Feeling “family-challenged”?
If you’ve been struggling with infertility issues, are a single person or a partner in a same-sex family, chances are adoption has come up in your thinking about a means of building your family. Perhaps you’ve thought a little, perhaps a lot. Ultimately, the key question that you need to answer is both simple and complex:
Is the adoption option right for you and your family?
Important questions about the steps to take–or not–toward building or adding to your family deserve informative and compassionate answers, and that’s precisely what you’ll find in this latest adoption guide from renowned authority and educator Patricia Irwin Johnston, MS.
Adopting: Sound Choices Strong Families offers expert guidance, insight and key understanding about adoption as a genuine, practical means for growing a family–perhaps even yours.
Written to help prospective adoptive parents like you make smarter, more thoughtful decisions about adopting a child, this guide will challenge you and move you step-by-step through the process of adoption through the lens of the deeply personal and emotional obstacles everyone feels during this decision-making process.
Adopting: Sound Choices, Strong Families is not a “how-to” guide to finding an adoption agency or managing the paper trail.
The author, wife of an adopted person and parent herself to three children who joined the Johnston family through adoption, poses and then helps you address the difficult questions that must be examined before you can make any realistic decisions about adoption, including how to
- Regain a sense of control over your life
- Decide whether you’re genuinely open to the idea of adoption
- Understand the central issues of attachment and adoptive family life
- Feel confident in your decision to pursue–or not–adoption as a viable option
- Make informed decisions about the details of the adoption process
- Embrace your decision to adopt with practical support and information
- Navigate the first months after placement with realistic expectation and information
- Move forward into adoptive family life prepared to address challenges and find resources for yourself and your child.
You won’t find any sugary, sentimental or rose-colored views here!
Built on the foundation of two earlier books, Adopting after Infertility and Launching a Baby’s Adoption, Adopting Sound Choices, Strong Families offers many tools, vignettes, Q&A, as well as the frank and honest commentary for which Johnston is well known. She tells it to you “how it’s been, like it is, and how it’s likely to be” from someone who’s been there, done that for nearly 30 years as a leading member of the adoption community.
Whether you come to this resource with enthusiasm, ambivalence, or even strong reluctance, it’s by tackling the touch and personal questions upfront that you will be prepared to make the very best decisions possible as you embark–or not–on the journey to family-building through adoption.