoption is viewed as positive by the adoptee appears to be the adoptive family’s attitude to the child’s race and their commitment to maintaining a positive sense of the child’s racial identity. This cannot be manufactured; it must be real. The adoptees whose parents made a “token” gesture
Source: No source given.
by Leceta Chisholm Guibault
The book Inside Transracial Adoption by Gail Steinberg and Beth Hall covers naming and re-naming adopted children.
The authors state that because children as young as four-and-a-half months recognize their names (research from the State University of New York at Buffalo), the child is better served when adoptive parents keep the child’s name and continue to use it. They suggest, “Asking a child whose world is
Source: No source given.
by Lyn Mogren
Adoption is possible for singles, though the options are far fewer than for couples. Singles must be prepared to be more patient, flexible, tolerant, and resourceful. Thankfully, these are all qualities necessary in parenting and regularly tested throughout the process. The aim of this article is to impart information useful for singles seeking to adopt internationally. It lists important considerations and questions to ask.
Age
Source: No source given.
by Susan Waugh -- based on a presentation by Lois Melina at the BC, Adoption 2000 Conference
As the white mother of two Chinese daughters, I was very interested in Lois Melina’s workshop, Raising a Child of a Different Race or Ethnic Background. Much of the current controversy surrounding intercountry and transracial adoption, centers on the ability of parents of European heritage to adequately raise and prepare children of a minority racial or
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